PEP Episode 069 — Why Smart ISOs Don’t Get Locked In | Build Optionality Into Your Payments Stack with NMI

NMI’s message is clear: you don’t need to lock into a single processor or bank to scale. With modular tools and real-time control over key systems, ISOs, PayFacs, and software platforms can adapt faster, negotiate stronger, and retain full ownership of their merchant relationships.

Whether you’re building a payments stack from scratch or optimizing your current setup, this conversation offers concrete strategies for preserving optionality, tightening operations, and future-proofing your tech.

Payments Shouldn’t Feel Like a Marriage You Can’t Leave

Featuring: Rob Hoblit, CRO at NMI (https://www.nmi.com/)

Hosts: James Huber (Managing Partner) and Jeremy Stock (Podcast Producer)

📍 Presented by Global Legal Law Firm

In this episode:

We sit down with Rob Hoblit, Chief Revenue Officer of NMI, to explore how payments infrastructure can stay flexible, modular, and future-ready—without locking you into a single processor or bank. Whether you’re an ISO, PayFac, or software platform, this conversation covers what it takes to stay in control of your merchant relationships while building toward scale and valuation.

🔥 Topics Covered:

• NMI’s evolution from gateway to full-stack modular platform
• Tools like Merchant Central, ScanX, and network tokenization
• Transparency in residuals, reporting, and onboarding
• ISO strategy for 500+ MIDs vs. vertical SaaS exits
• Why modular architecture = optionality, higher valuation, lower risk

 

💡 Who Should Watch:

• ISOs and agents building long-term book value
• SaaS leaders looking to monetize payments without replatforming
• Processors and PayFacs aiming to offer a stickier, flexible solution
• Fintech developers needing smarter merchant onboarding and oversight

📊 Takeaway:

Optionality isn’t just nice to have—it’s the strategy.

Start with flexibility. Grow with transparency. Scale with control.

👉 Subscribe for more expert-led conversations on payments, fintech law, and merchant processing.

*Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice.  All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.*

James Huber (00:00):

What I’ve always liked about Iris is one, they were the first to really go, Hey, here’s a tool that everybody can use. And it has always been choose your own adventure. With Iris, it was never in a box. And so when I saw it was selling, I was like, great, congratulations to the former owner, but that it was being sold to you guys in particular because if Fiserv had bought Iris, which they probably should have, it’s a whole different story. But when you’re selling to a company like NMI, who like you said, is behind the scenes and we’re having, this is just a suite of tools, it really elevated that company because there’s competition out there, there’s priorities. MX system is fabulous, everybody loves it, but you’re married to priority. When you go to Nmis tools, you get to do, like you said, still choose your own adventure. You guys aren’t tied to the processor, to the bank, to anything like that, and you’re also not competing with them.

Jeremy Stock  (01:08):

Welcome to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. We’re very excited today. We have an in-studio podcast joining us as a special guest. We have Rob Hoblit with NMI over@nmi.com. Rob is their chief revenue officer. Rob, it’s great having you in the podcast studio as well as our usual, our regular James Huber managing partner of global legal law firm. Gentlemen, we’re looking forward to a great conversation today. Take it away.

James Huber (01:44):

Yeah. Well, NMI is a huge company and we are standing at, everyone knows NMI and Rob will tell us about this a little bit, and I think you came up at the conference and we’re doing our thing at the booth and I don’t know if you knew or somehow it came out that Rob’s actually my neighbor and just moved to my neighborhood. And so he’s on a group chat with 30 or 40 other dads. We’re right about to hit the limit where we probably need to go to WhatsApp and I added Rob to that and then immediately after it was just an eruption of our HOA is doing this that the other thing. And I was like, ah, Rob, you’re having fun. And he’s going walking down. He’s like, I had no idea. And I was like, you’re probably sorry now that it’s one of those things where it’s like ignorance is bliss. It’s this beautiful, wonderful committee, but then you see the underbelly,

Jeremy Stock  (02:40):

The sausage being made. Yep.

Rob Hoblit (02:42):

Yeah. I mean what you don’t see on the outside can shock you sometimes.

James Huber (02:49):

Yes,

Rob Hoblit (02:52):

I’m not moving. I’m going to stay where I

James Huber (02:54):

Am. You’re going to stay. That’s good.

Rob Hoblit (02:56):

But no crazy. Thanks for having me on. I actually, I think I walked up to you in Chicago and asked you if you knew Travis.

James Huber (03:06):

Yes,

Rob Hoblit (03:07):

Right. I have met him and I’ve had lunch with him. I know him as well. He’s a local as well. And then we got to talking and here I am so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

James Huber (03:16):

And we’ll try not to talk about our foot 18 inch elevated concrete sidewalks that our community just paid 700,000 for and kids are falling off. We won’t talk about that. We won’t even say which HOA it is. Maybe. How about that?

Jeremy Stock  (03:34):

We don’t want to lawsuit James.

James Huber (03:35):

Well, not another one. So anyways, why don’t you tell us, because a lot of people know in the industry, they know who NMI is, but it’s such a powerhouse company. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what NMI does and do and maybe what they’re planning on doing?

Rob Hoblit (03:54):

Okay, awesome. Well, yeah. So I joined NMI three years ago. I lead our customer facing teams sales as well as support. And basically we’re a payment acceptance platform. We offer a lot of services. We work 100% with partners. So our customers who we work directly with are ISOs software companies and banks probably in that order in terms of how big they are. And we started out, the company started almost 25 years ago in Chicago, and the first thing was payment gateway and essentially matching processors on one end and shopping carts and devices and that kind of a thing. And over the years we’ve really grown that to do a lot of additional stuff. First of all, for our customers who are on the payment gateway, we offer a set of additional extensions. Probably the hot one right now is a product called network tokens that we are in the process of ramping as we speak. We as you I think mentioned James, we bought a company called Iris.

Rob Hoblit (05:15):

Our term of art now is Merchant Central. That’s the product that ISOs predominantly use. And the way that I like to talk to customers about that is are you happy with your tracking prospects? Are you happy with onboarding? Are you happy with your reporting? Are you happy? Most importantly with your residuals, if it’s not perfect on any of those things, let’s chat and talk about that. And so that’s something we’ve added as well as we now offer a product called X. You may have heard of a company called Agreement Express. And what this does is automate for companies that are risk bearing the process of doing underwriting and that process. The other thing that we recently have gotten into is we have an integrated solution where partners of ours can essentially do work with NMI all the way from the gateway to the processing to the acquiring.

Rob Hoblit (06:17):

So this was something that we kind of have assembled in almost like Lego pieces, and that’s a big part of our value proposition is that flexibility, modularity and choice. Where our view is, you’ve heard of us in the industry, but we actually are not there to get the glory. We are there to operate underneath the covers. Our partners know who we are, they take advantage of that, and then they build the solution that works for them. And sometimes that means using maybe a specific piece of technology that we offer other times the full kind of smear as it were in terms of what we offer. But you kind of make those choices. And in many cases, those choices are going to change as your business grows. So you start off with something and then you grow from there.

James Huber (07:09):

Yeah, you tweak it how you want. I mean, I have a long somewhat checkered past with Iris Dmitri, I would consider him a friend except for one time he invited me to dinner after I wrote an article and it didn’t talk about Iris and it talked about a CRM company and he invited me to dinner saying, Hey, come out to dinner. Lots of clients you get to meet, it’s going to be great. It was just him. And he goes, nobody knows who you were talking about in that this is years and years and years ago. He goes, didn’t appreciate that article. But then we laughed it up and it was anything, and it was nothing high stakes. But what I’ve always liked about Iris is one, they were the first to really go, Hey, here’s a tool that everybody can use. And it has always been choose your own adventure with Iris.

James Huber (08:09):

It was never in a box. And so when I saw it was selling, I was like, great, congratulations to the former owner, but that it was being sold to you guys in particular because if Fiserv had bought Iris, which they probably should have, it’s a whole different story. But when you’re selling to a company like NMI, who like you said, is behind the scenes and we’re having, this is just a suite of tools, it really elevated that company because there’s competition out there, there’s priorities. MX system is fabulous, everybody loves it, but you’re married to priority. When you go to nmis tools, you get to do, like you said, still choose your own adventure. You guys aren’t tied to the processor, to the bank, to anything like that, and you’re also not competing with them. I know a lot of ISOs and agents out there, they’re going, why am I going to work for you if you get a hack? Or even because you guys are competing, you’re going to take my stuff. But that’s not nmis game, right? I mean, you have a suite of tools and everything, but you’re not in competition with your customers.

Rob Hoblit (09:21):

Our view is we are Switzerland,

Rob Hoblit (09:27):

We don’t pick sides. We offer tools that our partners can use kind of however they want. But yeah, when it comes to Merchant Central, we’re continuing to add processors that we support on that. And our view is exactly the way you said it. Choose your own adventure. You figure out what the best way to use it is for you and then kind of go from there. But we’re there to help you along. And I’d say the other thing that we do do as a company is we’re very much into problem solving and working with our partners on problem solving. And that’s something that actually has become, I’d say in 2025, a much bigger thing actually, where we have customers coming to us saying, Hey, I have this specific technical problem with a merchant I’m trying to onboard, and that can be the number of transactions. It could be. I’m trying to solve this acceptance issue. It could be anything like that. And so a lot of what we offer is not only that tech, but we offer, the largest part of my organization is not sales actually. It’s actually support. We have more support people far more than we have in sales, and that’s a big part of our value prop is the opportunity to work with them as

James Huber (10:45):

Well. You create the pro, if you build it, they will come and it’s there. And it was actually interesting to start seeing NMI at the trade shows with a presence. I’m going, oh wow, you guys are actually out soliciting because people don’t, they don’t really get it that this is actually something that I should be out looking for. Because most agents, they go to the iso, they have a solution, but even a small ISO 10, 15 deals a month would benefit.

Rob Hoblit (11:16):

Yeah, I mean look, we sign up hundreds of new partners a year, and a lot of those partners are very new organizations that are just getting going and they’re like, Hey, we want to get started here. We’re an iso. Or maybe we’re a software company that’s focused on kind of some vertical specific application. We offer them the chance to get going. A lot of times people start relatively small with us and then over time we’ll see that grow. Generally what we find for Merchant Central and for customers that take advantage of something like that is once they get to usually 500 mids I would say is kind of the bottom there, maybe up to a thousand, anything above that, definitely they’ll benefit. But that’s usually the kind of size where we start to say, okay, now let’s talk about a bigger solution and how do we get that for you guys?

James Huber (12:14):

Yeah, I mean look, if you have a couple hundred mids, you’re probably not direct with the processor. We just did a podcast on why you should go to one of the bigger guys. But yeah, even if the bigger guys have their own system, this allows you to double check what’s going on. And merchants not really applicable, but for the salespeople getting this to double check, there’s people, I think James Shepherd started something where I actually know he did where he will audit your residuals and make sure you’re getting paid, but okay, you audited ’em. Got you. No, do it every month. And it would be something, and then I know that you guys will plug into basically anything, so you can feed it through and you can board through here. And then you also keep your super ISO or your smaller ISO in check and you might show them, Hey, I’m actually savvy. I’ve partnered with these guys. And then guess what? Now they’re giving it a look and they’re going, oh great. Hey, thanks sales agent for showing us how smart you are.

Jeremy Stock  (13:20):

Geez, I got a question. Can

James Huber (13:21):

I,

Jeremy Stock  (13:22):

On what you guys just talked about, maybe it could be helpful for a conversation for someone who doesn’t know. You were mentioning how NMI maybe as opposed to you mentioned priority, you guys are open to all these other platforms and work with other, your

James Huber (13:38):

Agnostic, well, it integrates with priority I too as well, but they have a comparable system as far as I’m saying, with residual reporting and onboarding.

Jeremy Stock  (13:47):

So how is it? Is NMI just better have they just invested more in the technology? Why are your competitors not doing this?

Rob Hoblit (13:56):

I think our view is nobody really has the scale that we’ve developed at this point. And we’re in a position now where we’re actually able to start accelerating what we can do for customers just given the scope and scale of the company. So if you look at how many mids you have coming through NMI through one platform or the other, it’s definitely over half a million. I think it’s substantially larger than that actually. If you count up all the different things that we touch. So our view is if you work with us, you will be future-proofed in terms of where the market’s going. We’re going to continue to follow trends in the industry, how things are unfolding. And a lot of people like that, that they know that they can work with us. And it’s interesting because we work with a lot of privately held companies that are thinking, okay, we’re trying to get to an exit at some point.

Rob Hoblit (14:58):

And so when you’re building a software company, especially one that is as an exit on its mind, being modular creates a lot more value for your potential buyer than somebody who says, okay, I got to buy this thing I’m now hardwired into and it’s rigid one way or the other and I have to work with this group. Or I have a tremendous amount of technical debt if I want to onboard it. That kind of a thing. So I think what we’re finding is a lot of customers will use us because they want to preserve that optionality because they don’t know where their business is going. And preserving that is really important for them.

James Huber (15:38):

I think that’s a great segue because nobody in the payment space knows where the business is going.

Jeremy Stock  (15:46):

Alright, thank you for listening this long to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm we’ve had in studio today. Joining us, Rob Hoblit, chief Revenue Officer over at NMI, you can find robert nmi.com. And as always, James, thank you for being here, gentlemen, great conversation. See you guys on the next one.

James Huber (16:03):

You always say this long, so at the end they’re going to be like, I wasted this much time.

Jeremy Stock  (16:09):

No, I’m telling you, it’s a way of thanking those people who do listen all the way through, which is like about 43% of the actual audience goes to the very end, but you’re rewarding them for doing so.

Rob Hoblit (16:22):

You’ve done it. Great job.

Jeremy Stock  (16:23):

Thanks guys. Rob, thank you very much guys. Thank you.

James Huber (16:26):

Thanks for coming down.

Jeremy Stock  (16:27):

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at global legal law firm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.