Meet HeroPay, The Startup That Wants To Be Small Business’ Payments Hero

The payments industry is a fairly large pie, but the way things are currently set up is skewed to favor larger vendors and businesses — a $4 trillion industry in the U.S. alone.

Of that $4 trillion pie, the U.S.’s 7.2 million small businesses make up about 26 percent of the overall payments industry but are responsible for 79 percent of its total fees.

In other words, payments is a field set up to favor larger, well-renowned merchants and vendors at the expense of the little guy.

But HeroPay, a Los Angeles-based startup, is seeking to change that by leveling the playing field and giving smaller merchants and businesses a more competitive advantage in the field, offering an all-in-one portal where they can shop for and compare multiple different payment processing options.

“HeroPay lets small businesses and merchants compare different payment processing options very easily all in one place,” said Hiro Taylor, the company’s founder and CEO. “Think of us as kind of like a LendingTree for payments processing, kind of like a mini-RFP for the payments sector.”

HeroPay, which bills itself as a group of “payment nerds who worry about all things payments so that you don’t have to,” offers a free account to any business or merchant who wants to browse its network of “top-tier processors” and shop for the best, most affordable payments processing option for their business.

“We work with merchants across the nation. The great thing about this service is payment processing can be provided by a processor in Boston to a merchant in Florida,” Taylor noted. “Payments are complex. There’s new changes to the system every day. The old world has been a very, very opaque process for merchants, and we’re trying to provide some transparency, some resources for merchants, so they can feel more confident.”

In addition to its payments processing marketplace, Taylor said HeroPay has also developed HeroPay Academy to serve as a sort of academic resource to the many small businesses and merchants who may not know all the ins and outs of the payments industry (which, oftentimes, tends to be a lot).

“It’s kind of an underserved segment,” said Taylor. “So, we’ll take a lot of these complex issues and identify what are the most important issues that a merchant needs to think about and really break them down for them.”

As a former Visa executive, Taylor spent four years in Asia helping to develop and grow the company’s Myanmar operations and oversaw the buildout of antiquated telecommunications and banking infrastructure to transform the country’s payments industry from zero to a $300 million commerce marketplace, making it Visa’s fastest-growing global market.

In Myanmar and during his time at Visa, Taylor said he experienced firsthand over and over again how frustrating and confusing the payments process can be for business owners and knew he could create something better.

“It’s just very hard for them to translate,” Taylor said. “The process of understanding can be very, very laborious.”

Taylor said that HeroPay, which charges a fee or commission from the payments processor and no fees from the businesses or merchants it deals with, can typically save a business about 40 percent off its credit card processing costs.

“There’s a huge imbalance in information out there. The idea behind HeroPay is we want to be that team behind small merchants to help them figure it out,” Taylor said. “HeroPay aims to be the platform or the tool that helps level the playing field for the little guys.”