Making Money Move Faster with Stephany Kirkpatrick of Orum

Are you tired of waiting days for your payments to process? In this episode of PayPod, host Jacob Hollabaugh sits down with Stephany Kirkpatrick of Orum to discuss how Orum simplifies the process of money movement, offering an orchestration to optimize the transfer of funds from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Orum is the simplest API integration for instant payouts. Watch this episode for a fun interesting dive into this latest development in payments and fintech. 

Payments & Fintech Insights In This Episode

Today’s Guest

Stephany Kirkpatrick : Orum

Orum offers instant payout processing solutions through their easy-to-integrate API. They also have the ability to implement instant payouts into a tech stack without costly bank integrations or prolonged compliance in one sprint or less. The benefits of using Orum’s payment processing solutions, includes saving money by avoiding engineering and operating costs, and satisfying on-demand customer expectations by providing real-time access to their money.

Featured on the Show

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About PayPod

PayPod is the leading voice in the payments and fintech industry, covering payments, risk management and new technology. Host Jacob Hollabaugh interviews leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world, as they discuss the latest developments in the payments and fintech industry.

Episode Transcript

Jacob: Welcome to PayPod, the Payments Industry podcast. Each week we’ll bring you in depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world from payment processing to risk management and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place. Hello, everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh. And today on the show we are talking about moving money faster. And of all the topics we cover within the payments fintech world here on PayPod, gotta say instant payments may very well be my favorite because frankly, I just love the idea of getting my money faster, being able to do more because I’m not waiting for multiple days for a transaction to settle anything like that. So I’m always a little extra excited when we have an expert in the field of instant payments on to learn from. And that is exactly who we’ve got today. Stephanie Kirkpatrick joins me, founder and CEO of Orum. The simplest integration for instant payouts. Stephanie, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Stephany: My pleasure, Jacob. Thanks for having me and thanks for such an amazing kickoff. And also my favorite topic, which is faster payments. We’re going to have a great combo today, I.

Jacob: Would have assumed so, which is actually exactly where I wanted to start is asking why instant payments? If you can take me back to, I believe like three and a half, almost four years ago now, when you started Orum, what was that decision point? What was it about this specific product service that set you on this mission?

Stephany: Well, the problem actually showed up in my life super early on, so my dad’s an immigrant. We grew up in a family where making ends meet was something that we had to talk about and think about. And I just saw firsthand in my childhood and then ultimately in my early career as a financial planner, the problem around time to money, as you just said, you get extra excited when you can get paid instantly. You didn’t say why you get extra excited, but for a lot of American households, that can mean the difference between an overdraft and not. That can mean the difference between paying a bill on time or ending up with late fees. That can mean the difference between receiving an insurance claim or going into a payday lender and paying an obscene amount of predatory cost to cover a bill for something unexpected. So there are just so many places where you see time to money show up, and not just for consumers. You see it for businesses, especially small businesses, where the difference of supply chain management and a time line to get paid always just leads to this chasing problem of where are the dollars? And when you peel back the layers of the onion and you look really closely at that problem, it ultimately boils down to infrastructure.

Stephany: Most payments in the US, despite us feeling like we whip out our credit cards a lot. I know feel like I do that. And actually most money movement in the US trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars is done via an antiquated system built 50 years ago called ACH. And it was designed in an era when instant wasn’t even a realistic idea. It was designed for and still is, a batch based system where people literally physically exchange Excel files and then they check those files to see if there was money in the account. And then they let you know days later how it went. And that just is fundamentally affecting the way that our entire financial system works, because time to money persists as a problem 50 years later. So that’s the inspiration. And so three, four years ago, although I knew the problem existed, I think I didn’t know until I spent time looking at why, how to think about a solution. And that’s where Orum comes in as the simplest API integration for instant payouts.

Jacob: Yeah, that’s a story a lot of people can relate to because it affects so many of us. I mean, I think it’s the number one thing when I talk to folks about doing this podcast and everything and the number one thing, someone not thinking about this world much, just your regular everyday consumer is just like, Yeah, it seems like money should move fast. Like it seems like these things. Why isn’t it all instant now? Like it’s 2023? Why especially millennial generation and younger? It’s like what we grew up with all this technology and why? How is this possible? That of all things that have not gotten faster, everything else on my phone moves instantly. I press a button, something happens, why can’t it be more? And so I definitely think you allude to one of the main reasons it hasn’t is the size it was built in that for a physical world, not a digital world. And then these big players that were there operating, it had no real incentive to ever make changes. And we’re putting up barriers to those that might disrupt them. So you start Orum Then can you give us a quick so we know what we’re talking about? Just a quick overview of the product and service that you offer and who and your marketing to or working with.

Stephany: Yes, so we are the simplest API integration for instant payouts. So our single solution brings you RTP, ACH, same ACH wires and more. We’re going to be launching FedNow this summer, which we’re really excited about. It’s interesting how in faster payments and instant payments there’s two systems now, not just one. So the complexity of orchestration offloading the sort of rails, routing, all of those key features are things that we offer in our single solution. So instead of going bank to bank, getting each individual set of money, movement parameters and pieces of the rails that you then put together with us, you actually get the entire package, you get an entire regulatory framework, and then you get all the orchestration and the intelligence that figures out. Just like Amazon figures out, How do I get a package to you? Same day? Is it UPS, Fedex? Is it Postal Service? Is it my blue vans that do deliveries? There’s an optimization layer in Orum’s money movement product called Momentum that seeking the same kind of answer. But for bank transfers, how do we get that transfer from point A to point B as quickly as possible? And so in our API, actually the fastest parameter is ASAP, and that’s a signal to us that you’re not optimizing for, let’s say, cost or other things. You’re optimizing for speed. And there’s many ways you can use our product to figure out the combination of speed, risk and ultimately timing for that transfer. And so that’s something that we get really excited about because when I think about, gosh, so many companies, let’s take Uber as an example. Airbnb businesses that have to move money end up building 100 person or multi hundred person teams because they have to go to multiple banks to get all the pieces.

Stephany: It’s like going to Home Depot and buying a hammer and a nail and I’m going to build a raised garden bed in my backyard, or I can buy a kit and it’s like ready to go and I can plant my flowers, which is the thing I really want to do. That’s what Orum does, right? We help you take a single engineer, integrate in two days or less, and then route that engineer and all those precious resources back to building your core product. Let those flowers get planted and bloom. So we’re excited about a lot of things these days specifically. And I think right now just top of mind for a variety of reasons. Um, is the insurance sector. I think a lot about how do we improve catastrophic events, access to money. There’s time to money in the everyday sense, and then there’s time to money during catastrophe. And something even as small as a relatively minor car claim. You know, you got fender bender on the freeway, a couple hundred dollars. You know, most Americans don’t have $400 to pay an emergency like that. And so getting claims into the hands of folks who are in a need is a really specific pain point that we can solve for. So we love the insurance space. We also love factoring. We love logistics. We love all kinds of categories like that where you’re really unlocking something for either the next puzzle piece, as the case would be in supply chain or trucking. Just as important as you might be, unlocking precious resources and much needed dollars in case of emergency.

Jacob: Yeah, and there’s a few things I want to follow up on there, but one, because you mentioned it, the insurance was actually one that when I was looking at kind of the different verticals you work within that stuck out maybe the most to me because it made total sense to me that from the consumer point of view, they would definitely clamor for that instant payout on that insurance claim. I have actually in another life I did some Lyft and Uber driving and I was in an accident, a fender bender, 0%. My fault that then like I needed that money immediately to fix the car to be allowed to continue doing that job. And I was like, I literally need this right now or else I can’t work. And it was this huge bottleneck. So I see the side of the consumer wanting that. But I guess I assumed the reason it kind of stuck out to me was that I thought the review process and would hold up adopting instant payments, that the need for accuracy of the claims would maybe stop that industry from being one that would be like early to the instant payments. How do you navigate that part of it? And is there anything I’m not seeing about? Is my hesitation valid of thinking like, yeah, the consumer would want that in insurance, but the insurance companies would be like, Well, wait a minute, how many claims are false? How many would we actually pay out too much? How does it work in that world?

Stephany: Well, insurance is a pretty wide range, industry wide. Things that you could be covering and paying out for. I think what I’ve been really impressed by as I think about where technology innovation has been maybe progressing rapidly but not talked about often, I think insurance is one of those places. So in the same way that loan underwriting up to a certain limit has become largely automated algorithmic designed based on relatively obvious key inputs that are generally available easily in the market. You can get a loan, you can get a credit card, all decided in a matter of seconds, really on the insurance claims side. Similarly up to a certain level of claim and within certain categories of claims, I’ll make up some numbers like claims under $500, claims that are PNC insurance with physical proof under $1,000. Those may not necessarily be the caps by company, but you can get an idea. Those are ones in which the details needed to decide. The approval for claims is relatively low. Right? It’s a few inputs. It’s pretty systematized. And if anything, the way AI is transforming a variety of industries I think is going to continue to transform availability and quick decisioning. So lots of insurance providers do instant claims decisioning and then they send you a check or they do a ACH.

Stephany: And if it’s a holiday weekend, you’ll get it in five days. So the actual technology to do claims management has gotten tons better. And then it’s like now there’s a whole lag on the back end of that. What have we married these two systems? And we said there’s instant payments and we only make the payment when you let our system know that the claim is approved. And so that’s been an awesome place to partner in the market because of the progress that’s been made around insurance. And again, I think just we’re generally seeing a lot of industries get to more rapid underwriting. So you can do loan disbursement faster, rapid decisioning on inquiries for refunds. There’s so many different scenarios where a payout is necessary and really needs that real time component and the technology to decide that it’s accurate and thus you should ship it instantly has gotten better and better. And that, I think, is a good example of probably a couple of other industries where we’re going to see things speed up in terms of the decision point, and then you can really maximize experience by adding faster payments right next to that.

Jacob: That makes sense. And so the other industry that kind of stuck out of the list that I saw on your site is brokerages. As someone I’d do a decent bit of trading on the side myself. And so that also made perfect sense to me that in the trading world, lots of funds being sent back and forth, consistent but variable basis, there would be a need and desire for faster access to those funds as they’re sent. Either way, would I be right when I saw that I kind of thought of as far as early adopters or industries that would be more prone to want to integrate more instant payments, faster payments more quickly, that someone like a brokerage, where it’s find volume mixed with that variability, would probably find an industry looking for more instant payment options. Am I right? In my thinking there.

Stephany: You’re spot on. I mean, you basically work in marketing at Aughrim. Welcome to the team. These are the exact reasons. And when I think back on my financial planning history and I think about how easy it was ultimately over many years of investment to get good financial advice into the hands of everyday Americans. Part of that good financial advice is to say if you have money that could be growing, let’s put it somewhere, whether it’s today Treasuries, high yield savings could be into capital markets in a brokerage account and people go, Yeah, great, they love the math. And then you ask them to actually execute that change and they get a little tense. Well, but what if I can’t and I can’t get it back on a Sunday? Well, wouldn’t you? People have the majority of their financial needs? Not usually 9 to 5, which is when banks are open. Yeah. So with our system, our ability to move money at night, on the holidays, on weekends gives people an opportunity to say, I’m going to go ahead and invest it. I’m going to go ahead and put it in a Treasury product, which is very popular now, and if I need it back, it’s literally instant. So now I don’t feel that high bar of friction and that concern. There’s $2 trillion of money just sitting idle in checking accounts, which even with good interest rates, don’t really earn anything because of that sort of gut clenching fear that I can’t access my own money on the weekends. And so that’s one of the huge problems we love solving, is opening up the aperture and saying there are no boundaries. This is a 24 over seven 365 payment business. Our lives run 24 over seven 365. If the best thing we can do is get money out of the ATM on a Saturday, like a cap of 500 bucks, something really needs fixing. So you’re right, brokerage is a great category.

Jacob: It makes sense. And so then back to kind of the infrastructure there you’re offering just if I understand correctly, the API integration. And one of your first answers I was thinking in my head you referenced like being like Amazon and I in my head thought so you’re kind of like the logistics company of payments almost. So actually when you’re facilitating all of these, is your API just kind of acting as that logistics person finding and connecting the best possible system? Are you actually handling any money at any point or filling any parts of the. Human chain, or is it simply the integration finding other existing rails and infrastructure to run everything on?

Stephany: It’s a great question. We are definitely in the sort of logistics business, so to speak, of a payment transfer, but we actually do the execution. So it’s important that we can have a system that knows what path is optimal. That’s part of the IP. So I can’t tell you all the details, but we think about things like is it RTP eligible, is it now eligible? Is a wire the better use case? Do you need a reference number? How high in the benchmark is speed versus other parameters? Is this bank not only eligible for RTP, but is it currently available? Because sometimes banks systems are not online? And those are some examples of things that drive some of the thinking around the routing and the decisioning. And then there’s actually payment executions. We do sit in the flow of funds, which is another huge benefit for partners that work with us who frankly don’t want to become licensed financial entities. They don’t want to become money transmitters. They aren’t really in the business of money movement. That’s not their core product, right? They’re in the business of building something else. And so for us to be able to take that compliance overhead, fully manage it, and then build a full settlement and reconciliation system so that operating on the payments back end is really straightforward. Whether you do that via API or you log into our portal, people do both. A lot of information about status of a transfer can just be sent back in a webhook and explained to the end user about where it is. But there’s lots that we do to support payment operations. Treasury folks rate depends on the profile of the customer. And so I would think about us kind of as logistics and services in terms of that end to end flow of dollars.

Jacob: Awesome. Thank you for that. And you touched on there that actually read my mind right to the next question. On the infrastructure side, where are we at with banks and financial institutions? Are they all linked to some sort? You mentioned there there might be a bank that isn’t linked to RTP or whatnot. Are where are we at in the ecosystem of banks, financial institutions all being linked to at least some form of an instant payment access? Are we still a ways away from that world or are we getting closer? Where’s the kind of transition at?

Stephany: Well, I think it depends on how you want to slice the answer. From my perspective, we are materially far along, meaning 60% of deposit accounts can receive an instant payment. 60% of those banks cannot send an instant payment. There are a smaller number of institutions that can send them. But that’s not uncommon for a banking system like ours that has thousands, literally five, 10,000 banks. Not every bank is actually sending money they usually correspond. So what’s really critical is how fast can we get coverage to receive? Think about it a bit like Apple Pay. I am a runner and I put my watch on and I’ll run out and on my way back, maybe I’ll stop and get like chocolate croissants for my kids, which is probably not the healthiest breakfast, but they love it. And I pay with my watch. Even just a few years ago, the number of places I could do that was lower than it is today. And at some point you have to use the system to create the ubiquity of coverage. So for 60% of banks today and bank accounts to be able to receive an instant payment, that is an incredibly big starting point when you think on a relative basis of any other financial products that we’ve kind of had to work potentially over 8 to 10 years to achieve coverage on. It’s early innings in the US, meaning one, there’s a lot more we could do. 60% should not be considered done, done and done. I think 60% is a great jumping off point. Lots of other countries have had a lot of success with instant payments I think are proxies for how we could design the system and keep iterating on adoption.

Stephany: And so as partners with the Fed and the new FedNow faster payment system as partners with the Clearinghouse and RTP, we’re big believers that both systems are really important, both drive coverage and adoption. And as an operator who sits in the middle, who can orchestrate between and create interoperability between two disparate instant payment systems, the advantage we have for our partners is that it doesn’t really matter which one you favor or which bank is which our system can find and seek out all the alternative forms of payment. And as we get to a place where we’re not paying with an account and routing number, but we’re leaning into an email, a phone number, which is what Zelle does, I think we’re going to find that just the unique ways in which we can move money instantly continue to grow and we will get to 100%, but we might still use ACH and we might still use wires, the good old workhorses, for various things because there are limits. Rtp has got $1 million limit per transfer. That might change. So there are reasons why you still want some of these other parameters, at least for now. But the more we can push to instant, I think net better for everybody and 60% plus coverage on essentially like day zero because we’re still in such early innings I think is an incredible jumping off point certainly.

Jacob: And it’s not like ACH doesn’t work for anything anymore. There’s still plenty of use cases where it works and it’s fine and we don’t need to overload the new systems with doing everything we used to do and whether that’s a transition or it’s a. Round forever and it has its roll that just gets smaller and smaller. It’s still necessary for the time being. You’ve referenced now Fed now a couple of times, and I believe I saw and you may have just said that you are one of the participating companies in the rollout that we’re about a month out from right July of this year, I think is the current date. Is that still the current date we’re looking at sometime in July?

Stephany: Well, listen, I don’t work for the Fed, so I can’t give dates, but I can say anticipated. Yes, in the early summer. And I think everything seems to be tracking. Well, whether it’s exactly in July or not, I think is less of a question. What I love about the Fed’s instant payment solution is that it’s really geared towards a network of banks that are smaller, that are serving and super serving their communities, their regional banks. And I think it gets at a different customer population than the original RTP design. While RTP is intended to be from the clearinghouse available in every bank, it’s predominantly available in its member owner banks, which concentrate to larger bank profiles Wells Fargo, Citi, JP Morgan awesome banks, but they have sometimes less of a footprint in certain areas. So this is expanding access of instant and real time capabilities to a much needed population. And I think we’re excited just to see how matching these two systems together just creates expanded coverage.

Jacob: And what do you think is kind of the timeline for when we can assess the first results of all the changes this is going to bring around? Are we going to know within a couple of months if this is a positive step heading in the right direction? Is it going to be a couple of years worth of data that we need? What do you kind of see the short term 2 to 3 year horizon looking like of is this going to be the thing that puts us on that tipping point of when you said that 60% number earlier, that’s a little higher than I would have guessed it was. What do you kind of just see the next couple of years timeline looking like?

Stephany: Well, I think one of the most critical pieces of even more adoption isn’t just the payout piece, which is what’s available in market today. It’s what you call the pay in piece. And so if you’ve ever been on Venmo and somebody sends you a little request and says, Hey, you owe me money for dinner, let’s split the bill. Or as is the case with my dog walker, my invoice, so to speak, you’ve experienced what the industry calls request per pay. I’m requesting that you pay me, and it’s a push payment because when you see it and you approve it, it automatically sends out from an available balance that’s designed into both Fednow and RTP. But it’s not live yet. And it’s complicated because you have banks who all have different experiences. Venmo unifies that experience for us, right? But each and every bank has got a different front end, a different login, maybe doesn’t even have a digital front end yet. Nonetheless, I think when this really comes out and I think it will be starting to show itself in the next couple of years, that’s where I think we’re going to see a major tipping point, not only to pay out but to also figure out merchant opportunities.

Stephany: Pay by bank is on trend, but figuring out how to give goods and services when ACH hasn’t settled without the protection of the Visa. Mastercard network is a complex equation and so what becomes possible with request for pay is that kind of goes away. You can still use Visa, Mastercard, Amex, those are going to exist forever, but you have the option now to receive a request to pay your utility bill and it can be done instantly. So let’s say you’re behind schedule on something. You receive the request for pay. You can chew it up instantly so you’re not getting further in arrears. So there’s going to be some really cool features. So it’s not just the service itself or the capabilities. I think it’s the add-on features that continue to advance the capabilities. Those are the kinds of things that drive adoption in addition to coverage. And those things are coming, they’re being worked on and things that we see as pretty big game changers over the next couple of years of faster payments.

Jacob: Definitely sounds like plenty of opportunity to keep you and all of Orum busy trying to grow it out and help that development over the next few years. I want to pivot for the final couple of questions to business leadership and development. I’d like to ask all founders and CEOs a couple of questions, but add an extra one specific for you, because on your website you promote remote, not distance workforce and show that you’ve got employees in all four mainland US time zones, which I think is really, really cool. What was the decision process behind building a company employee base in this manner? What are the benefits you see in this remote first team? Because I do think obviously with the pandemic, almost everyone went remote for at least a time being there. And now there’s this kind of tension and we’re seeing a little more of the traditional like, no, everyone needs to come back into the office mentality slowly seep in. So what are those benefits? What was that decision process behind wanting to build a company in that manner?

Stephany: Well, wish I could say that there was like a strategic plan here. I will be clear that we’re Covid babies, right? So this company was born and we raised institutional capital in the spring of 2020. And so one, I’m always barefoot. In fact, I’m barefoot now and I’ve sort of come to love working in an at home setting because you don’t have to think about the shoes. But I think more importantly, it was just an unknown time. And as we sat there and we said. Us and we’re going to need to hire people. And some of these people were physically, let’s say, in New York where I’m at, but because of Covid, they went somewhere else. And for the stretch of time that we were in the pandemic era, which ended up being years at the time, we didn’t know that it was hard to decide if we should have people beholden to move back at our demand. We ultimately said, let’s embrace what we know now and let’s lay the infrastructure to build a company where it is remote, not distant, where the work feels similar to how it could feel in person. You can’t replace in person, you absolutely can’t. It is different. It’s 100% different. But I think being a remote first organization has allowed us to do things on the diversity front that are incredibly important. We have a very rich, multidimensional team. And that’s not just your classic markers of diversity or underrepresentation. It’s different points of view and diversity of thought from different regions of the country.

Stephany: It allows us to be really flexible with folks, you know, 40% of our team or maybe even more these days has young kids or young parents. That’s really uncommon in a startup. And it’s not to say that we sometimes don’t have our long days. We do, but we don’t have all those hours spent commuting. And to have the opportunity to bring more women, more parents into the workforce is really powerful. And ultimately I think that the model has served us well because we invested in it. We brought in a VP people when we were right around 20 employees. Today we’re about 40. And I think that was one of the key things too, that allowed us to lay out our values which were there already, but to really cement them and to build infrastructure, to have a remote work philosophy, to have a communication philosophy, and then to build the tooling for it. So there are days when I’d love to be like everyone in the office, let’s have a meeting. And sometimes when we do get together we find it’s like really joyful and then we all love to go back home and kind of be heads down and start executing again. So it’s what works for us right now. Only time will tell what will work for many more years, but as we are multiple years into it, I love that we’ve been able to prove that there are many options and many pathways and set some examples in the market around it.

Jacob: Yeah, love all of that. And I can say I’m also or traditionally have been a barefoot person myself when I’m working from home, although I’ve got a new ten week old puppy that’s running around in his teething right now. So the feet have been covered for the last couple of weeks just because for some reason toe is just really stand out to a little puppy who wants to chew on something. So we haven’t been barefoot recently, but I’m with you. It’s one of the many perks of being able to be at home.

Stephany: I have a 10 or 12 week puppy right now in the same camp as you, and he keeps stealing everything that I put around my desk. So slippers have gone sideways and lots of toe biting.I can agree with you on that.

Jacob: And these interviews are the one time where he gets told you’re absolutely not allowed in the office anymore. He’s actually doing really good on this particular one. He’s getting used to the idea of sometimes I’m not allowed to be around in yelping. So to the final couple questions then that I love to ask founders and CEOs that have had some success in the payments world like you have at a company level. First, what characteristics or core values stand out to you as indicators that a company has a great shot of being successful in this world?

Stephany: Well, payments is a very interesting industry and that it’s slow, right? On the one hand, we talk about speed this entire time, faster payments, but the industry itself, it just presents differently, Right. And so I think one of the key things is just being patient. There is not really an MVP of payments. Like you can’t have an outage, you can’t have downtime. The SLAs are very high. So companies that are going to be lifelong players in this category, they didn’t cut corners and we certainly didn’t partners like JPMorgan banks in the background, they matter. And making those decisions about your SLA’s and your uptime, getting your security parameters really tight and remembering that on the other side of every call is a time to money problem. And if we mess that up, what a huge impact it is. Because you of all everyone listening, has been in a situation where the check got mailed to the wrong address. The money was into the wrong account, the tax refund didn’t come and you’re left frustrated and holding nothing. And so we take it very seriously. And it’s a slow patient process to lay out brick by brick the strategy of being able to do what we do, do it well and be extremely trusted in the market. And so I think that is one of the things that I would say is you’re looking at all the versions of payments companies or payment adjacent companies. Those things come to mind As I think about the success metrics. I wish there was a shortcut on an MVP where you can just change the blue button to purple and more people sign up and use it, right, which is the consumer facing universe, but just being steadfast in that it is a ten year journey and it’s going to take many years to be able to continue to press on faster payments being the number one solution and not losing sight of what that North Star looks like.

Jacob: Yeah, love that. I think that’s really insightful and spot on. Let’s take that then for the final question to the individual then for someone who’s. Maybe just starting out their career in this industry or looking to start working in this industry. What are a few key personality traits you think have maybe helped you be successful, or that you would tell someone newer to the industry to work on if they want to find success within this world?

Stephany: Number one, curiosity. I am a certified financial planner who spent a couple of years in my career outside of FinTech, building bikes at SoulCycle that go nowhere to come back to building payments infrastructure. And that’s because I’m curious. I wanted to know why time to money wasn’t being solved. I felt like it could be better. And so I think curiosity drives everything I think about. And I think it’s the key to being able to get into a category like this where there’s a ton of complexity and really come up the curve quickly. Number two, Life Learner, Read, study, explore. There’s a great book. Sophia Goldberg, another female founder in the fintech ecosystem, also in payments, wrote The Field Guide to Payments. We give it to everybody who started Orum or we recommend it all the time because it’s like a quick read, but you walk away going, Ah, I understand a lot better now than I did before. And it’s not so technical that you want to snooze fast. It’s a really great read, so just be curious, read, spend time, get educated and then take some bets. The systems were all designed 50 years ago. Modernization, sometimes the most obscure or brand new or totally different way of thinking. It might it might be a 10% improvement in thinking about an old system being better. And so I think taking small pieces of these broader huge frameworks and chipping away at different problem areas is a great wedge to getting into a place where payments becomes more and more core to potentially what you’re doing, what you’re focusing on full time.

Jacob: Yeah. And I think all those go hand in hand and so well together of the curiosity knowing this is an industry that there is a lot of change right now as we slowly but surely catch up and get all the old players of the industry, these behemoths, to allow some of the catch up to be happening. That if you’re curious and looking for the new opportunities, there are plenty of places where you can find to build those little bridges, to make those little connections that improve things by 10%. You don’t have to come in and just disruption is one of the big keywords the last decade or so. But you don’t have to come in and be the disruptor that makes something wholly brand new. You can be the one that builds all the little bridges or helps the little 10% increase here or there. And there’s lots of room to do that within this industry as it’s ever changing. So Stephanie, this has been really great to get to learn from you and about Orum. For those listening who might want to follow you or the company, keep up with what you’ve got going on, where would be the best place for them to go to do so?

Stephany: Hit us up. Orum.IO.com And Hello@Orum. Io are both great ways to reach us. And if you’re thinking all things faster payments, we’re your people. Let’s talk.

Jacob: Absolutely Love it. We’ll, of course, link to that and much, much more in the show notes below. Stephanie, thank you for giving us your time and knowledge. It’s been a real pleasure. Hope to speak to you again sometime soon.

Stephany: Sounds great. Thanks for having me.

Jacob: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over to sorbet.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s s o a r p a y. Dot com slash podcast.