PEP Episode 093 — Real-Time Rules That Keep Merchants Live: VAMP Portfolio Risk And Transparency | Qredible

Payments leaders love to say risk is everywhere, but most teams still chase it with spreadsheets, screenshots, and crossed fingers. Our conversation with Noah Fitzgerald of Qredible (visit Qredible: https://na2.hubs.ly/H02-3Md0) cuts through the haze. Our guest traces a path from pre-internet POS software to big-processor leadership and into startups that zero in on the same unsolved pain: compliance takes too long, costs too much, and fails too often at scale.

The core idea is simple but often ignored—high-risk is usually operational risk, not product risk. When merchants change products weekly and rules shift daily, human checks can’t keep pace. That’s why continuous audits, product-level validation, and transparent data sharing between merchants, processors, and banks now matter as much as good underwriting.

The CBD and hemp space highlights the problem. Onboarding a merchant with dozens of SKUs and lab reports used to mean manual COA review, endless back-and-forth, and slow time to revenue. With OCR and structured data extraction, those COAs become searchable fields. Processors can instantly locate banned cannabinoids, confirm potency claims, and flag mismatches against rule sets dictated by their bank or card brands. The win is not just catching risk; it’s enabling compliant businesses to stay live without disruption. Instead of black-box decisions that punish merchants after the fact, a shared layer of visibility gives them alerts before they trip wires. That turns compliance from a source of fear into a daily habit.

This shift extends far beyond cannabis. Any enhanced due diligence sector—gaming, adult, firearms, online alcohol and tobacco, nutraceuticals, functional mushrooms, cosmetics, and online lending—faces similar pressures. Municipal rules stack on state and federal mandates. Card brands push VAMP and portfolio scrutiny. Without a living map of requirements tied to real merchant behavior, providers rely on hope. Worse, merchants bear the brunt: reserves, MATCH listings, and sudden shutdowns. When a platform continually crawls product pages, pulls certificates, and matches claims to approved lists and rule sets, it empowers both sides. Banks get traceable evidence. Merchants get early warnings and clear steps to fix issues. Portfolio risk drops while revenue stays predictable.

Pricing opacity is the other quiet drain. Interchange shifts, processor markups, and “notice” of price changes buried inside statements leave busy operators flying blind. Two restaurants using the same processor can pay wildly different rates simply because one negotiated and the other didn’t. Statement analysis as a service fills that gap, translating six-hundred-line statements into actionable decisions. The takeaway is blunt: every company needs a payments brain—whether a chief payments officer or a trusted advisor. The goal isn’t to chase rock-bottom rates; it’s to align pricing with risk, ensure rules are followed in real time, and stop leaks before they become losses.

AI is not a courtroom litigator or a replacement for paralegals. Here, it’s a quiet, relentless assistant that reads faster than teams can and never gets tired of forms. Use it to extract, normalize, and monitor. Keep humans for judgment. Marry those strengths and you change the game: faster onboarding, fewer fines, fewer surprises, and a portfolio that grows because risk is managed in daylight. When compliance becomes a product feature—not a punishment—good actors thrive, bad actors stand out, and the entire ecosystem gets stronger.

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

Transcript

James Huber (00:00):

We started this out. We were going, because we’re interviewing people, we’re hiring somebody in there going, “Where do I go for information about the industry?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, here’s a couple expert reports. There’s just not a lot out there.” There’s a couple podcasts. James Shepherd’s a great podcast. Been doing it for years, but it’s mostly related to sales, I think. Yeah.

Noah Fitzgerald (00:21):

It’s very sales focused.

James Huber (00:22):

It’s sales focused, which is great because that’s his audience and that’s a ton of our audience too. For sure. But there’s what’s happening in real time with the regulations and the laws and everything. So I’m glad that there’s more out there and that you’ve stole our idea. You’re welcome.

Jeremy Stock (00:44):

Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. Today, we’re really excited. We got in studio joining us, managing partner of the law firm, James Huber, as well as our special guest, Noah Fitzgerald of Qredible. You can find Noah over at qredible.com that’s with a “q”. James, we’re looking forward to this one. Jump right in. I

James Huber (01:14):

Forgot to say we also have my 10-year-old daughters in the room as well.

Jeremy Stock (01:19):

Awesome. That’s exactly right. How you doing? Get to see your dad as the star.

James Huber (01:26):

All right, Noah, it’s been a while since we spoke. Not too long, but we’ve had interesting interactions over the years with various companies, but I know that you’ve got a new outfit. So why don’t you … Actually, I’m always interested and I don’t know if I necessarily know your story of, how’d you end up in payments?

Noah Fitzgerald (01:49):

Yeah. I went to school, studied for payments. No. It’s one of those things that everyone just kind of falls into. No one goes out looking for it, but you end up falling into it. So my story in that started in 1992. My father was operating a software company, a point of sale software company. This is all pre-internet days. So we were selling through magazines and we were a nationwide distributor of POS equipment like barcode scanners and cash flows receipt printers. And we sold a software package. And with that software package, we sold ICVerify and PC charge and other ways to be able to integrate payments. And so I was introduced through payments and that very early on in 92, I was just out of high school. And I had a payment processing company come knock on my door and say, “We’ll give you a referral for every client that you send over to us to get their payment processing.” So I started doing that and he started showing up with donuts every other week and a check.

 

Noah Fitzgerald (02:47):

And I was like, “Tell me more about this payments industry. What’s going on here?” And he was like, “Well, I’m going to give you a secret and this may change your life.” And sure enough, he did. And I learned about residual earnings. And this was before SaaS-based software and internet-based software was ever a thing. I mean, literally before the internet was even a thing. And from there, I left the point of sale software company and went to First Data who happened to be in my backyard in Coral Springs, Florida and worked for Nibanco, which was the precursor to Chase Merchant Services, which was a precursor to Chase Payment Tech and basically kind of survived the number of restructures and organizations of that company and learned really the big corporate world and organizational structures and then realized that my true calling was entrepreneurship. And since 2009, I’ve been a part of over 14 different startups, either as a founder, co-founder, or very early stage employee.

Noah Fitzgerald (03:49):

I’ve learned that I thrive in that first two years of an operations startup. I kind of have a jack of all trades with ideation to creation, to business requirements, to all the operational infrastructures, CRM management, very adept at the commercial side of things. And over the past, I think couple of iterations of my career have been really focused more on the revenue growth side of things. And that’s where I find myself thriving the most. So Qredible was, I was introduced to Qredible just last year, October, so 2024, October. And once I connected with the CEO, we immediately had a kinship and I saw exactly what the opportunity was with their technology and that’s kind of where I’m at now.

James Huber (04:40):

Nice. Yeah. I mean, that’s quite the background in particular getting to see the inner workings of what was probably First Data back then

James Huber (04:50):

Of the big corporate structure. And it always interests me because when I talk about like our law firm, for example, I’m always like, “Oh, we’re so much better than big law firm, but I don’t have anything to base that off of because this is the only job I’ve ever had aside from delivering pizza and teaching kids how to ski.” So yeah, I mean, I think that would make you personally highly valuable to anybody in this space. And I do admire what you haven’t done is you see the people in no offense to any of them. They see them at the conferences and they’re just changing their shirt every couple years, standing in a different booth and they do really well for themselves. But having that, like you said, the entrepreneurial spirit, it’s one of the things that keeps us so excited about this space because yeah, you can do the same thing that all of these companies, they literally do the same thing, but then somebody puts a calculator on a pen and we’re off to the races.

James Huber (05:52):

Not to say that’s what Qredible does, but why don’t you tell us what Qredible does?

Noah Fitzgerald (05:56):

We put the piano on a tie. Yeah,

James Huber (05:59):

There you are. Yeah, excellent.

Noah Fitzgerald (06:01):

The really good 80s reference, but-

James Huber (06:03):

No, that was Zoolander, was it? That’s what they’re saying. Mufasa invented that. I got you.

Jeremy Stock (06:10):

I do want to touch at some point, gentlemen, you mentioned magazines. I want to find out what a magazine is at some point on this podcast. I don’t remember. We have to date ourselves.

Noah Fitzgerald (06:23):

The only ones I remember are Car and Driver and Surfer Magazine. That’s it. There’s nothing else in my world of magazines that existed. But Qredible is a really very forward thinking and ahead of its time company in technology. The founders of the company are led by a gentleman by the name of Brian Fitzpatrick, no relation, close name. Obviously we’re both from the same island in Ireland, but he comes from a background in developing technology for compliance and regulatory management where he built three different companies that were supporting basically the residential lending landscape and mortgage landscape. And he built the first AI and machine learning technologies to basically parse and read through 700 page loan documents to be able to handle all the placement and organization of them. And he had clients like Wells Fargo and Freddie Mac and PennyMac. And his technology is still operating, I think over 85% of all mortgage loans, residential mortgage loans run through his technology.

Noah Fitzgerald (07:28):

So he’s kind of the father of AI when it comes to utilizing this technology for compliance. And in my journey, the last kind of idea that I had was building a solution for the hemp and CBD industry. As I saw in trying to onboard clients in this space, saw the struggles of just getting a merchant onboarded into a payment processor. It was an arduous task of back and forth of constantly scrubbing and screening the websites for content, getting access to COAs, product details, all the different bells and whistles and dots and I’s and T’s that have to be crossed. And it was just riddled with a lot of human level intervention at the underwriting side. And so me in my mind, I go, “There’s a technology gap that exists here. I need to help find and build a solution. That’s what I like to do.

Noah Fitzgerald (08:24):

I’m a builder.” So I was building this company called Canna Commerce and it was about creating a marketplace to connect businesses, the wholesalers and the distributors and retailers and had a POS solution and an eCommerce offering. But the one gap I kept on coming up to was compliance management and how these businesses could actually use a tool to organize all of these documents and help them stay ahead of regulatory changes and shifts versus being a firefighter and fighting it from behind. One of my colleagues connected me with Brian and as I was kind of, we were talking for about an hour and he started showing me some of the technology, my head was spinning. I’m like, “This is the solution that is going to help revolutionize enhanced due diligence and compliance management, not only for the merchants, more so for the banks, the insurance providers, the payment processors that all have to provide services to these businesses and they need some way of being able to manage the compliance at the product level, at the website level that they’re doing manually today.” So that’s really what Qredible is about is creating, it’s created a very unique technology that’s not … I think most compliance technologies are a black box like a G2 or a legit script and they’re used by the bank and processors to basically do what they do, but they’re not giving that utility back to the merchants so that they can use some components of technology to help themselves.

Noah Fitzgerald (09:51):

And that’s where Qredible’s a bit different. We’re creating an ecosystem that’s used by the merchants that basically helps them perform complete audits of their business and then connects all of that data and all that audit to the processors, to their supply chain, to insurance providers, the banks, and the regulators so that they can live in transparency and operate their business without the threat of interruptions.

James Huber (10:17):

Is this just for CBD and marijuana businesses or does it apply across the board?

Noah Fitzgerald (10:23):

No, it does apply across the board. I mean, obviously where my focus was at the time was the CBD and cannabis space because that’s where I saw a lot of struggles, but it’s for anything in the regulatory and compliance space, whether it be gaming, adult, firearms, online tobacco, online alcohol, online lending, digital services, even now we’re getting into other aspects of product compliance from cosmetics to new tropics, functional mushrooms, anything that has some kind of enhanced due diligence element or additional compliance or regulatory oversight component that makes it difficult for these businesses to operate.

James Huber (11:07):

Yeah. I mean, I know that from a processor standpoint or a bank standpoint, if you’re looking at a cannabis business, you’re basically just trusting the business that they’re doing it because you can’t go out and check every single regulation down to the municipality short of having somebody go to every city council meeting and deciding what they’re going to do on this. And I know early on some people were trying to build a tool and I think we actually got tapped into it, but the amount of data that you had to pull, it was before AI was AI, it was endless

Noah Fitzgerald (11:52):

Yeah

James Huber (11:53):

You just couldn’t because you’re going, “Oh, what if this person, what if they deliver over here?” Now there’s a different rules and all of that. So that was a nightmare, but I see it, like you said, it’s every business and in large part, but some of the ones you said, you really are just relying on the merchant and that can leave you in a really bad spot and it can leave the merchant in a bad spot. We talk about it a lot on this podcast of weak underwriting hurts the merchants. They end up getting put in on the match list, they get their reserves held and all of that. So I’m interested with vamp coming up or a vamp happening now, I mean, the big risk here is one, if you’re in this space, you don’t want to get fined, you don’t want to have a merchant selling more than cannabis or something or some new strain that makes people jump through car windshields, but the big issue is the banks don’t want to ever take losses.

 

James Huber (12:57):

So how does Qredible help with chargebacks, fraud, declines, all of that?

Noah Fitzgerald (13:04):

I think it’s really about creating transparency. So for these businesses are serving these types of merchants, what we do know is merchants, they’re going to be sneaky. They’re not stupid. They’ll figure out what the operating rules are. And what happens all the time is that they’ll get approved by a processor for their products at that point in time. A week later, they add 15 new products that are not approved by the processor. They’re out there processing products and changing, maybe adding a level of subscription services that they didn’t inform the processor about. How’s a processor … If you’ve got a portfolio of 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 merchants, how are you going to sit there and be able to find those anomalies or go back and do analysis? And the existing tools that are out there that are supporting with that, they’re not looking for the right things.

Noah Fitzgerald (14:05):

And so there’s so many gaps in these technologies today and where this is why things like what happened to FFB a year and a half ago happened. There’s these gaps. The car brands find them just by doing inadvertent searches themselves and then find, “Oh, well, this merchant’s selling 15 products that we don’t have on our approved list, now we’re going to go and do a full portfolio audit and/or you’re going to have to shut that merchant down and they’re going to get put on match.” And all these things happen. So from a VAMP perspective, I think what we do is, well, I know what we do is provide that transparency and not only at a one time point in time, but it’s an ongoing real time monitored service that is looking at their website constantly, constantly pulling products from the website, constantly pulling down COAs and other reporting or evidential information about those products to make sure that there’s coherence with the rule sets that are stipulated by that bank or by that processor.

Noah Fitzgerald (15:04):

And if there’s a violation there, it sends not only them an alert and also sends the merchant an alert so that they know that there’s something that they’re doing that is against the rule set and the repercussions of that is potentially getting shut down or put on match at worse.

James Huber (15:20):

Yeah. Well, I get excited again hearing about your system and how it actually works. And it makes sense with AI because we saw the, who was it, the famous stock fund guy bet against AI, the guy that said- Michael Berry. Michael Berry betted against AI. And I was looking at that because we have been slamming our head against the wall to get AI into our law firm. And you hear all the time, paralegals are going to go away. And I’m going, “How could a machine do what my paralegal does?” Now, we have some quasi AI tools and we’ve shopped like the big expensive one, but I’m going, “Look, a paralegal just giving … Sure, the thing can kick out a Shell,

James Huber (16:08):

But so can a paralegal that’s been doing it forever and she’s not even kicking out a Shell. She’s just pulling one … We have the templates for most everything. We’ve been doing this close to 20 years. So I don’t see it in my industry. And then I’m like, everybody use chat, use chat, use chat.” And then I start seeing them use chat for research and I’m like, “It’s all wrong. It doesn’t work for legal work. You’re absolutely right.” More than half of it for what … I mean, it’s all just wrong, but so we use it … Our AI so far is we use it for a thought partner like, “Hey, pretend you’re a judge, attack all of my arguments. Here’s my speech I’m going to give to the judge, what’s he going to say or proofread this tone because I’m about to tell the client what I really think.

James Huber (16:56):

” So tone it back, stuff like that. But yeah, as far as going out and finding stuff, I mean, I guess one thing in the legal field, we could be like, skim every case and tell us where the law’s going, but Westlaw already does that. They’ve got their AI. So when I saw that, I was like, “I knew it just because we can’t figure out a way to use it all that well.” He’s right.

Noah Fitzgerald (17:24):

One point. So one point. Yeah. I mean, to me, AI, it has its time in place and I don’t see it replacing things like a paralegal. I think it’s an augment tool to help them with the mundane tasks, But you know

Noah Fitzgerald (17:39):

There’s still an absolute necessity. It just allows them to be more efficient in a lot of ways. For us, we’re using AI in ways to be able, as OCR, for example, like we are actually scanning the COA documents from the lab reports and basically digitizing all of that data set into a database structure that is now ingestible so you can actually now report and create reports against it. So if your portfolio now, instead if you’re of a portfolio of merchants that is a thousand merchants and each one that has 20 products, you have 20,000 products worth of data that you can now report against. So if you’re looking for a specific cannabinoid because now THCA or THCO, or in this case with the new ban that’s happening, Delta-8 is no longer a viable product that you can have in your COA, now you can search all those products within those COAs and find which merchants products in an instant.

Noah Fitzgerald (18:34):

So we’re using AI in that way, not really in decision making processes, it’s more in functional processes of being able to pull data and scrub data.

James Huber (18:44):

Yeah, that makes sense. Actually, I did use it yesterday. I pulled the, there was a big news flash, Visa and MasterCard settlement, it might change surcharge rules. And I saw all these articles and I was like, “It might change surcharge.” So I pulled the settlement down from the court websites, 300 something pages, just the settlement and there are all these declarations and stuff

James Huber (19:08):

And I put it into AI because I did find surcharge, 118 things and I’m reading and then I pumped it into AI. I goes, “What does this do to surcharge?” And it gave me what it said. It’s a whole lot of nothing. It doesn’t change it at all. So all of these news sources said, they didn’t take the time to read it because it just happened. So they all said it might change surcharging. So I get like eight emails in the morning because people know I have access to court documents and they’re like, “What’s it say? What’s it say?” It’s a whole lot of nothing. But my thought was when I thought about it too, I was like, even if they had changed the surcharge discounting rules for Visa, they got all the states to make their rules like their own with the 3% cap.

 

James Huber (19:53):

So I was going, even if Visa changes their mind, the states probably wouldn’t follow suit because they’re going-

Noah Fitzgerald (19:59):

Not anytime soon, that’s for sure.

James Huber (20:01):

No, and they’re going to keep taking that lobbying money that they pay them to hold it in place. That’s very true. That’s very cool. Yeah. So anyways, now we’re way off topic, but you have a Qredible podcast. Am I on it right now?

Jeremy Stock (20:17):

No, you will be though. I think in December.

Noah Fitzgerald (20:19):

So Brian Fitzpatrick, our CEO, has been operating incredible live broadcast last … So we have it every Friday, and just this last Friday, we had 9,200 live viewers, which is pretty incredible. It’s a big customer to the marketing team and to the content that he’s really driving on. And a lot of the focus has been on nutraceuticals and supplements and a lot in the CBD and hemp space, the cannabis space. We have regulators. We have obviously the legal review podcast we’re going to be doing with you. Yeah. I mean, it’s a really good place for us to be able to promote the company and really, really get into ideas and concepts around what’s happening in this space in real time. And it’s a really valuable resource for us and for the audience, obviously.

James Huber (21:15):

Yeah. I mean, we noticed when we started this out, we were going, because we’re interviewing people, we’re hiring somebody in there going, “Where do I go for information about the industry?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, here’s a couple expert reports. There’s just not a lot out there.” There’s a couple podcasts. James Shepherd is a great podcast, been doing it for years, but it’s mostly related to sales, I think. Yeah,

Noah Fitzgerald (21:38):

It’s very sales focused.

James Huber (21:39):

It’s sales focused, which is great because that’s his audience and that’s a ton of our audience too, but there’s what’s happening in real time with the regulations and the laws and everything. So I’m glad that there’s more out there and that you’ve stole our idea. You’re welcome. Glad I can help. Yeah. No, but it’s one of those things where there’s more out there. So people are going, “Okay, yeah, let’s listen. I’m listening to yours. I’ll listen to mine.” And people just eat the content up. I mean, I listen to a few different podcasts.

 

Noah Fitzgerald (22:16):

Me as well. And there’s a lot of up and comers as well, and now that’s really starting to push. I’ve got a good colleague, Michelle Bayo, that’s starting a podcast on open banking. And as the landscape continues to shift, and of course more audience is looking for content like in this format, I see these types of things continuing to thrive. And it’s a good way to get unbiased or potentially biased, but at least it’s obvious.

James Huber (22:41):

We’re pretty biased.

Noah Fitzgerald (22:42):

Yeah. It’s obvious biases though, right? So it’s not under the cover bias crap. So

James Huber (22:48):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the challenges is people still don’t understand this industry. I know me personally, I learned something, I won’t say new every day about the industry, but at least every week, probably more you learn more and more about the industry. And what people now are starting to realize is every company is highly affected by this. And what was it? Somebody said every company needs a chief payments officer. And they do. I mean, look, if you’re … No, if you’re any business, you should really be looking at this because think if you have a restaurant where your margin is 10%, hopefully

James Huber (23:38):

Losing four at least- In payments. …

Jeremy Stock (23:42):

Yep.

James Huber (23:43):

Because nobody’s paying by cash. Right.

Jeremy Stock (23:46):

Like Chris says, payments has become the center of the universe as far as business is concerned. I think that’s absolutely right, James.

James Huber (23:53):

And since we help make the rules, essentially that puts us at a deity level.

Noah Fitzgerald (24:03):

Love it. We have to send it to God level. I love it. That’s amazing. I love that connection, but you’re absolutely right. I mean, listen, the capitalism is run by money. I mean, that’s what we’re here to do. And the money system is today very credit card and it’s payment focused. And there’s every single interaction, there is a transaction that’s happening, whether it be some energy or money. And in most cases, it’s money. So how is that happening? Well, we’re talking trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars every year through credit card processing. And because of that, you’re absolutely right. I think businesses should be relooking at what their makeup is and definitely need to have, if not on staff, at least a good payments advisor that they can go to as a source of truth because there’s too many people that are biased when they’re coming to you with a sales perspective.

Noah Fitzgerald (24:59):

And I will say the other thing in another company I’m a part of, we do statement analysis work and we provide merchants with essentially a CPO as a service offering. And the one thing about the payments industry is that there is no set pricing.

Noah Fitzgerald (25:18):

Anything else, you go and it’s like, it’s this per whatever unit. And payments, it’s all negotiated unless you go to Square Stripe or what have you. But everything else, it’s all negotiated. So one restaurant could be paying a completely different rate than another restaurant working in the same exact payment processor. So if you don’t understand the mechanics of it, which how can you? There’s 800 different rates of interchange. The complexities are silly. The processing statements are six to seven to 800 line items of information and CPAs can’t even figure it out. It’s like, how do you expect a business operator to figure out? It does require a tremendous amount of faith and trust that you’re not getting completely screwed over because of you can’t understand and articulate what’s in there. And good luck throwing that into AI. It’ll probably break the system.

James Huber (26:12):

No, I don’t think it would figure it out. You’d have to teach it. I did see in the settlement that came out, they are going to be lowering interchange like, I don’t know, 10th of a basis point or something over five years. I didn’t get into it too much, but as I was thinking about it, I was like, most merchants, they’re not affected by that, unless you’re on interchange plus, but most merchants, they’ve got a rate and interchange moves around and as it goes up, maybe they get it, but they probably don’t. So yeah, I mean, it’s something to look at of what your pricing program is because you know that they can price it however they want and they’re not going to price it at a loss. Sometimes they do even for certain types of business to offset. But yeah, I mean, it’s something where that service, every single business should be hiring you for it. What’s the name of that company?

Noah Fitzgerald (27:12):

It’s called Expense Defense, ExpenseDefense.com. And the other thing that we find and see constantly is that processors … And the funny thing about this is that I used to work at the processor side, helping them build these programs to find ways to manipulate these systems to be able to generate more revenue. So I know the inner workings of that on that side of it, and I just had a battle with my self-integrity and started shifting to the merchant, more focusing on the merchant side probably about 15 years ago. And the fine print of most merchant processors’ terms and conditions is that they will provide you with a … They can adjust pricing so long as they provide you a 90 days written notice. Well, where do they provide that notice on the processing statement that no one reads and is buried within the other changes that the car brands have.

Noah Fitzgerald (28:03):

And in there it’s like, “We’re going to adjust your rates by 0.05% and five cents a transaction by October, whatever, unless you call us.” And people, they don’t see that, they don’t do anything about it. It’s just cost of doing business. I worked with a merchant that was a moderate size gas station group and they had a contract with a very well known provider and over the course of seven years, their rates quadrupled.

James Huber (28:33):

Yeah. It’s insane. Yeah. And if you’re not looking at it, but on a lot of times all it takes is go complain. That’s all it takes. I always laugh is one thing is when people are in a dispute and I’m going, “Well, you’re being overcharged on your fees.” How do you prove it? And I can do it be easy every single time I go to the kilobyte fee. It is by definition a dynamic … You can’t even set it. And I’ve gone to task with this and they’re like, “Well, we round because it’s a dynamic fee. We have to round it. ” And I was like, “Have you ever rounded down?” No. Even the 0.0000001 rounds up.

Noah Fitzgerald (29:20):

Exactly. Yeah. It’s crazy. And it’s just a manipulating space, but yeah.

James Huber (29:26):

Yeah, no, it’s good. I mean, it sounds like your multiple companies are solving multiple issues that- That’s what I love doing. Yeah. So what are the biggest challenges that your clients face and how do you solve them?

Noah Fitzgerald (29:41):

Yeah. I mean, a couple different ways. So first, it depends upon who the specific client is because we’re working with the merchants as well as the payments providers and the banks, we solve multiple challenges dynamically for each one of them, but ultimately it’s really about helping them be able to manage their compliance compliance with technology rather than having to rely on human eyes and human resources. So I really like to think it from the merchant side of things as a compliance officer in a box. Obviously you can never replace a compliance officer just like you can’t replace a paralegal, but you can give that compliance officer a tool set that allows, that will scrub your website, make sure you don’t have any violation of content there, scrub your products, making sure that you don’t have silly claims on any of your products and you have all the required elements there.

Noah Fitzgerald (30:32):

Making sure that your COAs have a place to be stored that have been validated and authentic and connect to the products that you’re selling, making sure that your business licensing is up to date and doesn’t expire. So our tool set provides the merchants with these resources so they can focus on doing what they need to do, which is manage their business and not be a compliance officer. And for the payments companies, they have all their tool sets that they’re using today, but when it comes to the enhanced due diligence, that’s where their human capital restraints really show up. And the onboarding time of taking a merchant that has 30 different products that need COAs and having to open up every one of those COAs, review it, make sure it hits requirements, respond back to the merchant, all the back and forth, the speed to revenue that we can provide for them while also automating that entire onboarding review, I mean, it’s invaluable.

Noah Fitzgerald (31:31):

So we’re solving a lot of those challenges and those pain points that the entire industry is having. The bigger goal for us is to really help these businesses become low risk because in and of themselves, these aren’t high risk products. I mean, industry’s not high risk because of what they’re doing or it’s of the products they’re particularly selling. In some cases it is, but it’s more about the operations. Most payments processors look at high risk as those that have high risk of chargebacks, fraud, et cetera, from a risk. But the compliance risk side of things, that should be easily be able to be managed and today it’s just not. So we’re bringing a tool set that makes that stuff way easier to manage so you can focus on the financial risk of a business.

James Huber (32:15):

Right, right. Yeah. So if you look at like a bank’s prohibited list versus the warning list, the restricted is all of those merchants and that’s where the margins are made.

Noah Fitzgerald (32:29):

Exactly. And if we can help them improve the margin, like because they’re not having to spend as many resources to get them onboarded and make them more profitable at the same time while doing that, I mean, it’s a win-win for everybody. And then also mitigate the times that they have to shut down the portfolio or shut down a merchant because that affects the entire revenue stream, not just for the merchant, but for the processor as well. So if you’re well ahead of that and the system’s telling you and informing you of these things before they happen, it keeps the revenue sustainable as well.

James Huber (33:01):

Yeah, that’s great. Well, you get the last word. What do you want to leave us with? What would you like to our millions of viewers to walk away

Noah Fitzgerald (33:10):

That our competing podcasts are going to be at battles for a while. No, I’m really excited that I had the opportunity to jump on with you, James and Jeremy. I really appreciate the opportunity from a takeaway perspective for business merchants out there, pay attention to compliance. Most businesses that are selling compliant based products, they think that they’re just a business. You’re in the compliance business. If you’re selling CBD, hemp, cannabis, firearms, tobacco, alcohol, you are a compliance based business. And as such, you really should focus on compliance because just like what’s happening now with the CBD and with the hemp band that’s being pushed through Congress, this is going to decimate an industry. And certainly it’s going to have a massive and a significant impact. And there’s ways to be able to protect not just your business, but really the sustainability of an entire industry if you’re doing things right.

Noah Fitzgerald (34:14):

And our job is to help the good actors thrive and draw light to the bad actors and get them out of the way so that they don’t taint the rest of the market for everybody else. So that’s the biggest takeaway that I can lead you with.

James Huber (34:27):

All right. Love it. So how do people get in touch with you?

 

 

Noah Fitzgerald (34:31):

It’s Qredible.com. It’s with a Q instead of the C, but spelled exactly the same. And my email address is noah@qredible.com. So look us up. Excellent. I’d love to be able to connect with anybody out there even just to ideate or just to bounce conversations. So I appreciate you having it again.

Jeremy Stock (34:51):

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.