PEP Episode 086 — Compliance-as-a-Feature: How ISOs Keep MIDs (and Sleep) | Website Compliance That Sticks

ADA, Chatbots, and Compliance-as-a-Feature: Turning Lawsuit Traps into Portfolio Stickiness (with Michael Williams, Clym (https://www.clym.io/)

Cash is disappearing, card rails rule, and “set it and forget it” legal copy is now a liability. In this fast, no-B.S. episode, James Huber and Jeremy Stock sit down with Michael Williams, co-founder of Clym, to unpack the lawsuit vectors quietly hitting merchant websites: ADA accessibility claims, “chatbot wiretapping” suits, and a maze of state privacy rules that change faster than roadmaps. The punchline for payments pros? Compliance is product—it reduces fines, preserves MIDs, and keeps portfolios from churning.

Why this matters to payments teams

ADA goes digital: Website accessibility claims have exploded—think large volumes with five-figure settlements that crush SMBs and create needless merchant attrition.

Wiretapping via chatbots: In two-party consent states, recording or logging live chat without explicit notice is becoming an easy plaintiff’s layup.

Dynamic, not static: What’s compliant in one state might fail in another. A one-size policy either over-frictions conversion or under-protects risk.

Operational drag: When demand letters hit, support, finance, and legal get pulled off mission—right when merchants need them most.

What we cover (built for ISOs, PayFacs, acquirers, ISVs)

The new lawsuit economy: Why “fines without findings” moved from ramps and bathrooms to menus, receipts, and live chat logs—and how automation lets plaintiffs scan thousands of sites a day.

From GDPR to geofencing: How a CFO’s privacy headache birthed a horizontal, website-level compliance stack—accessibility, privacy, “wiretapping,” and geo-controls—designed to update without re-implementation.

Real-time compliance: Continuous scanning that flags risky changes (new widgets, menu updates, policy drift) before a demand letter arrives.

Friction that fits: Show less friction where law allows, more where it’s required—so marketing converts and legal sleeps at night.

Retention math: Portfolio stickiness improves when an ISO bundles easy, merchant-installed compliance at a partner price—versus losing the account after a suit.

Practical playbook you can deploy this quarter

Website attestation at boarding: Add a one-page checklist: ADA accessibility, privacy notice, cookie behavior, chatbot recording disclosure, and where each appears (entry, checkout, receipts).

Two-party consent guardrails: If you operate in consent states, on-page chat notice plus explicit “continue” intent = safer logs.

Geo-aware policies: Serve state-specific privacy/consent text and feature friction based on visitor location; don’t let the strictest state throttle all traffic.

Evidence kits for defense: Time-stamped screenshots of menus, signs, policy pages, chat notices, and a weekly crawl log. Merchants need this before a letter arrives.

Quarterly scans, monthly deltas: Automate site scans; review deltas with merchants; fix drift (plugins, templates, receipt footers) without re-platforming.

Field signals you’ll recognize

“Register-only” disclosures that fail conspicuous-notice tests.

Live chat that asks name/email without recording-consent language.

Menu PDFs that screen readers can’t parse.

Traffic from restricted states hitting prohibited SKUs.

Demand letters starting high, settling mid-five figures—and repeating.

Who should watch/listen

ISOs/PayFacs/Acquirers productizing compliance to cut complaints and chargebacks.

ISVs/PSPs embedding dynamic notices and chat disclosures in their templates.

Merchant ops & legal building evidence once—then reusing it for audits, insurers, and brand inquiries.

The Bottom line

The lawsuit machine is automated. Your defense should be, too. Put dynamic website compliance next to PCI and KYC in your stack, treat disclosures as UI/UX, and make “compliance-as-a-feature” part of your retention pitch. That’s how you protect MIDs, prevent panic spend, and keep merchants processing when it counts.

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

Transcript

Michael Williams (00:00):

It’s funny you made the comment about cash, right? I hosted a poker game last week at my house, and there was eight people and six of them did not have cash, bring cash guys. And so they all Venmo and I Venmo you. Yeah, exactly. Cash. But I was like, what? But that’s what you think about the movement is away from cash. 100%. A hundred percent.

Jeremy Stock (00:20):

We say it all the time on this podcast. Payments has become the center of the universe, right? Is what Chris Dryden always says, you can’t run a business in 2025 unless you are taking credit card payments pretty much.

James Huber (00:31):

And you can’t really run it that effectively unless you’re thinking about all the things just going and signing up with whomever out there. That’s not the best route because there’s a new settlement coming down that’s came down that says that the rates are going down, certain cards you can reject giving them. But if you are on just a regular payment processing thing where you’re getting flat three, 4%, that’s not going to affect you. The only merchants that are going to be affected by the new settlement is if you’re on interchange plus pricing. And in that case, you’re going, yeah, I’m not taking rewards cards anymore.

Jeremy Stock (01:12):

Welcome to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode.

James Huber (01:26):

And it says Michael Williams Esquire. But you’re not Esquire right now. What are you doing?

Michael Williams (01:32):

I’m not, well, I’m always esquiring, I suppose, but yeah, can’t shake it. It’s hard to, I tell people, I’m an attorney. I’m not necessarily your attorney. So I am an attorney by trade, but about six years ago started this company Climb, which is a regulatory software compliance company, and we offer website compliance services for merchants. I am one of the co-founders. I serve as the company CFO, and also I am actually a licensed attorney in California and DC.

James Huber (02:02):

Nice. Yeah. I ran into David, who’s hiding in the room silently at a conference, and he told me about what he did, and I was just like, oh, mother, I fucking hate those guys. Not you. I hate those plaintiff’s attorneys that come do shakedown lawsuits. There was one, there was a big one. It was the ramps, and I think he actually ended up getting disbarred because he did 200,000 of ’em. And it’s just a shakedown. And the website one is number one, if you’re blind and trying to use my website, that seems really hard. But anyways, it is just shakedown. I can’t imagine there’s actually any legitimate person that was seriously upset. They couldn’t read a website because they were partially and were like, I want money from them.

Michael Williams (03:01):

There’s definitely that big aspect of it. So just to kind of expand on your point, so the Americans with Disabilities Acts started about three decades ago, and the first 30 years of its enforcement, it basically allows or just trying to facilitate equal access or reasonable accommodation for those with disabilities to access public goods and services. The classic example is you’re a restaurant, you have a bathroom stall, it’s not wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair,

James Huber (03:32):

Right?

Michael Williams (03:32):

That’s a violation. And a private attorney can actually sue you to enforce that. A lot of those are also nuisance lawsuits. They can provide some good, but it created a challenge for merchants in the physical world. Most of that action has moved online in the last five years. So last year there was an estimated 250,000 of these online accessibility lawsuits initiated average settlement’s, $20,000. So there’s an estimated 5 billion of these nuisance lawsuits filed by

James Huber (04:06):

Shakedown

Michael Williams (04:06):

Lawsuits. Shakedown lawsuits, exactly as we kind of talked off camera. There’s a reason why there’s a lot of attorney’s jokes out there.

James Huber (04:13):

Yeah, well, exactly. No, I mean, I’ve always said it. Plaintiff’s attorneys just scum of the earth. Just awful.

Michael Williams (04:20):

Well, my background is a tax attorney, so I can appreciate such things.

James Huber (04:23):

I knew that, but yeah, I didn’t know that, but I just figured that you didn’t go from doing that to this. I say that because we have some class actions, but ours are, we’re fighting the good fight. We’re not fighting the shakedown fight. I remember with the TCPA was a big thing, and we can’t record phone calls because from when we’re representing ISOs, they were all recording calls and they’re listening in on their customer service people because they got to make sure they’re not saying crazy shit to people on the phone. So we got it, we picked up a bunch of these and it’s just shake down, shake down, shake down. And Chris and I met up and we’re like, Hey, man, we could do these. And it probably changed our lifestyle quite a bit. And we just go, but I want to go to bed at night. Exactly. I’m a small business owner. I don’t want to be attacking my own people, my own kind or whatever. So our class actions are against really bad people like Visa.

Michael Williams (05:29):

It’s great that you mentioned that, right? Because that now has also moved online where it used to be the case that they’re basically trying to prosecute those under state wiretapping laws. If you have a chat bot on your website now, there’s a lot of ambulance chasing attorneys that are suing merchants for recording chatbot conversations. So if you ask for someone’s name or you ask for their phone number or email address, that can all fall under state wiretapping wire if

James Huber (06:01):

You’re typing it in.

Michael Williams (06:02):

If you’re typing it in.

James Huber (06:03):

So you’re typing it in and you can say, I didn’t think anybody would be listening to this.

Michael Williams (06:08):

Exactly.

James Huber (06:09):

But you’re typing it.

Michael Williams (06:11):

You are typing it.

James Huber (06:11):

I don’t expect anybody to respond.

Michael Williams (06:13):

So again, not to get in the weeds, but as you know, it’s like a two party consent state law. And so if you’re in one of those states where there is the requirement to let someone know that you’re recording that or that you’re documenting that, which functionally all of those chatbots are, then you could be subject to state water taping laws. So that’s another thing that That’s Wild Climb is here to help resolve.

James Huber (06:36):

So your chat bot has to say, oh, by the way, I’m actually listening to you.

Michael Williams (06:41):

Exactly.

James Huber (06:42):

Yeah. That’s funny.

Michael Williams (06:44):

The attorneys are very creative, so

James Huber (06:46):

Yeah. Yeah, they’re awful.

Jeremy Stock (06:48):

I don’t want to say this is a world that attorneys created, but you’re not wrong.

James Huber (06:54):

Yeah. Well, and then the bad attorneys, then you need good attorneys. So it’s like let, there’s mice loose, unleash the eagle, and then the puma has to eat the eagles and all of that. So we’re the Eagles though

Jeremy Stock (07:10):

Love it.

James Huber (07:10):

Yeah. So here’s the horror story. You’re sitting there, you’ve got a business, you get a draft complaint.

James Huber (07:21):

And a demand letter that says, we’re suing you for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you’ve never been through this, you have a heart attack. You book your flights to the islands, you convert all your money to Bitcoin, and then you get in touch with an attorney who says, oh, hey, calm down. You’re probably going to pay these guys. I always start high. You might have to pay ’em 25,000 bucks. And then I usually get people out around seven, 12 K or whatever. But still, even that emotional roller coaster of getting that is just horrible. And you’re running a business and most people aren’t running. I mean, even if you’re running a website business, running the website’s, not your business, running the business is selling your stuff or giving your services. So I always, when our clients, the first one of these defended, I go, oh my gosh, we have to get this service. And so when David talked to me, he’s like, Hey man, you should probably get on your website. And I was like, I’m pretty sure we have it already. I’m not an idiot. And then he told me I was an idiot. Well, not anymore. Yeah, not anymore. Now I’m not. So tell us more. How does a program work? Because

James Huber (08:41):

I’m going, this is a no brainer. Every business should do this. You’re reducing what I think is inevitable, because

James Huber (08:47):

These guys will, they’ll come, they’ll find you eventually.

Michael Williams (08:50):

That’s right. Lemme take a step back here and just kind of talk a little bit more broadly what Clym is and what it does, that sort of thing. So 2018, why it exists. So 2018, I was a CFO of a travel management company based in Beverly Hills. So even though we’re based in California, we had customers and we did events in Europe. And 2018 is the year that GDPR came online. So for those who don’t know, GDPR is the world’s first modern data privacy law. So it kind of governed how merchants could collect store and process personal data. So even though we’re based in Beverly Hills, because we had that European connection, we had to get compliant with GDPR. We hired a consulting firm, we paid them a hundred thousand dollars, and the day after a consulting engagement ended, we found ourselves out of compliance. So that’s a challenge. So that’s the light bulb moment for client. We basically said, okay, there’s not that many merchants out there that can write a check for a hundred thousand dollars to comply with one regulation, and if you’re out of compliance on day two, why would you ever bother?

James Huber (09:53):

Sure.

Michael Williams (09:54):

So we set out initially to build a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution around privacy. And so we did that for the first few years. But then you’re right, the feedback that we got was like, Hey, that’s great, but what else can you guys do for us?

James Huber (10:11):

Well, I’ve got something immediate because the privacy violations, you’re being, oh, you’re compliant with every law in the world, congratulations. But it’s one of those things is what we always say is Don’t wait to call us in our business. We’re going compliance and payments and all of that. We’re going, I’ll get it all the time. I was like, even existing clients, why didn’t you run this by me real quick first? Now you have to pay me so much money to defend this lawsuit.

Michael Williams (10:39):

So we’re trying to take an ounce of prevention rather than the pound of cure that you’re talking about approach. But that involves, we develop privacy, and then all of our customers said, okay, great, but then we either hear of these other lawsuits or these other lawsuits going on, how can you help us? So then we build out the accessibility module that we just talked about. We build out a wire tapping module that we just talked about. If you are a higher risk merchant, we have solutions around figuring out if people are trying to access your website from states where they can’t, right? If you’re selling CBD and someone’s using A VPN to try to access your website from a state that doesn’t allow that, we have a solution for that,

James Huber (11:20):

Which is now all of them coming up that we just,

Michael Williams (11:24):

So basically what we’ve done is we’ve built, we’ve taken a horizontal approach to compliance, and we’ve built out an all-in-one online regulatory compliance solution.

James Huber (11:35):

And that’s great. And it’s mostly set it and forget it, right?

Michael Williams (11:37):

Yeah, that’s right. So we’re the only, first of all, we’re the only company in the space that’s taking that horizontal approach. So we’re covering across multiple regulations, and we’re the only one that sets you up out of the box. So we are set up in the US on a state by state basis, globally on a country by country basis, or depending on the particular country, on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis. So once you implement climb on your website one time, you’re up and ready to go. So then as regulations change, we can push out the updates to you without having to re-implement or update your system at all.

James Huber (12:18):

How are you keeping your ear on the track? I mean, one thing that we’ve wrestled with, we’d get calls of how do I set up my dispensary in a compliant way? And this is years ago when they legalized in Oregon, all of our payments clients there has decided they all wanted to go be farmers. And I’m not a single one of ’em worked out because it was just a nightmare, but I’m going, how am I compliant? And then we would go like, okay, we can check everything for this location. And then people were like, oh, let’s build a tool that any dispensary you could use, but you couldn’t do it because you’d have to go to every single city council meeting.

Michael Williams (12:56):

Yeah, exactly.

James Huber (12:57):

So how do you guys stay on track of what’s happening? I know what we do. We’ve been consulted for stuff like this, not, but somebody who’s selling something that has to do with geolocation. What I always do is I go look at Illinois first. I go look at the worst, and then you should be good everywhere else.

Michael Williams (13:18):

Yeah, that’s a good point. So the couple points there is, so we have an internal team that’s constantly monitoring regulations. We also work with outside attorneys on the topic. Again, because these regulations change. So for example, California implemented its privacy law in 2020, and then it changed it completely in 2023,

James Huber (13:36):

Right?

Michael Williams (13:37):

So they keep you on your toes.

James Huber (13:39):

They keep you on your toes. So you have people what using AI or just have their ear to the track.

Michael Williams (13:45):

We review every, there’s announcements that get made by regulatory bodies. We read all of them, we parse through them. We have a ton of information on our website if anyone’s interested in reading about these updates. We kind of provide that in layman’s terms, but we have an internal team, and then we work with an external team again to stay ahead of that, because that’s what our merchants rely on us for right Now. The other point you make is you are looking towards somebody in Illinois where they’re going to have the most restrictive environment. I think that’s a good approach to keep yourself on the safe side of the law. Now, I’m an attorney. You’re an attorney. One of our co-founders is a marketing guy. That restrictive approach does not really work for him,

James Huber (14:29):

Doesn’t work,

Michael Williams (14:29):

Doesn’t work. There’s always that natural tension there, right?

James Huber (14:31):

Yeah. If you don’t sell anything to anybody, you’ll have zero liability.

Michael Williams (14:35):

Exactly. So the reason that we’ve taken this geofence dynamic approach is to say, okay, let’s say you’re in a state like California, you have to provide a lot of friction, both from an accessibility and from a privacy and from a wiretapping perspective, if you’re in Alabama, you can provide a lot less friction on a merchant’s website.

James Huber (14:56):

That’s a really good point. Yeah. You don’t want to lock people up unnecessarily.

Michael Williams (15:01):

Exactly. Because even if they’re not an e-com merchant, the brand engagement that they lose by having two of much of a friction on their website is significant. So you want to make the marketing people happy while also keeping the attorneys happy. So that’s that needle that we’re always trying to thread.

James Huber (15:17):

Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. I mean, our approach is when we’re approached with something like this, we have to have to go the most restrictive. Then I’m going, well, I can do it state by state, but it’s going to cost you a half a million dollars. So

Michael Williams (15:30):

Exactly,

James Huber (15:31):

No, thanks. And by the time I get done on state 50, I’m go back because it changed.

Michael Williams (15:38):

Exactly. And again, if merchants are not able to keep up with that, and so this is why we are specializing in staying on top of these regulations on merchant’s behalf. And again, if those things change, we’ll alert our merchants that they’ve changed and we’ll push out the solution. And we’re also constantly monitoring the merchant’s website. So for example, we have this thing that we internally call real-time compliance. So we’re scanning the merchant’s website continuously. So if it changes, if they add something that they maybe are not supposed to, that we can identify that and then we can kind of alert them to like, Hey, this is not categorized correctly, or this needs to be removed, or things like that.

 

James Huber (16:21):

Yeah. I mean, I look at it because the world we live in, we hear about, as far as I’m concerned, anytime two people do business together, it goes horrible because that is 100% of the businesses that come in our door having a dispute, and I’m doing a little bit of hyperbole. We also do a lot of compliance work and have people running copacetic businesses, but we hear the worst of it. So it’s like, what is it? The guy who’s the insurance adjuster, he’s just like, you’re dead, everybody if you don’t put a seatbelt on your toast. But I go kind of putting a seatbelt on, this is a no brainer because when these things happen, it can totally fucking ruin your whole business. You can be out of business because of this, and it is. It’s what, a couple hundred bucks a month or whatever you guys are charging, I’m going, this is a no-brainer, especially even startups going, if you start, we see a lot of guys, they start off in ISO and right out the gates, they get sued.

Michael Williams (17:22):

Sure.

James Huber (17:23):

Then it takes ’em an extra eight, nine months just to get going because their sales budget part of it’s coming to me.

Michael Williams (17:31):

That’s right. And that’s again, we’re trying to implement an ounce of prevention rather than the pound of qr, right?

James Huber (17:37):

Yeah.

Michael Williams (17:38):

The other part about this is the scalability of these plaintiff’s attorneys that are now filing these nuisance lawsuits In the physical world. You could walk into a restaurant, maybe 50 restaurants a day, maybe you can scan a thousand websites a day. If you’re an attorney, maybe more,

James Huber (17:57):

More, you could probably get a bot to go scan all of these and to kick out the complaints and to find the emails and send them out.

Michael Williams (18:06):

That’s right. And oftentimes, even with the merchants that are trying to take the approach of being compliant, oftentimes again, to your point, these laws change so frequently they have a business to run, and so they’re not staying on top of the laws and as much as they need to. And so when they can’t do that, we like to be the outsource solution for them. And also the pricing you mentioned is more of our retail pricing. And when we’re working in this space, we offer a ton of price compression for both our ISO partners and their merchants, and so they’re even able to obtain the solution for much cheaper than retail.

 

James Huber (18:45):

Michael, tell us how you got involved in the payment space.

Michael Williams (18:49):

That’s a good question. It’s

James Huber (18:51):

A good question because you thought of it actually, by the way,

Michael Williams (18:55):

It’s all good, not rhyme. So four years ago, I did not know the payments existed. I like a lot of other people, probably 95% of Americans

James Huber (19:07):

Thought way more than that. 99

Michael Williams (19:10):

I’m being conservative here, thought that you would go into a restaurant, swipe your credit card, and Visa takes 3% wherever they take, and then Dave Landis, who’s our chief revenue officer, joined us about four years ago from the company G2, which offers website monitoring services and has done so for a long time. He joined us and just completely opened, I think they call it Red pilling, but opened my eyes to what was from

James Huber (19:37):

A matrix. Yeah, I’ve never heard that before. I knew what you’re talking about, right?

Michael Williams (19:40):

Yeah, of course. So basically he opened my eyes to this particular industry, and I think it’s a fascinating space, but without Dave, I wouldn’t know it existed.

James Huber (19:50):

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s every single business in the world. I mean, maybe there’s still some cash. We went at a bar the other day that was cash only, but they had an ATM there

James Huber (20:03):

So they’re still involved kind of. But yeah, I mean, that’s what we were talking offline of You guys don’t have competition. You certainly don’t have any competition in the payment space. But we say the same thing is we don’t really have competition. People are always like, oh, aren’t you worried about you guys are just giving information away for free? We’re like, give it away. We don’t have competitors. Now there’s other lawyers, but there’s not enough payments lawyers, and they’re definitely not as amazing as we are. Probably don’t even come close,

Jeremy Stock (20:35):

James, you’ve been doing this almost 20 years now.

Michael Williams (20:37):

Yeah, yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, Dave has about 20 years of experience. Well, it is funny you made the comment about cash, right? I hosted a poker game last week at my house and was eight people and six of them did not have cash. I’m guys, and so they all Venmo and I Venmo you. Yeah, exactly. Cash. But I was like, what do, but that’s what you think about the movement is away from cash.

Jeremy Stock (20:59):

100%. A hundred percent. We say it all the time on this podcast, payments has become the center of the universe. What Chris Dryden always says, you can’t run a business in 2025 unless you are taking credit card payments pretty much.

James Huber (21:12):

And you can’t really run it that effectively unless you’re thinking about all the things just going and signing up with whomever out there. That’s not the best route because there’s a new settlement coming down that’s came down that says that the rates are going down. Certain cards you can reject giving them, but if you are on just a regular payment processing thing where you’re getting flat three, 4%, that’s not going to affect you. If you’re on, the only merchants that are going to be affected by the new settlement is if you’re on interchange plus pricing. And in that case, you’re going, yeah, I’m not taking rewards cards anymore, which is hard to do too. I mean, how are they going to do that? It’d be like, what do you got there? No, put that away. If you’re at a restaurant, the ones that are hard is hit. Yeah, sorry sir. We’re not taking your American Express card. And he’s going to be like, what?

Michael Williams (22:07):

Well, also, it may not even, I’ve gotten my Amex rejected before at restaurants, but now it’s like, we’ll Chase Sapphire versus something else. It’s all, it’s the same logo, but a different rewards program. I think it’s going to create a lot of chaos because again, most consumers have no idea that this all exists,

James Huber (22:23):

Right? Yeah, exactly. No, but they love using their rewards card. Of course. I mean, we use our for everything. And it’s on my phone too. So what if I tap my phone? They’re going to go, Nope. So anyways, like said, James, just a side note,

Jeremy Stock (22:37):

Don’t lose your cell phone. Right. These days the guys you’re playing poker with Exactly. They don’t have their cell phone. They don’t have their money with them. Most of your clientele. As we come to the end of this podcast, most of your clientele, Michael, are they on the merchant side or on the more of the enterprise side? Where are you guys seeing?

Michael Williams (22:54):

We have a healthy mix. So we have a number, have a different channels. So we have the payments channel. We have a retail channel, which is more enterprise, mid-market, enterprise level customers, and then we partner with technology companies as well. So like MSPs and those kinds of things. Similar kind of reseller model that we have with the payments companies, but it is pretty well diversified at this point. So we handle, we say Joe’s Pizza shop on the street all the way up to Fortune 1000 companies.

James Huber (23:25):

The bummer is they’re probably not going to be like, oh, thank you for that compliance solution because it saved me all this money. Now, they’re not going to know how bad it could have been had they actually gotten popped. But it’s a really easy, in my opinion, it’s a really easy sales pitch. But I’ve seen at least 20, 30, probably 50 of these things over the time I’ve been doing this.

Michael Williams (23:49):

A lot of what we do is awareness as well. I think people just scare ’em,

James Huber (23:53):

Like, dude, if you don’t

James Huber (23:54):

Buy this, you are ruined.

Michael Williams (23:57):

So there’s a carrot and a stick. So there’s the stick is try to help your merchants avoid getting sued. The carrot is if you have an inaccessible website, there’s a study that was done last year that, so merchants that are transacting online are missing out on billions of dollars a year. Then the estimate last year was 7 billion that merchants are missing out on from having inaccessible websites.

James Huber (24:20):

Is that real?

Michael Williams (24:21):

I mean, I don’t do the stuff.

James Huber (24:22):

So who’s trying to do the stuff? Who can’t access the web?

Michael Williams (24:25):

I think people with vision impairments or if there’s a certain, it’s mostly vision impairment, but if there’s people who get confused by a website, they can also have a challenge with it. No, I think even if you’re not an e-comm merchant, let’s say someone goes to your restaurant website and they can’t see your menu or it’s in accessible in some way,

James Huber (24:46):

I’m not going there,

Michael Williams (24:47):

You’re missing out on the brand engagement as well. So it’s for the e-com merchants. So those that are transacting online, you’re missing out on the volume potentially. And then for the non eCom merchants, you’re missing out on some brand engages. So there is a care for me as an attorney, it’s more of the stick in terms of like, Hey, what if your merchant gets hit with a 20, 25,000 lawsuit and they have to pay an attorney five or 10 or 15 grand or whatever the fees are.

James Huber (25:12):

Are they going to go out of business? Are you going to lose the account?

Michael Williams (25:14):

Exactly.

James Huber (25:15):

Or are they going to get a call from another ISO that goes, oh, hey, I heard that it was bad. We’ve got this bundled service for you.

Michael Williams (25:22):

Exactly. And especially from a retention standpoint, because we’re offering such a discount off of retail when we’re working with a payments partner. If they leave trip from that iso, Hey, they’re going to pay retail now, they’re not getting the same deal. So that’s an additional level of stickiness for the ISO partners.

Jeremy Stock (25:43):

I got a quick question for you, Michael, if you don’t mind. Of course. Because as James mentioned, we’re a client, and I would like you to talk about the process of when you were first introduced to us, and I know I put you in touch with our web team.

Michael Williams (25:56):

Yeah.

Jeremy Stock (25:57):

Can you talk to us about what happened? It seemed like it was just fast and easy, but what did we not see?

Michael Williams (26:02):

Sure. No, of course. I mean, you pretty much saw the whole thing. It’s fast and easy. So I’m an attorney. I’m not a developer. So when I told, when we were starting to produce the product, we’re starting to develop it, my mantra was, Hey, it’s got to be easy to implement for non-tech people. And so all that’s required of a merchant is a copy. If you can copy and paste, you can install climb software. You literally fill in your name, usually your URL, a couple little pieces of information. You get a piece of code, you copy paste, you put it on your website and you’re done. I think the quickest I’ve seen it done is like 12 seconds, but the average merchant should be able to do it in five or 10 minutes. It’s their first time. We have videos. We have knowledge on our website. We have knowledge base articles. We have, if you have a Shopify or a WordPress or a Magento, whatever you have for your website, we have everything kind of set up and ready to go. The whole point of this is compliance is never easy, but this time it can be.

 

James Huber (27:17):

Does it have any effect on SEO or anything like that?

Michael Williams (27:20):

Great question. So Google actually, if you have a more accessible website, Google ranks you higher in pages. So that’s helpful. It’s another carrot.

Michael Williams (27:29):

But also from an SEO perspective, if you are, this kind of goes back to our conversation about being dynamic. So you, and I think one of the big parts about this is the reason it’s such a challenge is it’s not really about where you’re based as a merchant. It’s where your customers are, where your website visitors are. My background is as a tax attorney, I started my career at Ernst and Young as a state and local tax attorney. I’m like income and sales tax. So if you’re based in Texas as a merchant and you’re selling to California, you might be liable for California sales and income tax, depending on certain thresholds. Same thing with privacy, same thing with these other kind of accessibility or wiretapping laws that same based in Texas, but consumer website visitor in California could still apply. So that’s why you have to have this dynamic approach. So what we see oftentimes is that the merchants are taking either, if they’re taking an approach at all, it’s very static and it’s the most restrictive approach, but they don’t have to do that in every jurisdiction. So that’s why you have to be a little bit more dynamic and the technology that we have allows us to do so, which is helpful.

James Huber (28:37):

Awesome.

Michael Williams (28:37):

Yeah.

James Huber (28:38):

Well, I’ve learned more. I thought it was just put a little bell on your website, but it’s actually a much more robust than that. What do you want our listeners, our tens of millions of listeners to walk away with knowing about Clym? Or you

Michael Williams (28:57):

Of course,

James Huber (28:58):

And Jeremy will flash up your contact information that can hit you up.

Michael Williams (29:03):

Sure. I think maybe the takeaway is there’s a lot of risks the merchants face. The ISOs can be a trusted partner and provide a significant value add for their merchants at a super reduced price. The merchants can self-service. One of the things that our ISO partners appreciate is that there’s no technical integration for them. So the merchants are self-servicing, but again, they can do it in five minutes or less, and then they’re set up and ready to go with an out of the box solution that’s constantly updated. So it’s easy. There’s minimal technical integration, and it covers both your eComm and non eComm merchants. It covers your low risk, your restaurant retail, hospitality, as well as your higher risk, C, BD, nutraceuticals, those kinds of things. What we like to tell people is that we have something for everyone, and then we have everything for someone.

Jeremy Stock (30:01):

There you go. Love it. That’s great. Yeah. I’m curious, sorry, if you don’t mind me asking. Clym, what’s the name? Explain.

Michael Williams (30:11):

I told you I’m not a marketing guy.

Jeremy Stock (30:14):

You are now.

Michael Williams (30:15):

There you go. Originally when we were privacy focused, it was kind of an acronym for consent lifecycle management. The why would you ask Spanish for and Exactly. Exactly. Because that would be CLM and that wouldn’t work. So anyway, but that was the original intent. And then again, it’s interesting how businesses evolve and we were iterating and we just said, okay, let’s now become this more horizontal, take a more horizontal approach and cover this broad spectrum of services. Which made total sense intuitively to me is like, Hey, one solution, one system to learn. Or if you want to get really deep in the weeds on Climb, the other part about it, climb is super easy out of the box for small merchants. And then for enterprise merchants, if they can customize it pretty much however they want. So if you have an enterprise level merchant, it also works for ’em. So that was part of the point. It’s got to be scalable enough for SMBs and also for Enterprise.

James Huber (31:26):

Love it. Alright. How do people get in touch with you?

Michael Williams (31:29):

You can visit our website, www.climb.io. We also have an email address sales@climb.io. Again, we work a lot with our ISO partners to offer basically our reseller program and the ISOs are getting it at a super discount rate, and then they can pass that savings and launch of their merchants.

Jeremy Stock (31:49):

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.