Ingo Payments CEO Takes Aim at ‘FBO Account and Move On’ Mentality in Payments

For the longest time, moving money for business or consumer purposes was a manual, analog affair. In some quarters, it still is. But for the most part, money movement has shifted to digital channels.

Trillions  of dollars cross online platforms every second of every day, and money leaves accounts and arrives at accounts in a manner that is mostly invisible to both sides of the equation. But as any executive in the payments and banking business knows full well, in the background is woven an incalculably intricate web of data flows.

That background is the difference between success and failure in money movement. It can be the difference between transparency and hidden fees. It can be the difference between compliance and noncompliance with regulators. And as Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards told Karen Webster recently as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series, “Business Simplicity: The New KPI,” the end goal of any digital-first firm is to make the complex simple. But there’s a danger in those efforts.

“Sometimes making it simple,” he said, “and making it look simple doesn’t mean you did it right. Later you’ll pay the price for improper simplicity.” Money movement systems have to be built with checks and balances, he said, along with a healthy respect for rules.

“Simplicity, in our world, is something we’re all chasing,” he mused, “and it’s not easy.” (Steve Jobs, in similar vein, once said that simple can be harder than complex).

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One of the most visible examples of improper simplicity, Edwards said, can be seen with the implosion earlier this year with Synapse.

“My sense is they tried oversimplification,” he said, “and potentially took millions of consumers’ money accounts, and put them into a single commingled omnibus account without proper real time or even daily reconciliation of very complicated money in and money outflows.”

For its part, Ingo Payments (which among other things offers a SaaS platform for single-party, multi-party payments, and commercial banking platforms) competes with companies that “brush right over things and say, ‘let’s just get an FBO account and move on,’” Edwards said. Ingo, he said, spends a lot of time making things simple — akin to that old Mark Twain quote about sending a long letter because he didn’t have time to make it shorter.

“This is why in 23 years, we’ve never had a regulatory issue,” he told Webster.

Indeed, the regulatory issues governing money transmission and banking are among the key complexities facing Ingo’s FinTech clients. And on the enterprise side of the equation, there’s a gap that exists between their legacy platforms and a unified, modern and digital experience that also must be simplified. Enterprise clients, he noted, do recognize the power of digital and instant payments — and the ways in which payments can lead to the creation of accounts, which in turn become the basis for an ecosystem.

To get there, Ingo has built its customer engagement SaaS platform that bridges the gap between paper checks and digital payments. More recently, the company acquired Deposits Inc., which offers a “Money Kit” and also had built software development kits and low- and no-code user experiences, reminiscent of Stripe. By using a true, integrated modern ledger with money mobility built in, Edwards said that Ingo will offer client firms end-to-end visibility into money movement, reconciliation and reporting.

With Deposits folded into the mix, it becomes easier for enterprises and platforms (think of a restaurant platform) to pre-fund accounts, pulling money in from thousands of sources and disbursing those funds without violating money transmission laws.

Edwards also noted that there’s value in having a human touch in the drive to cut down on complexity. He said that Ingo, for example, has “solutions calls” with constituents to uncover the complexities behind what those clients are trying to accomplish before examining how their own technology can fit.

“I like to talk about using technology and low code, no code and the engagement platform, but so much of it too is just getting the right people involved and actually understanding what’s going on,” Edwards said.

As he told Webster, “my philosophy is to get it right and get it right the first time … if we can achieve simplicity, elegantly, in a way that works, that’s the magic.”