On Episode 27 of FIntech Confidential, Co-Founder & CTO, Mike Meeks and Head of Sales & Marketing Casey Scheer for BHMI the electronic payments back office processing software and creators of the Concourse Financial Software Suite.

They tell us the story about Max, discuss the evolution of bank end payment systems, and what it is like to shift from building custom software to building a market-leading product.

Three things in this episode that we dive into.

1️⃣ Making Instant Payments Happen

2️⃣ How FIntechs are reaching the limits of Legacy Payment Systems

3️⃣ What a Payments Back Office is, and why you should care about yours

Watch the full episode on YouTube

Links:

BHMI

Website:         https://www.bhmi.com/

LinkedIn:         https://www.linkedin.com/company/bhmi-software/

Twitter:          https://twitter.com/bhmisoftware

Facebook:       https://www.facebook.com/BHMISoftware/

YouTube:        https://www.youtube.com/user/bhmiomaha/videos

Mike Meeks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-meeks-492a1323/

Casey Scheer : https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-scheer-8314894/

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Time Stamps:

00:00 Payments at the Speed of Now! Featuring BHMI's Co-Founder & CTO, Mike Meeks and Head of Sales & Marketing, Casey Scheer - Episode 27

00:38 Intro

01:24 Meeks Meets Baldwin

03:00 Starting BHMI

05:55 A Family Affair

07:03 Max Steals the Show

08:44 Defining a Payments Back Office

10:24 The Evolution of BHMI

10:36 Evolving the BHMI Tech Stack

13:22 From Custom Software to Market-Driven Products

17:01 The Keys to a Successful Transition

19:40 Pushing Legacy Payment Systems to the Limit

24:57 How Configurability is Solving Speed to Market

28:04 Instant Payments

29:16 Modular Cloud Frameworks

30:58 Advise for Fintech Leaders

32:00 Getting Involved with BHMI

This is a Production of Diamond D3, Media

ABOUT:

BHMI: BHMI was founded 36 years ago by Lynne Baldwin, Jack Baldwin, and Mike Meeks. The company originally focused on the creation of custom software solutions, but over the last 20 years, BHMI has evolved into a leading provider of software products focused on the back office processing of electronic payment transactions. The company is best known as the creator of the Concourse Financial Software Suite, which is a cohesive, integrated collection of back office products that allow companies to adapt to the rapidly changing payments landscape quickly and easily. As a modular solution including settlement, reconciliation, fees processing and disputes workflow management, Concourse reduces the cost and complexity of back office processing and enables organizations to modernize and monetize payments processing. Concourse’s continuous processing architecture and powerful rules engine are ideally suited for real-time payment methods, such as P2P, and enable companies to perform back office processing for any type of payment transaction.

Mike Meeks: Mike is one of the co-founders of BHMI. Mike originally met the other two founders, Jack and Lynne Baldwin, as college student. Lynne and Jack were both professors at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) and Mike was one of their computer science students.      

Casey Scheer: Casey has been with BHMI for more than 24 years. She originally got to know the founders of BHMI because her husband Rod was and still is a chief architect for the company.  Lynne, Jack, and Mike reached out to Casey in 1998 and asked if she would be willing to help with some marketing and sales initiatives and she has been with the company ever since.

Tedd Huff: President & Founder of Diamond D3, a professional services consulting firm focused on global payments and marketing. He is also a video podcast host and producer of Fintech Confidential and Head of Corporate Strategy at Corvia. 

Over the past 24 years, he has contributed to FinTech startups as an Advisory Board Member, Co-Founder, and Chief Experience Officer, providing strategic and tactical direction for Global Payments OpenEdge, Heartland Payments, Nuvei, and TSYS, among others, focusing on growth while delivering innovation, process improvements and user experience-driven value to simplify the complexity of payments.

Diamond D3, Media: A media creation, management, and production company delivering engaging content globally.

If you don't build a company that is a place people

wanna work, you will never get the right people to execute that vision.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Casey and Mike, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Tedd.

It's great to be here.

We appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah, we're really excited to be here today.

Thanks Tedd.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

BHMI started in 1986, Well,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

before the term FinTech was ever even thought about or ever used.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

and BHMI is transformed into a Back office, electronic payment,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

transaction processing software product.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Mike, as one of the founders of BHMI.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

I'm looking forward to hearing all about the journey since you've been

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

there since the very beginning.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

and Casey, you may not have been there from when it all got started, but you

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

have been there for 24 years driving the sales and marketing efforts.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Mike, how did you meet the two other founders, Jack and Lynn Baldwin.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

And what was that moment when you guys decided you were

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

gonna go ahead and start BHMI?

I first met, the Baldwins, at the local university,

university of Nebraska at Omaha.

The same semester or one semester after they started teaching uh, in

the computer science department.

The first time I met uh, Jack Baldwin, I was in a, I think my sec third

semester, and I was, in a, it was a required class that was very large.

There were over 200 students in it.

We were packed into a room and, um, I wondered why they had the room a little

smaller than it probably needed to be.

And

Jack walks in, walks up.

and He has.

kind of a, wicked smile on his face, and he looks out at the, students, and he

says everything you've heard about me is true And it was quiet for a moment.

And then there was lots of whispering.

What does that mean?

What does that mean?

Well, as, as there were a few people in the audience, I wasn't one of them at

the time, but, uh, the word got around that, Oh, a this is a really hard class.

And B, he's a really tough instructor.

And I found out why the classroom was that size because only about 25% of the class

graduate so, um, that was how we met.

Um, And then, shortly, uh, uh, after I left, I ended up joining the same company.

In fact, they recruited me into the company they had left the

university for, and we've been working pretty much ever since.

then.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

What was the point at which you

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

guys decided that you were going to go off and and build, uh, BHMI.

we had worked together at another company and

we had kind of gotten to the point where we were looking for something

a little bit different, uh uh, and.

We, we really wanted, um, a couple of things, We, first of all, we wanted to

create a company that we wanted to work at that had the kind of environment.

and did the kind of work we were interested in.

So, um, our background was, high volume.

Uh, financial transaction processing.

And so we, we already had that background and that was obviously

gonna be kind of a linchpin.

Um, and it's definitely a challenging area to work in.

Um, we also had some definite ideas about, uh, the working environment.

as I said, we wanted to create a place we, And hopefully others, would wanna work.

So a couple examples of the things we, were looking for there.

Um, first of all, we and this was really kind of counter to the,

prevailing office culture at the time rather than put people in a notion of

cubicles, we basically gave everyone, um, an office with a door to close.

So if you needed to work and you needed some peace and quiet, you

could go into your office and work.

Um, everybody got the.

same.

offices.

There were no, you know, the founders got the same office as the people.

Just joined that week.

Um, but we also created a bunch of shared spaces, Sometimes these were no more

than conference rooms, but other times, basically a, a group of people working

on a project would take over one of these rooms and it became kind of the war

room for the duration of that project.

Um, we had to ceiling, wall to wall whiteboards in there.

So you could write to your heart's content, um, And keep up all your

design design, notes and diagrams.

and so forth up.

We had, you know, laptops and projectors in there.

Um, we had, we, for some projects we brought in specialized

equipment for testing.

And so it was, you had a lot of flexibility and we let people kind of

define how they wanted to work together.

Um, we also wanted to keep.

up with a key thing was keeping up with technology.

One of the things that will attract.

people who can do this kind of, work is if they're working with the, with

the latest and, uh, uh, greatest, both, uh, hardware and software.

The.

Tooling and so forth.

Um, and that all kind of went towards, as we said creating a place, that we wanted

to work at as well as attracting others.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

That sounds so much like the modern

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Silicon valley style company and, that's number of years back you had

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

the foresight and understanding that the collaboration and having those pieces

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

in place to have the place for people to go and, do the deep work, without

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

interruption was, was a key piece.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

of mind.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Casey, I want to ask you what, what led you to join BHMI and what has

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

kept you there for all These years?

This all started about 29 years ago.

And my husband, whose name is Rod.

Uh, he has a computer science degree and actually Lynn,

Mike and Jack reached out to.

Rod and asked him if he would join their team, uh, to be a, a lead in the,

in the software development efforts of the company to, to be a software

and engineer and a solution architect.

And then through that, I got to know Mike and Lynn and Jack, and

saw how amazing the BHMI team was.

And about five years after Rod started.

They knew I did the sales and marketing stuff and they asked, you know, would

you like to come and help us with our sales and marketing efforts?

And I knew how strong the company was and what they were doing.

And I jumped at the opportunity And by the way, both Rod and I have both

been here for a very long time, Rod coming up on 29 years and me, you know,

over 24 years and we've never looked back, we love working with the team.

It's, it's a great, great company to be part of.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

doing my research, I saw all

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

sorts of really cool videos, And I have to ask about the corporate

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

mascot, max, the, bulldog.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Can you tell me how this got started at BHMI?

I would love to actually, this was back in the eighties

and there was one of our customers that gave a quote and they said that BHMI

is like a bulldog organization cuz they get the job done right And no technical

challenge ever is too difficult for them.

And I was looking at that quote and I was This would be a really cool

mascot for BHMI so we ended out, ended up creating a, a stuffed toy.

And this is actually one of them, Uh, this one has, uh, money from around

the world on it, but we've had max in all different types of outfits.

We've had 'em in tuxedos, we've had 'em in Hawaiian shirts, you name it.

We've had 'em in different outfits and we give these away out at

different shows and conferences.

And by the way, you mentioned videos.

If you go out and look on our website, There's an English bulldog that we use.

And, um, he's the star of a variety of different videos on our website,

including our holiday videos, which have been kind of famous.

So go out and take a look.

We've had a lot of fun with our corporate mascot, max.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Yeah, that was one of the, things that

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

I, noticed and as I'm, I'm looking through all the videos, You, you, look

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

at the, the number of people that have watched max videos versus other videos.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

It is, it is easily a thousand to one.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

ratio.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Um, so he is extremely popular.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

and that's one of the things that drove me to asking that question is

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

just, it has become very popular.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

and I was curious to where that came from.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

When most people think of FinTech, typically they think of the

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

consumer facing products, with these slick user interfaces.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

often they overlook all of the stuff that happens in the back office solutions

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

that support those experiences and in electronic payments, typically the

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

company that you think of that has that really cool interface is Square.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Now, before we dive in deeper into all of these different things, can

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

we take some time and, dive into what BHMI means by a payments back office?

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

. Casey Scheer, BHMI: The payments back

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

gets authorized on the front end and then the back office does the

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

really tough stuff that happens after the payment is authorized.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

So this can be things like reconciling transaction data, across many sources,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

doing things like settlement and funds movement and getting the appropriate

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

transaction participants paid.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

It also can include.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

the Calculation and assessment of fees.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

And then a big one obviously is if a transaction is disputed, there's a

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

whole workflow that goes around that to successfully REL resolve that.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

A back office also needs to have a comprehensive enterprise view of

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

transaction activity and financial positions across the entire organization.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

And then also what's important is to be able to easily do transaction research

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

and also to be able to, um, do reporting.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

So the back office is extremely key.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

And, uh, again, it's what happens after a transaction is authorized.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Both of you have seen a lot of change.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

How has BHMI evolved over the years to keep up with this change?

There's two perspective to this, the technology

perspective, and a business perspective,

And I'll, I'll address the technology perspective.

Um, when we started in the uh, late eighties.

Everything we were doing was primarily still on proprietary platforms, obviously.

Um, fairly rapidly after we started, had, had started the company and were doing

work on those proprietary platforms, Open systems really began to take over.

And So we had to, we had to shift a whole lot of stuff, um, at that point.

We had many different operating systems, which, which coalesced down

to really the vast majority of the marketplace is Windows and Linux.

Now we also, uh, a shift in databases.

We were on proprietary databases, a.

variety of them, and we really shifted to, a number of SQL

databases and the hardware changed.

So again, from a bunch of hardware to really the vast majority of

the world, Running on X 86 And,

now on, on mobile also on a variety of, of things there.

so when we were presented with this shift, and this started in the mid nineties from

a technology perspective, we looked at it.

and said, Okay.

how do we, how do we make sense of this?

How do we build something that.

Or where we can reuse our code in a variety of ways.

And so what we did is we built a set of software frameworks that basically

isolated our applications from differences in the operating system

differences in Windows and Linux.

Um, it also isolated us from.

the different, uh, dialects of sql And so our application concourse has almost zero

dependencies It is the same application code running on Windows and Linux.

It just runs on top of these frameworks that provided that isolation.

uh, same thing with supporting, you know, for example, if you took Oracle

and SQL Server, we run across those with.

The same stuff.

There are very few dependencies.

So we get a lot of, uh, leverage of being able to run across these new,

the what were at the time, new systems.

They're now The standard systems.

um, uh, with, a, common code base.

um, And so that was a um, a big change that uh, uh, obviously that was a fairly

significant investment for us to make.

but we've really benefited and our customers have benefited.

Um, because once you shake down the problem, the application

on one platform, it's.

Pretty much gonna work on the others with, with, uh, very little problem.

Um, so that was our big change from proprietary to open and how we

took advantage of that opportunity.

Um, from a business perspective,

uh, we had a big shift in the company from, uh, a cut doing custom

software, which is where we started.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Transitioning from a custom software

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

to software products is a huge shift and most companies, well,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

honestly, they don't survive.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

What are the biggest challenges that BHMI has faced moving from that

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

custom software development company to a software products company?

The first thing is to realize that it is fundamentally

different from what you've been doing, and you don't just keep doing

what you're doing and somehow the product magically happens, um, because

the, doing custom versus product is fundamentally different from a a

technical or software perspective.

When you're doing custom work, you are focusing on meeting

the needs of a single customer Obviously with a product you want.

the needs of a wide variety of customers.

so you can sell the product over and over.

The first thing that that became apparent right away was your

software now becomes more complex because you have a broader range.

of Customers you're targeting, you have a broader range of requirements.

So that means you've got effectively a whole lot more work to do.

And this is everything from design to development, testing,

documentation, deployment.

It impacts everything that you're doing.

Because of that.

you have to build it.

You have to have a bigger team doing this and.

A couple things happened out of that.

Be because You're addressing a broader range of requirements.

You've got a lot more software.

the software you are now doing what I've heard some people refer to as

industrial scale software, we have millions upon millions of lines

of code in the product and doing.

And to support that from a technical perspective, we needed.

New processes to, to manage the software.

Um, but we also needed new processes to manage communication among people.

When you have a small custom project that might have would typically have.

four to eight people on it, communication in that.

group's pretty straightforward.

but if you 50 people working on, on, on the product.

you've gotta put more in place to enable 'em to effectively communicate

and to manage what you're doing or you're going to have chaos.

And so we ended up.

having to create a whole new business unit, um, with new processes in place

for how we, for how we manage the work, um, new technology in order

to manage the scale of the software.

One of the, the, the other kind of tricky bits of this is you are

constantly, even now, all these years later, we are always trying

to balance how much process we need.

Versus people getting the work done.

You know, it's the, it's the, it's the old agile thing about people versus process.

You want just enough process and not too much, if you don't

have enough you have chaos.

And if you have too much, it gets in the way of getting the work done.

And that's something.

we're real conscious of and it still comes up today as,

uh, new challenges.

come up.

So as I, said, those are, those are what we saw uh, from inside

the company, realizing we.

Something fundamentally different, um, making the change and, and, and balancing,

you know, uh, and balancing the process.

versus, versus people getting work done.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

With all of those transitions and making

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

those moves into more of a Collaboration across multiple different personas, it,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

It really, is not a simple process and It it becomes very complex very quickly.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

What do you guys feel were the keys to successfully making the

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

transition from the software, custom software, development to.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

the Software product for a market.

one of the main reasons for our success and how

we were able to do the migration from a custom software company

to a product software company.

First of all is, is that we had a pretty focused vision.

We decided early on when we were gonna make this switch and change.

Our business model was that we were gonna focus on the back

office processing of payments.

A lot of other companies in this space tend to focus more on the front

office side of processing payments.

And there weren't a lot of providers.

Solution specific to the processing on the back end side.

And that's where we, as a company made a strategic decision.

That's where we were gonna focus.

We made that decision about 20 years ago and we have not, uh, moved away

from that vision and that focus.

And then, uh, as Mike was alluding to something that's been really important

and part of our success is that.

Very early on created a business unit within BHMI, that was

focused on the Concourse product and the evolution of that.

And what that meant was we have a very specialized product

management team that understands the payments industry really well.

And the needs of the marketplace.

We have a very specialized architecture and engineering

team we had to, um, dramatically.

Change our quality assurance procedures for a product.

Obviously the level of documentation that we had to do dramatically changed.

We had to create manuals across all of the product components

and we keep those up to date.

Um, so we have a very integrated.

Product unit within BHMI that is completely focused on that.

And you know, it's been fun to watch because we offer 24/7 support and we're

supporting customers all around the world.

Our team is growing, our client base is growing.

So I think our, our vision has been spot on.

And I think, uh, that's the reason why we've been so successful.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

24 by seven support on a product

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

that is, critical to, to a business's success is, is a huge differentiator.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Most of the companies in the space don't offer that type of a thing.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

I can understand how your clients and your customers, really appreciate being able to

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

pick up the phone and call somebody when something isn't working as they expected.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

FinTech companies are always Pushing the envelope with what legacy systems can do

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

and what processes they have to follow.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

What are a few things that BHMI is doing to help companies.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

facing these obstacles in the payments back office?

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

how are you solving them?

It's really common for us to come into a a, a.

Engage with the customer.

And what they've got is, uh, usually a fairly old legacy system

it's batch oriented, um, and, uh, difficult to, uh, to change.

And what we provide with Concourse is we can do continuous loading of transactions

from front end systems, uh, chasing their transactions, log in near Real

time and, uh, up and And then updating.

so we We have near real time, uh, information for, as, for the

various functions that Casey was mentioning, uh, generating fees,

settlement reconciliation, we can provide, you know, as usually we

we are, we are chasing within uh, a couple minutes of the, uh, front end.

So you're, you can see on your back end, your real time,

your near real time position.

The other thing that's, uh, we, we Typically see with these uh, systems that

we're, that customers are, looking to do something about is all the business

rules that the customer has, is hard, are hard coded into the application.

And it, this makes it a real pain when the business wants to go out and sell a

new service, but they need to price the service to create fees for the service.

In a new way that the system doesn't support.

So they'll go to their IT and say, What would it take for us?

to put this in?

And they'll say that's a six month project.

And they're saying I need to sign the customer.

Next week.

What do I do?

What concourse provides is we have a configurable, uh, rule

engine that really, and, and it.

It is embedded throughout the application.

So that all through the processing, uh, All through our processing,

there are points where you can, you can change what the application

does through configuration.

so when presented with those same challenges we can say, Okay,

let's sit down and work out.

What, for example, pricing or fee strategy you want for this new customer.

We'll configure it and we will, and we can schedule it to be rolled into

the system when you sign the customer.

that obviously is a much more attractive solution and gives them

a lot of flex, gives the business people a whole new set of flexibility.

that they often don't have Just.

because it's So hard.

and so time consuming to change their current system.

Um, and the system is pretty sophisticated in terms of the, all

these rules we remember for things like.

last week, you, you know, or last week, or last month you loaded

under a different set of rules.

Well, we, we remember that and we, the information reflects those rules.

But when you change it and new transactions loaded, you see that too.

So this kind of configurability and means that.

there's a whole range of things.

Our customers don't have to come to us for customizations, or they

don't have to do customizations.

They simply configure it into the.

Turn it on and it goes in without, with zero downtime.

So those two things, being able to give you near real time information, and

being able to through configuration meet new requirements, rather

than, uh, having to write code.

Those are two real big ones that, uh, we're able to address.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Mike.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

so could you give us a couple examples of the configurations you

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

can do on the fly versus having to, wait for a production fix or a

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

push or, or running a full release?

Yeah.

Um, so for example, if the, the case that I had, if you come in and say,

I have a new customer.

um, that I wanna bring online for my processing, and I want, when we, we

process these transactions, I need for example, at certain levels to generate

a, A, basically, as they provide, generate certain volumes of transactions.

I want to change at certain thresholds, the fees we generate and within

those, each one of those tiers.

And in fact, I want to be able to look at each transaction, certain characteristics,

and generate a different fee.

So I want, you know, they can come up with, for example, very, very complex,

at ones that are specific to a given customer that they're processing.

And so, uh, uh, and that was in effect one of the drivers we had for the,

for the first customer for this.

And, um, You know, their, their, their salespeople means I, I can

go out and write a contract and put in whatever the customer wants

And they Yeah, you can do that.

And before they could, they had a very narrow set of rules that was all the

system could and they, you know, They had to try to shoehorn all their customers

big and small with widely varying needs into that that that one shoe size.

And we're saying, No, you can make whatever shoe you want.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

So Casey talking about all this

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

configuration, talking about how you can do it on the fly, I can only

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imagine how the marketplace has, has.

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accepted and moved forward with it.

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What are some of the things that you're hearing from potential clients

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and existing clients that it's helping them solve their problem?

One thing that we've heard is a lot of the companies

that we're working with, they're large enterprise organizations and they

have back office systems that have been deployed, um, over the decades.

And they're siloed.

Um, there there's many of them, many different applications and Talk to

each other, they're not integrated.

So one thing that Concourse has really helped them with

is the way it's architected.

We're able to bring in any type of payment transactions.

So this could be like trans, uh, traditional card based transactions.

It can also be the newer types of transactions.

We're hearing a lot about today, the account to account P2P type transactions.

Real time payments, instant payments.

It doesn't matter what type of electronic payment it is.

We can bring that into the system and also message formats.

I mean, you've probably heard of ISO 85, 83, which is the message standard

that's been used across our history for electronic transaction based payments.

now with the real time rails they're using ISO 20 0 22.

Well, we're able to support any type of message standard.

So again, one unified integrated system.

I think another big challenge that we're seeing companies face is these back

office procedures are often riddled with a lot of manual procedures.

So for example, reconciliation, most of our clients have systems that.

Or, uh, sources where the data's coming in from many, many different

transaction sources and they have to determine financial equivalency

across all those data sources.

So they do that a lot of times, very manually, and we

ha allow them to automate that.

We, we determine financial equivalency through the rules

engine, uh, in an automated fashion.

Another one is disputes and chargebacks.

That is usually a huge.

Manual process within many organizations and we automate

a good chunk of that process.

For example, we tightly integrate with the card network, such as visa and

MasterCard, and they no longer have to manually send and receive data.

That's all automated.

They no longer have to swivel chair.

Uh, so we automate those workflows within the system.

So accommodating and helping with manual processes is

another way we've really helped.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

That's fantastic, Casey.

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Supporting the legacy ISO 85 83 and the ISO 20022 protocols, , you guys seem

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to be positioned really well for being ready to support the

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instant payment phenomena, whether it be real time payments or, or

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other peer-to-peer type stuff.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

What's next for BHMI?

When we originally started to design the.

the most back office systems, Uh, within companies today and also

on the market are batch oriented.

and we made a decision from an architecture standpoint to make it based

on a continuous processing architecture.

And it's been fun to watch this explosion with real time and instant

payments because we've been well-suited.

For many years, uh, to be able to accommodate that need.

So we're very excited about where the industry's heading with all

the new technologies, because we're architected to be able to handle

these faster methods of payments.

And like I said, any type of payment, So, We're, we're pretty excited

about the future and we're gonna keep doing what we doing and make

sure that we can support, uh, what's gonna happen well into the future.

And we think we're well, well, situated for that based on the architecture

that we put together with Concourse.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

And Mike, what is that architecture piece?

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Have you, guys moved it into the cloud are you still premise based?

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

like help us understand, where, where BHMI is is headed with,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

with the overall technology?

I'm glad you mentioned cloud We've been an on

premise, uh, product, um, up until now.

and.

it's interesting.

in the back office processing has been, slow to move to the cloud.

Um, mostly due to security.

concerns.

Obviously there's a lot of, there's a lot of sensitive data there.

However, we've noticed a shift in the last couple of years, the

market's finally moving in that direction and so we are too, uh, we

are moving concourse into the cloud.

. Um, we actually have it up and running in, in the cloud here.

Um, and we plan on eventually supporting all the major clouds.

Um, we've got a number of customers who are, are looking at this and.

One of the advantages we discovered in, in going through this process is because

we designed concourse from the very beginning to be horizontally scalable

because we, uh, we were kind of fortunate.

Our

First customers had large volume, So we had to, you know, that, had

to be a day one requirement for us.

Um, that made it a pretty easy fit to move into kubernetes in the cloud.

Um, we really didn't have to hardly change much code at all.

It was mostly a configuration exercise for us.

Um, once we have it there.

we plan on taking advantage of some things that the cloud will pr, additional

capabilities we can only get in the cloud.

Um, but uh, the market is finally moving there and so are we.

And we've got a number of customers that, uh, are looking to do this.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

We've talked about so many things

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

today, and it has been really fun.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

to Hear the journey from the beginning to, So all the changes that have happened,

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

how the culture is at the, organization.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

how you're positioning yourself to move forward.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

If you were to give FinTech leaders just one piece of advice on long term success

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in this, arena, just one, what would it.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

be?

My advice would be, you know, really look at the market

and identify where there's a need and create your vision and stick with it.

You know, you have to evolve the vision, but stick with it.

That's what we did with 20 years ago, we had a vision and we've stuck with that and

we've continued to enhance that vision, but overall we've stayed with that.

And it it's really, um, helped me a definite need in the marketplace.

Go back to one of the founding principles.

whatever.

market you want to attack and however you want to do it.

If you don't build a company that is a place people wanna work,

you will never get the right people to execute that vision.

Build a place you want to, you wanna be at, and you think other

folks want to come and join you.

Um, because otherwise you, you'll, you'll never get there if you, you

won't be able to bring in the kind of people you need to execute.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

That is fantastic.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

I, I love that we started with culture We're ending with culture.

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That is a huge part of any business's success.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

And how can people get involved with BHMI Learn more about BHMI and find out how

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Concourse can help them in their business.

To get involved in the conversation with BHMI, first

of all, I'd suggest that you go out and take a look at us on the web we're

at BHMI.com and out there, you'll find all kinds of white papers and

articles and videos that you can.

Look at and learn more about the company and also Concourse.

We also invite you to follow us on LinkedIn.

We're continually doing posts about our company and about

what's going on in the industry.

So we'd love to have you follow us.

And then also check out on YouTube, our channel out on YouTube for our

pioneers in payments video series and Tedd, you are a recent guest on

there and shared some great insights.

So we invite everybody to go out and take a look at that.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Well fantastic I'm gonna

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

go ahead and put all.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

the links to those things Down in the show notes, as well as in

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

the description, So if you want a quick way to get over to BHMI.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

That is how you're going to be able to do it.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

Thank you both of you for joining today.

It's been wonder.

We Appreciate the opportunity.

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

I look forward to sharing this with the

Tedd Huff, Host, Fintech Confidential:

audience and Hopefully someone learn something, out of this to help them