Fintech guru, investor and executive Ron Suber moderated a Benzinga Fintech Summit panel with leaders from the growing payments industry.
BPM’s Mark Li, Qwil CEO Johnny Reinsch and Token.io’s Steve Kirsch presented their takes on how to create an effective global payments ecosystem.
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BPM
California-based accounting and consulting firm BPM was founded in 1986 and has six offices across the Bay Area. The firm offers consulting to several industries including financial services, technology, life sciences, manufacturing and food.
When first embarking on new endeavors in 2014, BPM executives were unsure of the benefits of entering certain financial markets, Li said. “In the early years, a lot of people ran away from the digital assets. Internally, we are convinced that this is a market we want to serve and a market that we perceive to be underserved.”
BPM now has a wide range of clients and sees technology, data organization and taxable transactions to be among the largest challenges in the payments space, Li said.
Qwil
Founded in 2015, Qwil offers services to help businesses manage a global freelance workforce through simplified onboarding and payment processing. CEO Johnny Reinsch said his passion for the work stems from going unpaid as a freelancer and a resulting near-default on a mortgage.
“At first the question was, ‘is this just happening to me?’”
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Over 300 million people are similarly vulnerable, the CEO said. “I want to get 1 billion freelancers in our system so that they don’t feel that pain point. It’s a scary thing to be vulnerable, but the more you are open and true to yourself, the more of a following I tend to get. It has been really empowering.”
Token.io
Token.io provides payment solutions for merchants, developers and billers using one application program interface to access all banks for data and payments.
This year, the company launched the stable coin Token X, and convincing banks to work with the cryptocurrency is a hurdle to overcome despite the evidence of its usefulness, Kirsch said.
“The use cases are pretty compelling. It wasn’t until recently when a vendor wanted to be paid in crypto and it was paid through the corporate account in 5 seconds — there were no wire charges and he got his money instantly,” Kirsch said.
“It’s an eye-opening moment to think ‘we just did a cross border payment, essentially B2B and it was done so easily without any infrastructure.’”
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Ron Suber, left, leads a panel on global payments at the Benzinga Fintech Summit with BPM's Mark Li, Qwil CEO Johnny Reinsch, Token.io's Steve Kirsch and Yapstone CTO Sanjay Saraf.