In this episode of Payments FM, we sit down with Dan Loomis from Gusto to discuss the world of payroll and cashflow management for small and medium businesses.
Dan sheds light on the common financial headaches like cashflow volatility, lack of control and confidence, and how Gusto Money aims to solve these through innovative solutions.
We explore the challenges small businesses face such as managing payables, accelerating receivables, and the unique issues arising from bill payments and invoicing.
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Dan also discusses the new integrations and features of Gusto Money, including the Payroll Bridge, financing options, and using stable coins for international payments. Learn how Gusto is transforming payroll management and providing flexible financial solutions to help small businesses thrive.
00:38 Guest Introduction: Dan Loomis from Gusto
01:12 Common Payroll Challenges for Small Businesses
05:02 Gusto Money: Addressing Payroll Pain Points
08:11 Invoicing Solutions and Market Competition
14:11 Bill Pay Solutions and Payment Methods
19:45 Same Day Payroll: How It Works
25:19 Financing Solutions: Payroll Bridge
35:04 Stable Coins for International Payments
38:26 Future of Payments and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript
Nikita: Let’s maybe start with a high-level question. So, with Gusto managing payouts for 400,000 businesses, which is an enormous number, you probably hear a lot from your customers about their payments and payroll experience.
So maybe you can highlight a little bit: what are the main pain points that small businesses experience with payments and payouts?
Dan: First of all, I just want to thank you for having me on and allowing me to help share how Gusto solves problems for small businesses.
We have the privilege of serving several hundred thousand of them, like you just mentioned, and we talk to our customers repeatedly. It’s critically important for us to all [00:02:00] understand exactly the pain points that they’re facing.
Most commonly, there are a few acute financial headaches that small businesses face today. They feel a lack of control. They feel a lack of confidence. There’s constant cash-flow volatility and challenges, and they cascade.
When businesses can’t reliably manage payments, employees can feel the stress directly in their paychecks, and both sides are stuck in a cycle of instability that the organization I help run — Gusto Money — is designed to break, by automating processes, improving visibility, and providing flexible access to capital and wages.
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Nikita: Right. That makes a lot of sense.
I think there are a lot of analysts who are saying the economy is not doing super well right now in the US. Are you seeing any trends or signals from your customers, and do you think there is a demand for certain [00:03:00] products?
Dan: What’s incredible about the US small-business economy is that it’s very vibrant and very much alive.
That’s not to say there aren’t financial headwinds and macro-environment considerations that we have to think through in partnership with our small businesses, but there’s a lot of opportunity when we look at the acute pain that they face.
There’s a clear lack of control that small-business owners face. Their financial centers of gravity can feel manual or disconnected. There’s commonly poor visibility into cash flow.
There’s a resulting lack of confidence. Small businesses often lack real-time insight into cash positions. It limits their access to capital. Inefficient AR and AP systems leave owners guessing about whether they can meet payroll, pay bills, or invest in growth. The uncertainty really makes it hard to run a stable [00:04:00] operation.
And then you have this cash-flow volatility — the “who do I pay?” dilemma. Late customer payments coming in, and scarce credit options, can at times force owners to make some painful trade-offs: choosing which vendors or service providers to pay, or even the unconscionable question: “Do I pay or delay paying my employees on time?”
These decisions can damage relationships with suppliers, vendors, and employees. They create a vicious cycle of distrust.
So there are a few areas that are pain points. And to touch on your broader point about the macro environment and what our customers desire: they’re really looking for control, they’re looking for confidence, and they’re looking for cash-flow-smoothing solutions. That’s what Gusto Money is here to deliver.
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Nikita: Right. Exactly. And I think it’s a great segue to my next question — Gusto Money. Big announcement.
So, you just listed the pain points and problems. I would imagine that, with the product you’re building, you’re trying to address some of them. But if you can provide a little bit more specifics on what exactly the pain points and solutions are that you’re bringing to the market with Gusto Money and what you’re trying to solve.
Dan: Totally. Gusto Money is solving kind of a dual story of time and cash-flow control, confidence, and “more money.”
On one end, we help provide financial solutions for millions of employees that small businesses bring. We help them with control, confidence, and more money through great financial solutions delivered for the employees of our employers.
We help them get paid early, get paid on time, understand their earnings, have fluid access to cash in [00:06:00] moments when they might be lacking confidence or control.
I think for the purpose of this conversation, we’ll spend the lion’s share of our time talking about what we’re doing for our employers — what we’re doing for our small businesses.
When we think about the challenges that we’re helping to solve for small business: cash flow is extraordinarily stressful.
Small businesses struggle with balancing money in versus money out. Gusto Money is solving for this by helping to accelerate receivables — by having an invoicing product in market that helps reduce the days-to-paid with automated reminders and payment flexibility that allows money to move faster into bank accounts.
We also help solve for managing payables with confidence. We give one integrated view of your cash position that helps you see what money is going out to your employees through payroll, what you’re doing with vendor and bill payments, and how you’re handling expenses.
When we consolidate this single view of money out, it helps provide a [00:07:00] lot of comfort and confidence around cash flow.
And the last critical area that we’re delivering now is providing working-capital backstops. The goal is to provide fair and affordable access to credit that employers can lean on to help pay their team.
The thing that keeps small businesses up at night, largely, is: “I feel comfort and confidence around building my product or service, but can I pay my employees?”
When we pull all this together and help produce a better view of cash flow and backstop it with working capital, it helps all of our small businesses win.
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Nikita: Thank you for this overview. You just listed a set of products, and I believe the key for success is going deep into each of them — to think not just that you delivered them as a checkbox, right, but that you’re actually delivering value and that the product works for employers.
Let’s maybe unpack each of them in a little bit more detail, in the order you [00:08:00] listed them.
Maybe let’s start with invoicing. I believe there are certain solutions on the market today, and I’m actually not sure if invoicing is part of the announcement or if it’s been with the product for a while. Are you competing with other invoicing platforms — I don’t know, like QuickBooks, or maybe someone can just go into Stripe and create an invoice there?
Do you see it as competition, or do you provide more of a niche solution specifically for a certain type of employers?
Dan: I don’t see Gusto invoicing as a head-to-head competitor with standalone invoicing tools like some that you just mentioned.
Instead, I think our strategy is to actually solve a more fundamental problem around cash-flow and workflow fragmentation for small businesses.
When you integrate with payroll, Gusto has the unique opportunity to sit at the intersection of money in (invoicing and payments received) and money out (payroll and bill payment and vendor payments).
When an invoice is paid, that money can be made immediately visible in the same place where a business is deciding how and when to pay their people and suppliers.
That closed loop that we can support is unique, and we really want to solve core problems in this space for small businesses.
When you have invoicing integrated into a workflow that a small business is already in regularly, we can help reduce days-to-paid, which helps you accelerate payroll. We can provide better cash-flow confidence.
Gusto almost uniquely has full visibility into both inflows and outflows in a way that other companies might not have. We can help owners prioritize payments, avoid shortfalls, and provide working-capital backstops.
We’re trying to attack this by really holistically solving the workflow of getting paid and paying others, given our position in the ecosystem.
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Nikita: Right. I have some follow-up questions about that.
I believe invoicing can be paid in different ways, right? So you probably support online payment methods that your employer will accept from regular customers, and also there could be some B2B payments.
I’m a little bit curious how you manage B2B payments. Is it that the employer sends an invoice, but funds arrive directly in their bank account — is that the traditional flow? Because I believe that’s usually how it works: you send an invoice, there are your bank details, and someone pays your bank account.
But you’re saying you’re in the middle of the funds. How does that actually work?
Dan: Yeah, I don’t necessarily know that we’re in the middle of the funds flow.
What we’re able to do is — when you’re thinking about disparate pieces of financial information and financial artifacts — reconciliation of this, and truly understanding “How much money do I have in this moment?” We’re really trying to begin to crack this problem of expressing cash flow, answering very clear and simple questions like: “What do I have available today?”
By integrating ourselves into the flow, into an invoicing flow — we’re partnered with a company called Melio to help bring AR and AP solutions to market — we can, by partnering closely with them, leverage some of their payments layer, some of the workflow around actually creating a bill or creating an [00:12:00] invoice, and then listening for that information and pairing it with what we know to be true around relationships with employees, with time and hours worked at hourly rates.
That combination gives us a richer perspective on cash flow, and we’re trying to solve that problem.
When it’s Wednesday afternoon and I need to think about running payroll, or it’s Friday morning and I need to think about running payroll, I don’t want to go to multiple sources of truth to actually understand, “Can I make this happen?” Gusto, we’re trying to very clearly solve that problem for small businesses because it’s a leading pain point.
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Nikita: I believe you also mentioned you can expedite an invoice, right, and help an invoice get paid quicker. Can you tell me more about that?
Dan: Yeah, we want small businesses to get paid as fast as possible.
One of the ways that we can help accelerate days-to-paid is by providing payer and payee flexibility in how you’re getting paid and how you’re paying others — looking to optimize for tender types around, again, paying in or getting paid out.
Tender-type maximization is really important, because you give people that are going to be paying your invoice a lot of choice. If they don’t see their preferred way to pay listed, it’s probably going to take them a few more days to pay.
So providing tender-type flexibility, having automated follow-ups and reminders — that helps salvage the relationship between a small business and their customer.
The customer doesn’t want Dan of Dan’s Donuts to be pestering them to pay the invoice. If the system can help automate this, if Gusto can help create that relationship with an end individual who is perhaps late on an invoice, that helps salvage the relationship between the small-business owner and the customer.
These are [00:14:00] the ways that we’re helping to accelerate days-to-paid: great user experience and providing maximum flexibility in payment-rail choice.
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Nikita: Right. Is the situation similar with bill pay, when a company wants to pay their vendors? So you’re providing an additional layer of information and insights compared to just going to their bank and initiating the payment from there.
Dan: We think we have a far richer set of features and centralized capabilities that we offer to our small businesses.
When we centralize accounts payable next to payroll — which would not be the case in a couple of examples you just mentioned — and we express what “money-out” position you have in totality (payroll, expenses, bill pay), it helps small businesses mentally centralize all that information.
They can see obligations, view their cash position, understand upcoming payroll, and know who to pay when, all in one spot.
Again, we’re partnered with Melio to help bring this kind of bill-pay solution primitive into our product, and then we deeply integrate it with the rest of Gusto.
The experience for a user feels like: add a bill, upload a bill or email it in, or manually create it. You can review and schedule; if there’s an approval route that needs to go from an individual entering the bill to maybe the business owner because it’s over a certain dollar amount, that approval workflow exists.
You want to be able to confirm and select payment types — pay via ACH, pay via card, how you want to pay. When somebody receives that bill payment, how do they get paid? And critically, how do you reconcile all of this within [00:16:00] your accounting stacks?
So this is the kind of bill-payment offering that we provide to small businesses. And again, by pairing it next to payroll information and expense information, you start to have a more complete picture of your money-out exposure. We think there’s a very clear pain point we’re solving there.
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Nikita: You mentioned different payment methods. I saw recently that America’s payments are still running a lot on checks. Is that something you also help automate? Do you see check volume as still a real volume that small businesses are using to receive and send payments?
Dan: Sometimes there’s a necessity for a check, and for various reasons checks still exist.
Our goal is to provide maximum flexibility in how people want to pay and get paid. When you offer choice, the whole solution works better.
So how do we offer payment methods like bank transfers or ACH? How do we, if somebody wants to mail a check, enable that and make it easy for them? How can they fund bill payments with a card, if they want to use a credit card, for example, to pay bills?
We see that flexibility and choice — how you pay and how you get paid — as really important for adoption and engagement.
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Nikita: Just from the employer perspective, having all this information together makes a lot of sense, and you have a partnership. Can you walk me through how it actually works?
I would imagine that through this partnership a small business can connect their bank account, where you’ll get more visibility on their transactions. Is this the flow? Is there a Plaid somewhere in this chain that helps you connect to bank accounts? What are the rails that you’re using?
Dan: Great question. In order to really harness the total power of what Gusto offers, typically a bank connection is important.
Today we do have a couple of different ways to connect bank accounts. One of them is with Plaid. We grab that information of a connected bank account; it helps us be able to run payroll, it helps us facilitate bill payment.
So we definitely want a connected bank account.
Then with the example I think you’re asking about around bill pay: yes, let’s connect a bank account. If you want to pay a bill, typically you need to add a bill, and manual entry is kind of a pain. So how do you upload a PDF, take a picture, or email it in? We need to ingest the bill, and there’s a lot of flexibility in how we do that.
Once the bill is in, it’s not just automatically paid. We want to help you review and schedule when that takes place. Is it the right vendor? Is it the right due date? Do you want to adjust [00:19:00] the payment date that is right for you, in the context of the information that Gusto provides?
If it’s a large bill, do you need an approval route from the small-business owner, for example? And ultimately, how do you want to pay this? We may have connected your bank account and that might be your preferred method of payment…
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Nikita: Do you actually want to pay that using maybe your credit card? And then that last, transparent step that just kind of needs to work: how do we sync and reconcile these types of payments with your ERP and your accounting platform?
So this is the flow that we help provide, and we’re super excited about the visibility it offers small businesses.
Yeah, absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about the core of Gusto — the payroll itself.
One of the features that is very requested is same-day payroll. Can you walk me through how this [00:20:00] is structured and what rails you’re using to run same-day payroll?
Dan: I think, if you’d allow me, I’d start with the customer problem that we’re solving.
Small businesses, as we’ve been talking about, have a lot of hats that owners wear. Typically, time is at a premium. There are a lot of jobs to be done in the day of a small-business owner, and payroll should just work for them when they need it to work.
Sometimes you might need it to work a little bit closer to payday and may not have gotten to that job on Monday or Wednesday or Thursday in service of a Friday payroll. So we want to make sure that we have a lot of flexibility in how employers and administrators of payroll can actually run payroll.
So in the instance of same-day payroll, at a surface layer the flow is very easy to express. There are a lot of mechanics and core capabilities that Gusto brings to bear that allow what sounds like a relatively simple use case to [00:21:00] actually pay people efficiently and on time.
At the end of the day, we debit the employer on payday, and then we credit the employee using same-day ACH. Again, at the surface layer, it sounds very simple, but there are a lot of mechanics that sit underneath that.
For instance, how does it work behind the scenes? Domestically, we use a combination of FedNow, Clearing House real-time payments, and FedACH through our banking partners to help. Internationally, we use leading FX and stablecoin partners to move money across borders.
We stitch all of this together and present it in a clean and simple user interface for payroll admins to understand what they’re doing, know who they need to pay, how much they’re paying them, using what speed — and either have that on autopilot or manually submit payroll and get those employees paid very rapidly.
We’re super pleased with how this launch has taken flight, and it’s just one in a series of steps we’re taking to make the payroll experience better for employers in the United States.
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Nikita: I am very excited to hear that you’re adopting the latest solutions, including FedNow. That’s relatively new, and it’s something that you’re utilizing today.
I don’t have much experience in payroll-type payments, but I have more on platform solutions. Usually, when you want to speed up the payout to, say, sellers on a marketplace or service providers, there is an extra fee that comes with this.
If you want an instant payout, there’s an extra fee to send money in real time, which sounds a little [00:23:00] extreme in 2025.
Do you see it as a premium service — like, “If you want same-day payroll there’s an extra fee or you should be on an extra plan”? Or do you think that’s something everyone should have access to?
Dan: That’s a great question. Again, my standpoint is that offering maximum choice allows all sides of the network to be optimized.
An employer can choose to run payroll earlier in the week, and there are certain processes and mechanics that allow us to bring that solution to market. Or employers can choose to run payroll a little bit closer to the actual pay date.
Broadly speaking in the industry, when there’s accelerated speed or some sense of urgency around moving money quickly, typically there’s a different price point for that. There are a whole host of reasons: when you move money quickly, risk and fraud rates can go up, and you need to be able to absorb that in the process of running your business.
What we’ve done is look for a fair and affordable price that allows small businesses an incredible amount of choice. We solve their problem if they need to run payroll urgently — we have that solution for them at a fair and affordable price that helps them maintain the relationship with their employees.
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Nikita: That makes a lot of sense.
The product from your announcement that I’m particularly excited about is financing. To what you mentioned, there is a big problem with cash flow, and I would imagine that financing is here to address it.
Can you tell me more about this? How does it work, and what’s the business experience?
Dan: How it works is we’re solving a clear need. Payroll is one of the largest non-negotiable recurring small-business expenses, and managing that cash flow is an extraordinarily stressful pain point for SMBs.
We’ve worked to integrate a product offering called Payroll Bridge. We’re partnered with a company called Parafin to [00:26:00] bring this to market. Payroll Bridge is embedded in the Gusto ecosystem and is an extraordinarily convenient option designed specifically to meet the need of payroll.
When I’m in the “run payroll” flow as a small-business owner, I have an option. I can see what my bank balance is, and I can see an option to use Payroll Bridge — receive a draw and fill that gap in cash flow in that moment, in the job-to-be-done of running payroll, in the context of the payroll engine.
That’s, at a surface layer, what we wanted: it’s deeply integrated so that you’re not going to point solutions or going outside to attempt to fill this problem. We’ve got your back in-flow with fair and affordable [00:27:00] access to working capital.
Together with us and Parafin, we create the conditions where small businesses can defer payroll expenses at or before running payroll. To my knowledge, Payroll Bridge is the first and only solution of its kind, and we’re super proud to bring that to market with Parafin.
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Nikita: Yeah, that sounds very exciting.
I have a couple of questions about the details. I’m not very familiar with the partner you mentioned. I’ve explored other solutions for embedded financing, and a lot of them are very expensive.
Maybe it doesn’t look that expensive if, as a business, you’re financing for a short amount of time — you’re expecting an invoice next month, you take a certain amount for a short period. But if you recalculate to the annual percentage, it’s kind of double-digit interest.
How do you think about this? Is it the case with Gusto? And do you see that convenience and the extra layer on top justify the extra cost of money?
Dan: Small-business owners regularly face decisions involving their workforce — the people that help their business operate. These are very sensitive, and we want to pay those relationships the right amount of respect.
How we’ve thought about this is: a small-business owner is confronted with a very challenging moment. “I owe my employees $12,000 and I have $7,000 in the bank.” Again, hypothetical situation.
A small-business owner can do one of many things. They can go out to a myriad of point solutions, attempt to aggregate their assets, move their assets into one place and run payroll. This is common; this happens.
It’s also common that a small-business owner may not have received that payment on that invoice, or may not have had the sales volume they were expecting. They’re running short on budgets, trying to compress lots of moments into a narrow timeframe to run payroll. Sometimes things don’t perfectly line up.
So in these moments, there are choices. It is an option to not run payroll — and we are here to help prevent that, number one, through our cash-flow solutions that we’re stitching together around receivables, payables, understanding assets, and understanding working-capital situation.
We hope to prevent the moment where you’re unclear on how much money you have in the bank and whether you can run payroll. We’re solving that problem.
But in the moment when you need to fund payroll, we have a deeply integrated solution that we believe is very fair and affordably priced for what it offers small businesses.
There are flexible repayment options of four, eight, or twelve installments, which gives merchants flexibility and choice: do they want this offering, and how do they want to repay the use of credit — all while retaining the relationship with employees who were paid on time.
So yes, there is a cost to the product, but we believe it’s not required for everybody, it’s not recommended for everybody. It’s an option available for moments of extreme pain, and at Gusto we just want to have our small businesses’ back. We make that [00:31:00] possible through our partnership with Parafin.
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Nikita: I appreciate the transparency. Thank you for this answer.
Just one more question on financing — I’m very curious myself.
You obviously have tons of data, and probably, to underwrite the loan, you can utilize all this data that you aggregate on your platform. Did you run any estimations of how many businesses on your platform qualify for this product? Is it like 10%, or 100%?
Dan: Our goal is to make sure that a “right-for-me” product is available for the right people.
Did we look at our back-book portfolio and see how many small businesses this product might be eligible for? Absolutely — just like we would with any product development effort. For any feature X, Y, or Z, you want to look at the eligible audience.
Beyond that, I think you might be asking how we assess how many small businesses would be eligible, how many could potentially be underwritten, etc. There are a lot of “it depends” moments there, and ultimately that decision is determined by our lending partner, Parafin, using their underwriting criteria and credit-worthiness assessment.
What I can say is that customers who are approved and use the solution absolutely love it. It provides them with the flexibility, control, and confidence that they can run their business and meet payroll even when challenges are present. That’s the power we’re working to bring to market.
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Nikita: Right. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Did you consider repayment of the loan as an automatic deduction from their future invoices or anything like this — integrations like that?
Dan: Yeah, when it comes to repayment, we’re trying to optimize the entire experience.
The experience isn’t just “Can I be underwritten?” and “Can I access money?” but also “Do I have a fair, affordable, and clearly understood repayment plan that I’m able to meet?”
So there’s a responsibility at the top of the funnel to make sure eligibility checks and credit limits are designed not to put SMBs in an awkward position or in trouble. We address this upfront.
In the edge case where they get a bit lower in the funnel and have challenges repaying — which is not the majority of our customer base, to be clear — that’s where the flexible repayment options come in.
And again, in partnership with Parafin, when businesses experience demonstrated financial hardship, we’re looking to offer repayment pauses or other repayment arrangements on a case-by-case basis that meet the needs of the small business.
This is something that should work for a small business, not be a detractor to them running their business.
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Nikita: As part of this announcement, I also saw a feature around payouts using stablecoins. It feels like stablecoins are the theme of 2025 — there have been multiple launches and products, which is very exciting.
The particular use case you’re implementing makes a lot of sense: it’s for international payments, and it’s part of payouts. I see it as a real solution, not just hype.
Can you provide more context about what pain point you’re solving and what the employee experience looks like when they’re receiving this type of payment?
Dan: Using stablecoins is particularly valuable in these use cases, so we’re super excited to bring this to market.
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Nikita: Right. I would love to hear more about how it actually works. Are there popular stablecoin wallets that employees can use? What’s their experience — do they receive an email and need to do something from it, or…?
Dan: Yeah, we are working on shoring up the final details of a couple of large announcements, and I think if we were to have this conversation again in a couple of weeks, I could provide you a lot more clarity on this front.
Right now we’re in the final moment of putting a bow on this, so it might be worth revisiting in the next couple of weeks.
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Nikita: Maybe, if you can share something because you’re already working on it: did you see any interesting challenges from a regulatory perspective by opening up stablecoins?
I think it’s getting popular, but it’s still maybe in some sort of grey area, and in some countries regulations are not there yet. What was your experience working with this?
Dan: Yeah. Number one, it’s great to see guidance and a framework here. The Genius Act that recently came out — guiding and establishing national innovation for US stablecoins — is broadly speaking a landmark piece of legislation.
It establishes a pretty comprehensive framework for regulating stablecoins and digital tokens, etc. This provides clear guidance for how we should think about building products, how we should evaluate partners that can enable certain capabilities, and how we should think about a compliance framework for governing this feature not just in US markets but internationally as well.
We’re resolute that stablecoins enable faster money movement. Businesses can pay employees or contractors faster. We can enable better cash flow. We can create more transparency that can be evaluated more thoroughly through the lens of compliance and regulation.
We see this as an evolving space — as I’m sure you do too — but we’re excited there’s governance, guidance, and a path forward for our industry.
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Nikita: You obviously have a lot of payments experience and have been in payments for quite a while.
What do you think is the biggest problem with payments that businesses — and maybe even consumers — experience today? What is the big blocker for the industry and for all of us in experiencing fast, seamless, secure, convenient, and cheap payments?
Dan: It’s a very broad question, and I don’t, for a nanosecond, attempt to speak on behalf of a very smart and competent industry.
I think when we look ahead in payments, transparency, speed, and reconciliation are extraordinarily important. These are areas that aren’t always that interesting to talk about. Everyone wants money faster, but how that works, how it is cost-optimized, is critical.
We just talked about stablecoins — I think there’s a very clear future for optimizing payer and payee experiences around speed of money, cost of money, transparency of money movement, and the reconciliation of that movement with what that payment was representing: an invoice, a bill payment, a contract.
Being able to communicate not just that a dollar moved from point A to point B, but that it moved immediately, that you can exit it in whatever tender type or fiat currency you want — and, by the way, here is the information that was part of that payment.
The industry is recognizing this and realizing it through technology.
What I’ve learned across my career is that things are relatively slow to be adopted and then they’re adopted very rapidly.
Another example from payments: early in my career I worked on NFC, tap-and-pay, contactless payments. We seeded the globe with infrastructure to accept this. There was adoption in various markets and growing adoption in core markets; then overnight, in 2020, there was this moment that basically catapulted the acceptance of contactless and NFC payments and mobile wallets across a variety of industries, verticals, and use cases.
Things happened very slowly, and then they very quickly. I think we are seeing relatively slow adoption of capabilities like stablecoins. I don’t know what the specific moment will be, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in the next few years there’s going to be one of those moments where it’s just everywhere, and it reinforces why we do what we do.
FinTech and payments — it’s nerdy but fun.
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Nikita: That’s very exciting.
Okay, my final question. Again, considering your experience in payments: if you met someone in the elevator and they ran a small business — let’s say an e-commerce store — and they said, “Oh Dan, you have a lot of payments experience. Tell me, how can I improve my payments performance and make my payments better?”
What would be the single piece of advice you’d give them to significantly elevate their payments experience?
Dan: Most small businesses use multiple tools from the time they have an idea, to when they get started, to when they mature, and then when they need to professionalize.
The better you are at centralizing your tool set — looking at receivables, payables, banking, accounting, payroll, expenses, how you consolidate these — you’re going to save yourself time, you’re going to improve control, increase confidence, and critically you’re going to understand your cash flow.
When you understand your cash flow, you understand your profitability. You’re better prepared to run your small business and thrive.
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Nikita: I love it. “The Cash Flow” will be the name of this episode. Thank you so much, Dan. It was absolutely a pleasure, and I hope our listeners will enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Dan: Hey, [00:43:00] thanks so much for having me today, and nice chatting with you.
