So we’ve been expanding sales and we felt we needed to put some — a few more technological components in place so that salespeople could be highly effective. We did that, as I think we noted, not the least of which is the banking-as-a-service component, right? I mean think about the experience of a buyer and your supplier network and you can permission supplier wallets or I’ll call it, supplier accounts on Passport instantly, right? Take all your supplier information, upload them into our system, take all the information they have on their W9 and run AML and KYC checks in minutes, right? That’s a vastly different experience going out to sell than I’ll call it, the old school way of gathering that information supplier by supplier. So we waited to have that complete to expand sales.
We’ve now done that and we’re very optimistic about the success of those selling efforts with this platform being available broadly and B2B.
Brian Kinstlinger: Great. Just quickly on merchant acquiring, I think I heard the comment but just to be clear, to date, in the first quarter, the trends you have seen in the last 2 to 3 years or even longer of merchant acquiring are generally unchanged. Is that right?
Tim O’Leary: That’s correct. Now we’ve seen strong volumes through the first 2 full months of the quarter and expect that to continue through the balance here.
Brian Kinstlinger: And as you become much larger, it might take more merchants to sustain the growth. Are you making investments on the sales side? What do you do to eventually have to accelerate the number of merchant acquirers — merchants you’re acquiring?
Tom Priore: Well, a couple of things that are going to influence that segment and the revenue in that segment, right? So let’s just, first of all, talk about the merchant base we have. We’ll start rolling out embedded finance/banking into this segment, right? We don’t need to invest any money to roll that out. These are all things that are built. They’re set to go. Every single merchant that’s on our platform will have a Passport account, call it within the next month to 6 weeks. So our revenue account will be there. Now it just needs to be activated, okay? As it gets activated, we’ll offer them the ability to receive funds instantly, what we call fund in 5. If you’re processing on our gateway, as soon as you authorize transactions and you elect to have instant funding, you get your money in 5 minutes of authorization through the gateway.
If you’re not a gateway customer but you’re on our MX merchant suite, you’ll get money same day when you close your batch. And if you leave that money in your Passport account and you spend from there using a debit card, there’s no costs. If you sweep it to an external account, there’ll be a fee, right? So these are things that they’re — look, they’re what businesses need. And in this — particularly in this environment, they want cash acceleration. They want transparency. And I would submit to you, given the current banking environment, having modern reporting that’s clear and transparent which we have is going to be, we think, a pretty high value add, particularly sense that money is in an FDIC insured ratable account. So that’s just one example.
And of course, we’ll keep building on from there, the ability to borrow funds from approved lenders through that account. And host of other things that, again, just become additive to margin without us having to do a whole lot. So I think that’s the future of SMB acquiring is these things need to happen in one place. We’re positioned to make that happen. The investments have already been made. They’ve been made very profitably as you can see from our overall performance. And now we have an opportunity to both ourselves and with our distribution partners provide more services which should lead to wallet share growth, profitability per merchant growth in that segment. So I would say that’s really Phase 1. The other area where we’re just winning.
