Payments Pitch-Off Winner Modo Talks TRANSACT Experience

You’ve got the Modo team here! To kick this off we want to say that we’re so proud to have won the Payments Pitch-Off at TRANSACT. There were a TON of amazing companies pitching at the event, and for us to come home with the win and the $30,000 prize meant so much to our entire team.

At Modo, we have a thing for accepting challenges. Whether that be a challenge coming from a client as we tackle the industry’s toughest problems, the challenge of consistently exceeding client expectations, or the challenge to push ourselves to the next level of personal growth. (Doing things you thought you couldn’t do is pretty cool).

The main challenge that we’re taking on is doing the most good for the most people by reducing friction between payment systems. Modo’s payments utility enables interoperability throughout the industry without requiring any integrations. That means connections between enterprise online merchants, banks, networks, and their partners to new alternate methods of payments (APMs) like PayPal, Alipay, Klarna, and Venmo (to name just a few) can happen quickly without any changes required on either side of the connection.

If you deal in financial services or commerce you understand how complicated it is to connect the siloed systems and closed networks that make up the industry. But we are obsessed with payments (seriously, we call ourselves #paymentsgeeks), and work eagerly to reduce friction for the industry.

(From left) Donald Chapman, Chief of Business Development; Brian Billingsley, Chief Revenue Officer; Lindy Nelson, Chief Marketing Officer & Chief of Staff

Now that we have established just how much we love a good challenge, when we heard about the TRANSACT Payments Pitch-Off we automatically thought “CHALLENGE! Let’s do it.”

The first step was the interview and application – we had a call with the team over at ETA, got our application in, and fortunately got our “Congrats” email not too long after that. First challenge checked off the list!

The second challenge was figuring out how to squeeze everything that our payments utility can enable into a 3 minute pitch. That took a lot of back and forth from the team on which use case we wanted to focus on for the TRANSACT audience. Our amazing team of core and services developers worked to create a working demo for the event that showcased the interoperability capabilities of our platform for our Checkout use case.

The third challenge was actually giving the pitch. At first we thought our Founder & CEO, Bruce Parker, was going to get up on stage to represent Modo, BUT through a series of unfortunate (or maybe fortunate?) events Brian Billingsley, Chief Revenue Officer, repped Modo at the Payments Pitch Off instead. Looking fly in his jeans, Modo t-shirt, and blazer (the go-to Modo pitch competition outfit), Brian took the stage to walk the judges through our Checkout solution.

It went a little something like this: You know all of those different alternate payment methods like PayPal, Alipay, Klarna, etc? What if online merchants could quickly add and subtract payments services providers that they aren’t integrated with without changing anything in their systems? We are currently creating interoperability for Klarna, Alliance Data, and FIS with Verifone using this solution.

Since we are a utility, we can be used to make a wide range of payment systems interoperable. Another use case we are proud of here at Modo is the work we’re doing with Bank of America Merrill Lynch to connect their corporate clients to a variety of alternate payment methods like PayPal and Alipay in order to disburse funds around the globe using our Payout solution.

Being recognized by ETA and winning the Payments Pitch-Off for our work is another indication that we are solving a HUGE problem in payments. We are encouraged to continue our mission of doing the most good for the most people by reducing friction in payments. (And yes, the large $30,000 card has found a prominent place in our office).

Our experience at TRANSACT went better than we could’ve possibly imagined. We were able to connect with industry leaders at our table in the Startup Zone, we came home with the win from the Pitch-Off, and we got tons of good snacks (and snacks are our favorite). Until next time!

The Payments Pitch-Off, sponsored by Vantiv, now Worldpay, included ten participants who pitched their groundbreaking payments solutions before a panel of venture capitalist and payments solutions before a panel of venture capitalists and payments executives. Click here to read more.