PEP Episode 092 — The CPayO Mindset: The Eight-Step Payments Framework Every Payments Professional Needs

The CPayO Mindset: Turning Payments From Cost Center Into Competitive Edge.

Three percent can quietly devour fifteen percent of your profit. In this episode, we strip payments down to the levers that actually move margin: rails, contracts, tokens, data rights, and operational control. With Viktoria Soltesz of the Soltesz Institute (https://na2.hubs.ly/H02Y1Cv0), author of The CPayO: Chief Payment Officer — the role that doesn’t exist (but should), we reframe “processing fees” as an executive function and show how a CPayO-style approach protects revenue when card-brand caps, state rules, or platform shutdowns collide.

Why this matters to operators

• Profit, not percentages. Measure cost to collect against unit economics, not top-line. Small fee drifts compound into lost margin.
• Rules collide in the wild. Brand surcharge caps, state price controls, and regulated markets squeeze merchants while costs float.
• Platform risk is real. Provider offboarding and token lock-in can turn recurring revenue into an existential crisis.
• Control beats hope. Own tokens, build routing optionality, and negotiate portability so you don’t beg for access when risk appetites change.

What we dig into

• The Soltesz 8-step framework for mapping fund flows, quantifying fees/FX, aligning treasury timing, and building redundancy that actually fails over.
• Pricing programs and optics: how surcharge/dual-pricing rules intersect with consumer expectations and brand enforcement.
• Open banking, wallets, stable-value rails: where they lower cost or latency, and where compliance/UX friction slows adoption.
• Contract gravity: data portability, token migration, termination assistance, audit rights, and change-control clauses that separate resilient operators from the rest.
• Middleware and orchestration: route for approvals and cost, keep PCI/fraud scope sane, and maintain leverage across providers.

A practical playbook you can use this quarter

1. Instrument the money map: Merchant-level reporting, approval rates by BIN/region, cost to collect by rail, dispute cycle time, and days-cash-held.
2. Contract to control: Add token-portability SLAs, termination assistance, data export formats, and service credits tied to approval-rate deltas.
3. Build a second rail: At least one production-ready alternative for subscription retries, fails, and geographic outliers. Test it monthly.
4. Protect recurring revenue: Standardize token escrow/migration rights; document refund runways before any offboarding event.
5. Monitor and iterate: Quarter-by-quarter audits of fees, FX, routing outcomes, and policy drift; adjust playbooks as products, SKUs, or rules change.

The heart of the conversation centers on control. Stripe and Shopify offer easy starts but can shut merchants down or lock tokenized credentials in ways that endanger recurring revenue. We share a real case where token migration became an existential crisis—and how to avoid it. The strategy: use payment orchestration to own your data, route transactions for cost and approval rates, fail over across providers, and keep leverage when risk appetites shift. We also dive into contract trends pushing fraud, PCI, and liability to merchants and POS providers, plus practical middleware options to meet those obligations without becoming a bank.

Rounding it out, we walk through the CPayO eight‑step payment framework: map fund flows, quantify fees and FX, assess treasury timing, align compliance and tax, evaluate alternative rails, negotiate smarter contracts, build redundancy, and monitor drift as products and rules change. Whether you run a startup or a large enterprise, the goal is the same—turn payments from a black box into a managed profit function. If you found this useful, follow the show, share it with a founder who needs a margin win, and leave a review with the biggest payments challenge you want us to tackle next.

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

Transcript

Viktoria Soltesz (00:00):

If people would understand how expensive is payment processing, they would think twice before ignoring it. So I have a really easy to follow calculation which put things in perspective. So let’s say that you’ve got a product which you’re selling for $100, right? So then you’re going to your friendly payment processor. Let’s say the average fee on that is 3%. So you think 3% is not going to hurt me, right? It’s okay, it’s significant, but it’s not that bad. Now, if you’re putting this 3% in perspective of not your revenue, but your profit, meaning to create that 100 euro, 100 dollar volume of product, you need to spend $80 costs on that. And you put that $3 cost as opposed to the 20, which is your profit now, it is a significant cost. And sometimes

Christopher Dryden (00:56):

Totally. It’s great that you said it that way.

Jeremy Stock (01:02):

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

Christopher Dryden (01:16):

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Once you start to look at it on a profitability basis and not on a gross revenue basis, but I’m going to tell you, lawyers are the worst business people I’ve probably ever seen, or maybe Dockers, because there are businesses that are, especially professional businesses, where what they do in the business is so not … Actually, tons of business, even trade businesses. The ones that are successful are the people that do have a business model. And most of them don’t. And this does. I will tell you, for us, this has become much more highlighted for a variety of reasons, but there’s been a real push on surcharging and different programs to force the absorption of this fee that we’re talking about, which is huge in your profit margin

Christopher Dryden (02:11):

To the cardholder. And it’s actually caused schisms with the card brands over here. MasterCard will let you charge 4% to the cardholder. Visa’s capped it at three and they can say whatever they want, but that’s all about cardholder disputes. That’s them saying, “We want to stay in good graces with our cardholders more than we care about the businesses.” That’s my opinion, but that’s what I see. And so we’ve actually think, I think there’s been a highlighting of this idea of this percentage and the importance of it. And now as the fee shift has been taking place to push back to the consumer, at least in part. And we’ve got the card brand rules and then we’ve got state regulation that’s … I heard something yesterday that we’re trying to help one of our clients out. He does liquor stores in Ohio. And I learned last week that in the state of Ohio, if you go into a liquor store and you want to buy a bottle of vodka, it is the exact same price in every single liquor store because the state manages the entire sale of spirits over 20% alcohol volume or whatever the percentage is, and it all is the same and the markup on it is capped.

Christopher Dryden (03:31):

Now, if you can’t surcharge those because you’ve frozen the price, you can’t do a cash discount because in debit, you can’t actually do anything that would ultimately surcharge a debit card and you can’t raise the price because it’s capped. These guys, like all of a sudden, that just hits their profit margin. My guy’s like, “This is 72% of my sales in Ohio. What do we do?

Viktoria Soltesz (03:57):

” Wow.

Christopher Dryden (03:58):

And now they have to eat whatever this processing fee is and they’re looking at it from a profit margin standpoint. Have you guys seen anything like this over in the EU where there’s a … It’s almost like this ongoing fight between card brands, because the card brands have conflicting interests. They issue cards and then they take cards, but they clearly overhear favor one side. But now we’re starting to see these real pools and then we get state legislation involved, which kind of doesn’t understand payments either. And now we’ve got all of these unintended consequences, but most of them just heard small business.

Viktoria Soltesz (04:37):

That’s right. In Europe, we like to cap things. Different country, different politics, different approach, but sooner or later you’re going to find something which is a cap. As a matter of fact, we even kept the interchange fees, right? So that’s a good thing. But utility prices are usually capped. Food products sometimes are being capped. And Medicine, for example. So yeah, if you are running any of these business where the products or service prices might be capped, it is a big problem for you. How can you stay profitable? And yes, card schemes and payment processing, even banking fees can eat a lot of, lot of profit off from you if you’re not careful. And that’s what I don’t really understand as originally I’m a tax accountant that everybody’s still talking about taxes and how to incorporate and move the funds and whatnot. And no one is really talking about the payment processing fees.

Viktoria Soltesz (05:35):

And today there are so many other alternatives rather than just cards that we are talking about. The open banking and the mobile payment and the QR code and the this and the wallet payment and the crypto. And there are the hundreds of new methods is just not adopted because people don’t know. The user doesn’t know, the merchant doesn’t know, but these alternative payment methods were born out of the frustration that, wow, these card payments are actually ruling the whole market. So that’s

Christopher Dryden (06:09):

Also- I agree with you, but I think adoption over here, it doesn’t take place because the big banks get in front of it.

Viktoria Soltesz (06:15):

No, that too.

Christopher Dryden (06:17):

And I don’t know if you guys experience this, but they’ve come up with this concept of stablecoin and it’s backed by larger banks and the larger banks are going to have … I almost think they’re like exchanges to make crypto liquid and get it in and to get it into the actual marketplace for consumerism here and then to allow it to come back out and actually have an exchange, almost like a currency exchange the same way the stablecoin’s going to be the vehicle for it.

 

Viktoria Soltesz (06:46):

Exactly. It’s basically tokenizing assets and- Totally. In case it’s the dollar, right? But it’s the digital representation of a volume. And it could be anything. It could be real estate. It could be the dollar. So it is just very interesting that the industry is already frustrated with the infrastructure, with the way how things are being handled. So instead of fixing the underlying issue, they are just creating a secondary market, tokenizing the same assets and then put it on new rails. But it’s definitely interesting that how even a very small change can really affect the prices and the user behavior and how merchants are also started to open up that, “Well, what’s this? It’s a stable coin 101, so why don’t I use this?

Christopher Dryden (07:38):

” I think that this is important and we’ve seen a lot more of this recently, but this goes to kind of the same concept of tokenization and payment data tokenization and pans. And we just recently had … I’m sure you’re aware of Stripe. So Stripe is huge over here and really it’s because of ease of access. It is a technology company more than it’s a payments company. It is very easy to use and for people to get set up. Its customer service is God awful and if there’s ever a problem, nobody’s ever getting back to you. And if they are, the answer is, “Sorry, you’re on your own.” And Shopify who’s just gigantic, they’re back into Stripe. So this infects a ton of people,

Christopher Dryden (08:29):

But we have recently seen Stripe offers out the opportunity … I mean, I’m just going to tell this story real quick because this is my case study. We had a company come to us that does a lot of subscription and it’s all about incorporations and registered agent filings and information filings with states and business licenses. And they offer all of these services and some of them take place in the future. And I think Vamp really caused this because they do a lot of refunding where they didn’t need to charge people and it was just automated. And so these guys got kicked off of Stripe, really no notice, had a bunch of money in reserve and they were not concerned about any of that. They were like, “We’ll deal with all that. ” Don’t care. The problem is, is that we need to get all of the tokens from Stripe to our new gateway.

Christopher Dryden (09:22):

And if we don’t, the amount of potential loss is going to be crippling to us. And they had an email from Stripe that said, “The tokens are yours. All you got to do is tell us where you want them to go. ” This was before. Then they get terminated, Stripe just disappears. And it took them coming to us and the threat of a lawsuit and then showing Stripe, “Hey, you guys have already said that they own these, and here was the kicker. In the terms and conditions, there’s nothing that is mentioned about tokens in Stripe’s terms and conditions.” So it’s a service being provided and relied upon by the merchant and that could easily, for somebody who does recurring billing, put them out of business. And to me, tokenization is becoming more and more relevant, especially with online transactions and people … I mean, whether it’s my monthly student loan bill or whatever it is, right?

Christopher Dryden (10:21):

I mean, these are things where it makes the ease of the transaction great. It’s, look, I can go on, I don’t have to write a check, get a stamp, boom, boom, boom, I’m done. And all of a sudden I’m seeing this issue with tokenization or the migration all of a sudden, like the company going, “Well, we’re going to have to charge you for that. ” And then they try to make that a profit center and that creates a cluster as well. I mean, can you talk a little bit about tokens and data migration and issues that you might be seeing that might be separate and apart even from what I’m describing?

Viktoria Soltesz (11:00):

It is a big problem. What we see is that there are more and more businesses using these payment orchestration tools when you are actually the one who is owning the data because everything is going through a gateway. And then within that payment orchestration tool, you can run different reports. So actually you own your own payment data. And even in case that one provider closes you down, there is a routing system within the technological platform itself, so you can switch it over. So it somewhat diversifies your risk and then helps you to put the traffic where it’s the cheapest, is the safest, is the most relevant to that market. But yeah, I think the problem here is that to start with is that finance has a completely different approach to that than tech. And I don’t know if you have seen ever that when a finance person tries to talk to a tech person and they try to resolve something together, it always ends up in a disaster.

Viktoria Soltesz (12:02):

So that’s also adding a lot of problems that there are a lot of tech problems which need to be translated into a finance language so the finance can make a decision on that. And just going back to the original point, there is a lack of education, how a finance person can think tech, for example, the tokenization and the payment data and the storage and the security and whatnot, and there is a lack of education from the tech to understand even the basic financial requirements. “Oh, I didn’t know that you needed that data to make certain decisions.” So this is the biggest problem that we see. And actually I have a really interesting case about Stripe as well, because Stripe usually likes to close down merchants often, they onboard them and a couple of weeks goes on and then-

Christopher Dryden (12:49):

Let me let you run for three weeks or four weeks and then I’m going to keep all your money and then I’m going to just shut you down because we should have never approved you in the first place.

Viktoria Soltesz (13:00):

Exactly. And that’s what happened to one of my clients who was a nutraceutical business. And as you said, Shopify, they spent so much money on building everything on Shopify and as you know, Stripe doesn’t have the risk appetite for certain kind of activities. So they got shut down and it goes back to the original idea that how would a finance person know what would be the risk appetite of the biggest payment processor? And at the beginning everything was good, couple of weeks passed by and then they got shut down. So they were under a false understanding that everything is okay. So that is a reputation damage that needs to go back from scratch and then redesign the whole platform, find the different one, not just the Shopify or just find an alternative provider, but then pay extra fee to the Shopify platform to bring a third party provider, there is a penalty on it.

Viktoria Soltesz (13:52):

So that can cause a lot of issues if you just don’t know what you’re doing.

Christopher Dryden (13:57):

Yeah. We watch it. It’s kind of crazy to me in the sense that I apply for a merchant account, I tell you exactly what I’m going to do, I do exactly that. You approved me and then you shut me down. And like there’s nothing that would like, there’s no indicator and it’s all about risk. And we were talking about this yesterday. You were talking about nutraceuticals. I think that’s actually a really good example of it. We were talking about peptides yesterday and we were talking about MasterCard just doesn’t want to do the business, right? But they don’t really communicate to their member banks that really this should probably be prohibited or explain how you can do this business.

Christopher Dryden (14:38):

So people get approved and we’re talking about doctors, licensed doctors here getting approved. It’s almost like the … What is it? With women in menopause, they do like bioidentical hormone treatment, right? There’s stuff compounding pharmacies, but these are doctors, right? I mean, it’s not some like guy in a garage throwing stuff together. But anything that’s ingestible, and this was my counterpoint to what we were talking about, anything that’s ingestible would seem to give fear because you don’t know what could happen with that. And there’s a lot of legal liability associated with it. But once you kind of figure out how you want to approach it, why not make it … This is more like operational compliance on the underwriting side, and it doesn’t happen a lot of times. In nutraceuticals, there was somewhat of a structure for the underwriting of people doing nutraceuticals, and I watched there be something in there in the underwriting process that was really unique to nutraceutical providers, but it’s not done.

Christopher Dryden (15:46):

And it’s like you’re saying, the finance person, the bank’s just looking at financial risk when they’re doing the underwriting, they’re not looking at anything else. And it’s kind of crazy to me that there is this real separation between something that should be so fundamental, like you approved me,

Christopher Dryden (16:03):

And now you’re saying no. And I used to think that it was a cash grab, and now I think I’m a little less inclined to just go right there. And I almost believe that it’s just a dissonance between how people are looking at payment and payment processing. And because like you said earlier, it really does touch every aspect of the business.

Viktoria Soltesz (16:30):

That’s right. And I had a case when a small payment provider, they were a PayFac. So they managed the portfolio and the risk level internally. And they had, I think, three or four compliance officers and one who knew about that industry. I think it was crypto at that time, but it was a couple of years ago, that person went on a holiday. So they stopped onboarding crypto clients because we just don’t know what we are looking at. So it is so subjective. And one of the hardest thing that I need to explain to my clients is that you are legal, yes, but it doesn’t mean that banks and payment providers still want to work with you and they just don’t understand that. “How come that everything is legal and look at my legal opinion and they convince me and I’m like, ” You don’t need to convince me.

Viktoria Soltesz (17:17):

“We need to convince that compliance officer who is at work at that given day looking at your file, understanding what they’re looking at and this could be completely subjective. And I think this is the problem that industry wise, there is no commonly agreed risks. Whatever is risky for you might not be risky for me. Or even worse, if I’m a Pay Fac, I’m managing the portfolio risk on a level of, okay, now I have enough low risk clients. Now we can go a bit more high risk. Now we can charge a bit more for profitability, I’m happy to take an extra level of risk. But what happens if I’m losing all that good low risk merchants, immediately I’m stopping onboarding higher risk clients. So even you who has nothing to do with my internal operations and the Pay Fac, you are just a merchant who just happened to work with me, your business can be affected by my internal risk assessment and process and losing low risk clients and not allowing higher risk clients, which has nothing to do with you, but this needs to have some kind of understanding how the whole system works and get you ready for certain risks which is completely outside of your authority because it’s nothing to do with you as a merchant.

Viktoria Soltesz (18:39):

So that’s also the rest.

Christopher Dryden (18:41):

Well, I think that that’s a good segue to the Soltesz’s payment framework, right? I mean, I think that that in your book … Here, I can show it again. It’s my CPayO. I think in your book, you have some really fundamental steps that somebody should look at as a framework to really understanding payments. Why don’t you go into that?

Viktoria Soltesz (19:04):

Yeah. So it’s a very easy to apply eight step payment framework, which you can apply regardless of the size of the business, regardless of the activity of the business, which is always starting with understanding where you are. What are you doing as a business? Who are your key employees? What are the different documents that you have? What are the agreements that you have with banks and payment providers? And then it goes into evaluate a bit more on the risk, on the fees, on the FX fees, on the treasury part. Then it talks about the taxes, how the money moves internationally, and where are the tax points which it might trigger. So these things are putting things in perspective so you know what to ask before it actually bites you. You just need to know basic things and ask the relevant questions just to see things from a different perspective.

Viktoria Soltesz (20:00):

And that’s what the payment framework helps with. It’s actually on the website, so it’s available for anyone who’s interested. You can skip a couple of steps if it’s not relevant to you, but it’s just really starting the conversation between different departments that, “Hey guys, what about this? Shall we discuss that? ” Could it turn into a problem later? So it just helps you to see payment and banking and all the money flows internally from a bit different perspective.

Christopher Dryden (20:29):

I truly believe this, that your … Look, the book is kind of geared towards a certain sophistication of business and granted, but I think even small business owners that have limited operations, they still experience all of these things and your book was digestible. That was something that I really felt that anybody could read it and it was written in a way that anybody who runs a business and looks at the dollars and cents of the business will understand and have a takeaway from it. And it will be a benefit to them if they just sort of incorporate the information and start to use it. And I think the only way to evoke change in this industry, because it’s very top down driven, is to have almost a populous movement amongst small business pushing back, pushing back and saying, “Look, I understand, but here’s what doesn’t work for me.

Christopher Dryden (21:25):

Here’s what I want. ” Whether it’s legal, whether it’s fees, whether it’s just having just some basic knowledge about the service that they use that really impacts their profit margin, I think it’s super important. And I’m actually … What we’re talking about right now, we didn’t represent a lot of merchants before COVID, and now we represent quite a large contingency of merchants. And I don’t know how many of them actually watched this, but the reason that we represent them is COVID shifted everybody’s transactions to card not present online or just changed the way that businesses interacted with their customers. It was far less face to face because it had to be. And when that shift occurred, nobody really anticipated from an underwriting and risk standpoint. And so you had all these unintended consequences where long-term businesses operating the exact same way, just doing it at a distance started to get flagged.

Christopher Dryden (22:27):

And I think that there was an immediate reaction that has kind of been curtailed a little bit, and I think that that is going to need to continue to take place, but I think the merchants are the one that’s going to really have to drive change. And I think what you said, education is what’s lacking. And your book, I just think it’s really simple, right? I mean, somebody could spend an hour and read the first couple of chapters and look at it and go, “Oh wow, this really does apply to me. ” It’s on a smaller basis, but these principles that somebody’s teaching me right now are important. And we do this podcast more than anything for education. I think information should be free. I think you just throw it out there, right? What people choose to do with it is their choice, but the fact that the internet made things available and right now there should be a free flow of information to allow people to make choices.

Christopher Dryden (23:31):

And so I think your book accomplishes that in a lot of respects. And I actually want to make it mandatory reading for everybody in here because I think it would really help people understand what we do in a much better context by understanding the overview of the industry itself.

Jeremy Stock  (23:52):

Chris, can I speak to that really fast? Yeah, yeah, please. This is actually really cool. You didn’t know this. The Soltesz Institute is information gateway really for the payments industry. And a while back, Viktoria and her team reached out. They’re actually using some of the Payments Experts podcast episodes on their website. Great. So it’s got an international audience. It’s really great.

Christopher Dryden (24:16):

No, great. I mean, look, I’m not a believer in this creates anything. That’s like zero sum stuff. And I believe that you just make the pie bigger and everybody’s piece gets bigger. And the only way to really do that is to share information. I really do … That’s just a personal philosophy more than anything else. And so I appreciated your book from that perspective. I understand it probably has a commercial component, but that really didn’t impact me. It was more, “This is really good information.” And I think it’s very simple and it’s a way to explain … I try to explain to the attorneys in here all the time, like, “Look, you have to speak to our clients in a way that they’re going to understand what you’re saying.” Some of them don’t know how to do it. They really don’t. And I think this book accomplishes that.

Christopher Dryden (25:09):

It’s payments for dummies, right? I mean, and I think I fall into that category at times. Show me. Give it to me very simply so that I can understand. I did have one question, but for the more sophisticated entities, if you were to be hired a CPA tomorrow, what’s your action plan? Three weeks, one week, three months. What are you really looking to focus on as you walk into an environment that hasn’t focused on this subject matter?

Viktoria Soltesz (25:43):

It really depends on the company in the same way as you’re asking a doctor that what would you treat? Well, it depends on the patient, right? First, you really need to understand what are you dealing with, where the money comes from, how much, how often, what currency? Who is handling those funds? What are their license? What is the risk which is posing on my operation? Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the opportunities? What’s with tech? Do I have the relevant reconciliation methods? Is the payment provider integrated with my CRM system? So first, you really need to understand what do you have? And once you have that, put the head of departments in one room and then follow through all of those payments, where the money is hitting … Where the money stops, it triggers risk and cost, that effect. Go through all of those nodes.

Viktoria Soltesz (26:38):

How much are we paying here? Why? What is the risk here? Why? Can we change that? Is it good? Do we have an alternative? How does it affect the tech? How does it affect the risk? How does it affect compliance? Let’s have everyone have a say in that room about their industry and how does it affect them. And once you have these bird’s eye view, then you can actually make the relevant decisions that, okay, now we need to change this or wow, I didn’t know that there is such a big risk there. And then you can actually start doing the work. But startups are facing completely different issues than a large scale up companies. And that’s what I write in the book as well. And even if you don’t read anything else, just one chapter, there is a breakdown of when a CPayO is needed, what life cycle of that business.

Viktoria Soltesz (27:31):

So if you’re a startup, just read that one chapter about startups. And that is going to resolve, I would say, 80, 90% of your problems as a startup around payments and banking. If you’re a scale up, read that one chapter, a couple of pages. If you’re a large organization and you think you got it figured out, still read that chapter, because that’s when things are really falling through the cracks and those could be very expensive mistakes because you’re large. We are talking about large volumes.

Christopher Dryden (27:58):

Yeah. I mean, 1% of a large volume is a lot of money. Exactly. And to the bottom line, it matters. Yeah. I hear you.

Viktoria Soltesz (28:03):

Exactly. Exactly. So that’s what I would say. Understand your own fund flows and ask all those questions, why, how, and obviously timelines are very important as well. Maybe you have the money, but it doesn’t hit your pocket for five days. How does it affect you? What’s the risk profile of that transaction? So yeah, every company is different. That’s what it makes it obviously interesting and everything is changing all the time. And your business is not the same as it was two years ago. So you need to always monitor, reflect, understand, get new things involved, because what worked two years ago, maybe it doesn’t work next year. And in the age of AI, definitely keep your eye open.

Christopher Dryden (28:48):

Yeah, it’s going to ramp fast. And look, I’m seeing … We do a lot of contract review, and so our clients, they have new business opportunities, and I’m watching shifts that are happening, and I can read it in the legal language, and definitely risk shifts from processor down to POS provider through API gateways, and really the processor trying to stand in the background and not really take any risk and look like a bank, even though they’re the primary function, but they’re not the input. And the technology side of it, I read agreements and I try to ask clients, “Look, are you even outfitted to do this? Do you have the technical capacity to detect some of the things that they want to make you responsible for when your sub user’s just really using their environment?” You can’t control what they type in. And there’s just a lot of stuff where I believe that the way things are moving, nobody wants risk.

Christopher Dryden (29:53):

And so it gets shifted down either to the merchant or to … Now I’m watching it to, like I said, The POS provider, whether it’s hardware, software, it doesn’t really matter. Wherever that input is happening, they want the provider of where the environment where things are being inputted to be responsible. You said something earlier about token migration and tokens. I don’t know if I misheard you, but Stripe is the one that actually stores the tokens because they’re PCI compliant and they have the sophistication. I almost think there’s an opportunity for a middleware company to come in and be within the API bridge or something with POS providers to make almost like compliance in a box where tokens are stored in a compliant way through some middleware fashion in the API chain to the payment gateway. I’m just thinking conceptually, this may be impossible to do, but I’m sitting there looking at it going, because the problem is that to go to these large entities that are actually storing the tokens, it’s difficult to get … I mean, these are large entities.

Christopher Dryden (31:06):

You go to a Fiserv or a TSYS, it may not be that they don’t want to help you. It’s just that they move at glacial speed and you’re a nimble business that needs to move in a moment and there’s just a disconnect there. It might not even be desire to help. So I didn’t know if I misheard you when you were talking about that, but I think that that’s a layer that I’m seeing is that on the POS side of the API bridge, they might want to start integrating PCI compliant protocols to do data storage, because it may be that much easier than having to deal with the processors on that item.

Viktoria Soltesz (31:45):

There are a lot of millware kind of platform who is doing that. Some of them are focusing on the tokens, as you said, the PCI DSS compliant ones. Some of them are focusing more on the fraud element, how to filter out what are the transactions which are legit, which are the ones that need to be blogged. Then there are, again, certain other ones which are helping you to cascade. It didn’t go through with the first provider. Let’s jump to the second one. Then there is some added volume in the reporting as well. So you don’t have to log into each and every payment provider one by one and the accountants try to reconcile it. So there are different options out there. But again, it goes back that how do you know? And do you know what’s the best for you? Or you’re just getting ripped off by some smooth sales stuff that you need it when you actually don’t.

Viktoria Soltesz (32:33):

And that’s when you need the expertise, because it doesn’t cost a lot to have everything set up well by a professional. Then it can cost a lot when things go wrong. And then you mind, “Oof, I should have known and would have known.” Again, going back to the doctor example, when you’re eating healthy and exercising, it is easier than trade the disease later on when it bottoms up to a fatal problem. So that’s the same thing with payments and banking as well. And again, I’m putting payments and banking under the same umbrella because you, as a merchant, all you need to understand that whenever the money is moving, is it because of payments or banking, you need to treat these flows with seriousness because at the end of the day, it’s your funds.

Christopher Dryden (33:26):

And I also want to say, I’m going to give you the last word in a second, but I did want to say, I’ve done a lot of compare and contrast because you’re in the EU, but I want to make it clear to our listeners and our viewers, look, Viktoria does work everywhere. She’s really knowledgeable in payment. She does work in the States. She does know our infrastructure as well. And it’s not all that different from Europe. There are some ideological differences in how it operates, but overall it operates very similarly. And so she can’t consult on anything, but I always like to give our guest the last word. Go ahead.

Viktoria Soltesz (34:00):

Well, educate yourself and learn and keep your eye on the market and get ready for a lot of changes because your business is changing, the environment is changing, regulation is changing, fees are changing, and you are in an age of FinTech. When Fin, regulation and tech goes hand in hand. So educate yourself, listen to podcasts, talk to your lawyer, talk to your strategist, and make sure that you are having the relevant strategy set up for your business at that given time.

Christopher Dryden (34:35):

Awesome. Well, look, Viktoria, thank you very much for being on. Really appreciate it. Please feel free to reach out to Viktoria. The information should be here on …

Jeremy Stock (34:44):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (34:44):

Yeah, Jeremy will be doing his job, hopefully. And thank you for coming on. It’s been a great conversation and thank you very much for sharing your book with us. It’s been great.

Jeremy Stock (34:55):

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Viktoria was wonderful. Chris, if you can hold up the book again. We’ve had our special guest author of the CPO, Chief Payment Officer, The Role, which doesn’t exist but should. Viktoria Soltesz from the Soltesz Institute, you can find her over at Soltezinstitute.com. Viktoria, as always, a real pleasure, Chris. Thank you so much. All right. And we’ll see you on the next one. Bye-bye. See, Viktoria. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at globallegallawfirm.com.

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