What Customer Intimacy Has To Do With Payments

What have the powerhouses Starbucks and Airbnb managed to do better than anyone else? Establish customer intimacy, according to Bill Clerico, CEO of WePay. Clerico has built WePay from the ground up through his innate love of people and by building relationships with customers to provide them with a payments platform that is exactly what they want and need. Karen Webster chatted with Clerico to find out what has inspired him along the way.

PYMNTS: What does a day in the life of Bill Clerico look like?

BC: Well, no day is ever the same. Today, I talked to summer interns about their careers and how to be successful at WePay. My best days are when I get out in the field and talk to prospective customers. I spend a lot of time with people, which is what I love. One of WePay’s values here is to invest in relationships, and so I consider myself Chief Relationship Officer in many ways, building relationships with my team and with my customers and prospects.

PYMNTS: How does what you learn from people shape WePay’s innovation agenda?

BC: We really try to get our insights from our customers and understand their holistic business problems and objectives. A lot of payments companies try to build point solutions, solving one problem related to payments. We try to understand the end problem, how they are trying to grow and their priorities. Then we think about how payments and WePay can help them. That often takes us outside the realm of pure payments. The more we talk to our customers, the more we can incorporate the insights into our product road map.

For instance, our target customer is really a software company that’s selling to small businesses, and that software is helping the small business in lots of areas. I find it inspiring to talk to the customers of the software company.

One of our new partners is Time to Pet, a software for pet sitters and a dog lover businesses. We worked with them to try to understand the whole experience and then helped them adapt our solution to their business needs.
For all these businesses, though, payments is really a back-office function, the last mile in getting paid. We try to make that part easy for them – and package our products around that key premise. It is really powerful from a product perspective and very inspiring for me and the team to know that we helped a couple of thousand businesses like Time to Pet.

PYMNTS: Do you have any “formula” for innovation?

BC: We only build what our customers want. There is a famous business artifact – a triangle – that differentiates companies in three ways: product innovators that ship the latest thing, operational and efficiency companies who compete on price, and a third category of companies that are customer intimate, who really understand the customer.

We fall into the third bucket, customer intimacy specialists, which is highly differentiated in the payment space. A year ago, bitcoin was hot, companies rushed to add bitcoin to their checkout form. We asked our customers whether they wanted us to do that too. They were much more interested in a mobile point of sale unit they could brand and we would white label. So that’s what we did. Doing things like that deepens our relationship with our customers, the value that we add, and ultimately fuels our customers’ businesses.

PYMNTS: What is the one thing that people underestimate about igniting payments innovations?

BC: They underestimate the whole process. We may turn software companies into their own payment companies by allowing them to white label our payment system, but we also educate them. Many people think that all they need to do is work with an acquirer to process credit cards.

In reality, there are many different touch points, settlement to the merchants, chargeback disputes, and so on, and this is multiplied by geographies. It gets really complicated, and that complexity is underestimated. Many people try to build a system and then come to us three to six months into implementation and say, “We didn’t realize what we were getting into.” Those are our best customers who really understand our value.

PYMNTS: You are a former investment banker – what compelled you to jump into the crazy complex payments world?

BC: As an investment banker, I didn’t find meaning in advising in transactions. I really wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I knew I wanted to build a company based on relationships with a unique culture.

Back in 2009, the Apple iStore and Facebook Connect had just come out, and a group of friends and I saw these disruptive forces and thought that we could harness them and build a social payments app. We wanted to make it easy for people to collect money from friends – so the first thing we did was to sign up with a credit card processor. But when we started to look deeper we found an iceberg where our consumer app was one tiny piece of the front-end technology, and 90 percent of the work was beneath the surface on the back-end payment platform.

Later, after success with the consumer app, we realized the tremendous asset of being able to solve for that iceberg under the surface. We now help entrepreneurs build apps on top of our platform so that they don’t have to go through what we did in order to make payments a part of their experience.

PYMNTS: From a broad perspective, is there a company that you think has aced understanding the customer and innovating to meet customer needs?

BC: A number have, but one company that is overlooked because it’s not as sexy as Tesla, for example, is Starbucks. They have really nailed customer intimacy. They don’t have a whizz-bang product, the coffee is good, not great, but it’s tailored to the customer’s taste. They have optimized their process to give their customers what they really want. A shining example of customer innovation.

PYMNTS: What advice would you give to other innovators who are trying to build and scale businesses?

BC: I sound like a broken record but listening to your customers. I’m a part-time partner at Y-Combinator, a seed stage investor in Silicon Valley, and I work with many entrepreneurs. The successful ones don’t build technology for technology’s sake but get out there, listen to customers and incorporate that feedback into the product.

The best example of this is the founders of Airbnb. They met the first couple of hosts on their platform, helped them photograph their apartment, listened to the hosts’ feedback and posted all of that on Airbnb. The hosts became diehard fans of the platform, and it was built with all the right features and functionalities. Their success is based on customer-driven insights.

Bill Clerico, Founder and CEO, WePay

Mr. Bill Clerico founded WePay, Inc. and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Clerico drives WePay, Inc.’s vision, strategy, and growth. Before joining WePay, he worked in technology investment banking at Jefferies & Company, where he advised enterprise software, digital media, and financial technology companies on M&A and capital market transactions. Previously, he worked for the U.S. Army’s Communications Engineering Research Command and in electronic trading at Goldman Sachs.