Larry Hipp With Brightwell

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by onpay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the Atlanta Business Radio, we have Larry Hipp with Brightwell. Welcome, Larry.

Larry Hipp: [00:00:42] Hey. Hey, how are you today?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Great. I am doing great. Before we get too far into things, tell us a little bit about Brightwell. How are you serving, folks?

Larry Hipp: [00:00:51] Yeah. So Brightwell has been in Atlanta for about about 11 years now. And we have been traditionally in the prepaid card space doing payroll for people that work on cruise ships. So if you’ve ever been on a cruise ship, there is somebody from every planet, every country on this planet working on a cruise ship. And what we do is, is we help them get their money back home to their families come payday. Pretty much everywhere in the world.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:18] So now how has that business evolved over the years? You know, especially when you went through a period where there weren’t many cruise ships moving around the planet.

Larry Hipp: [00:01:30] Yes. So it the pandemic hit hit pretty hard. I mean, when we look back at what’s happened over the last two years, in March of 2020, the cruise lines were were shut down. Actually, one of the only industries in America that the federal government just turned off and didn’t allow to come back on until July of 2021. So it was a wild, wild, wild, wild time there. And, you know, one of the things we did, we we definitely still had people on cruise ships through that period. And we had a lot of people going back home to their home country. So we had plenty of work to do for our users. But we honestly, we put our heads down and we took an opportunity to say we’ve got some downtime because cruise ships were a little down and locked down. And we we came out of there building two new products that were launching and now into 2022. And it was really a fun time as we could make it to say, Hey, we’ve got ideas about new things that we can build. And we were able to take our existing teams that would have normally been working on our main cruise payroll product and have them start working on some new things to build and sell. Once we got on the other side of this whole cruise COVID time frame and happy to say, yeah, we made it through it and we’ve got a couple of new things that we’re bringing to market and excited about our future.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:50] So can you talk about those things?

Larry Hipp: [00:02:52] Yeah, 100%. So one of the things that we had happened in March of 2020, cruise lines shut down. I mean, remember, this is like back in the we’re all going to go home for a couple of weeks to flatten the curve days. And in April of 2020, just really 30 or so days after kind of that timeline where most Americans went home for the work from home error, we had a massive fraud attack happen for our users. And this wasn’t a data breach, it wasn’t a security breach. It wasn’t any security failure on our systems. This was a brute force attack where you where the fraudsters took every combination of card number, expiration date, CVV, and just threw them at the processors and just brute force one by one, finding card numbers that they could unlock. And then once they could unlock one, they drained the card and took the money away from our users. And we’ve all had that feeling when you look at your card and your money’s gone and you call your bank and say, Hey, bank, this money has disappeared, what happened? And the bank immediately gives your money back. That’s what we did. Once the fraud happened, we immediately went to task of getting the money back for all our users.

Larry Hipp: [00:04:09] And once we went through that, we said, Man, this is a really big security hole. How are none of the payment ecosystems in kind of in the process of making a car transaction, figuring this out and leave? We spent we spent a long time trying to buy software to solve this problem and eventually couldn’t find it. And so we built it and we have got our fraud losses down to historic lows. And even people like Visa are coming around saying, hey, what you all are doing over there is an anomaly and we’re super pumped to share that with other people because fraud, especially fraud that is out of your control on something like a brute force attack on a card number. It never even hit our technology systems. Our code, our software was never even in the process. It was way upstream and some sort of payment rail. Being able to help other people not have to go through with that is is pretty rewarding. So we’re we’re doing number one, we’re bringing a new product to market that is helping on fraud. We’re also bringing a new product to market with cross-border payments. And so if you think about our business on the payroll side, what do we do? We move money around the world.

Larry Hipp: [00:05:19] We’re a fintech. We move money around the world. And. We’re now here with another product that we have launching now that’s enabling other fintechs like us to move money around the world where we’ve got a lot of a lot of companies that we’ve talked to that want to be able to offer something like a cross-border payment to their users. But it’s complicated because it’s a compliant world. It is a world of OFAC and BSA and AML, and there’s a lot of acronyms on what you have to do to make sure that money moves across borders compliant, secure and safe. And we know how to do that. We’re experts at it. So what we’re trying to do is enable technology for other fintechs to give that to their users, and we’ll take over the compliance for them. And so, yeah, it’s it’s been a wild two years where we come at our highest point ever as a company coming into 2020 to hit our lowest point ever in the middle of 2020, to be sitting here in 2022 with a cruise recovery and two new products that we’re bringing to market right out of here out of Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:20] Now, can you share with our listeners when you’re going through that kind of a pivot and that kind of a kind of looking at yourself in the mirror? What were you doing first to kind of triage and assess, okay, this is bad. Okay, let’s see if we can, you know, try to, number one, fix this with triage the problem. But number two, is it possible for us to come up with a solution and reallocate resources and people like what was that kind of meeting? I’m sure an all hands meeting, like what we’re kind of share a little bit about how that came about and how you were able to come out of that with a plan of attack and move forward. And and, you know, not only come to the other side, but come to other side with something that’s going to could benefit lots and lots of people.

Larry Hipp: [00:07:11] Yeah. I mean, all hands meetings have been mission critical for us over the last couple of years. You know, when we if you timeline this out and you got March of 2020 cruise shutdown, you’ve got April the 2020 big attack we have to deal with. There’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty for our organization, for our staff. And, you know, I think one of the things that we that we hopefully did really well and I think there some awards that we just won that would help kind of back this up is that we are just very transparent with everybody, very direct. This is where we are. This is what has happened. This is what we’ve got to do. No, I as your CEO, don’t exactly know that it’s going to be all okay, but we’re going to do everything we can to make it okay. And we’re going to do everything we can to kind of build back in and fight back against the fraudsters. And we’re going to stick together and we’re going to get on the other side of this thing. I don’t know how long and I don’t how I don’t know exactly what the path is yet, but we’ve got a tremendous group of people here that work at Brightwell.

Larry Hipp: [00:08:11] And when we put our heads together and we’re all ruined in the same direction, we can do pretty big things. And so, I mean, yeah, lots of all hands meetings to try and communicate what we were doing and keep people on the same page through very uncertain times. And then as you move through the through the couple of years here, it’s easier and easier. The everybody kind of settles in on some of the COVID uncertainty with Cruise and everybody knows where we are as a company, where we are as a business, what the metrics we need to hit to get on to the other side of this thing. And eventually we all just got to work and started to kind of build new things to get on the other side of this thing. So communication with our staff up and down the chain was absolutely mission critical to getting through this thing.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:55] So now as a leader, can you share what’s your superpower that helped you power through these difficult times?

Larry Hipp: [00:09:03] You know, I don’t have a superpower. I think we have amazing teams and leaders and people. And I think the biggest thing that we can do to our organization is, you know, let the really, really smart people who know how to do their job really, really well execute with as little of friction as possible. And I am a proponent of kind of a bottom up leadership, if you will. Right. There’s there’s plenty of leaders out there that come into the room and say, I’m the leader of this team, this company, this whatever, and you need to listen to me. We try our best every day to turn that model upside down and say, hey, to our to our staff. Our leaders are here to help empower you and get you going through the work that you’ve got to do with as little friction as possible. Are we perfect at that? No, but I think it’s part of our secret sauce, is that we have a we have a culture here from a leadership perspective, that is, we move fast. One of our core values is quick as better than slow. We’ve got to make sure that we move things, move through, move through, move through things that are on a pretty healthy clip. But we also try our best to stay out of the way and let really bright people do what really bright people want to do, and that is build great things. So I don’t know that there’s any one person here that is the superpower we’ve just got. So we’ve been very, very fortunate and a very competitive market to keep and hire and retain very, very talented people.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:29] So now and that has been noticed, you’ve been recognized as one of these top places to work for several years in a row. When you talk about the culture at a place, a fintech firm that is using technology and it’s dealing with people’s personal information and privacy, how do you kind of strike that balance on moving quickly but still, you know, keeping the compliance, keeping the ability for your team to impact, you know, you empowered them, but you need them to take risks and you need them to kind of push the envelope in order to stay on top of things. But also, you know, sometimes things don’t work out. So you’ve got to be accepting of that kind of, you know, not having, you know, having things not work out. But still you need them to try to make things work out. So how do you kind of strike that balance?

Larry Hipp: [00:11:23] Yeah, I would say one of the things over the years we have really tried to ingrain into our business is the core values that we operate on. And those many companies, I mean, every company’s at core values. Right. And a lot of companies will say that they’re a core value driven organization and some reach that level of kind of really making it there or not. And there’s a lot of companies that are somewhere in between, but you’ve got to be careful with this stuff. I mean, even Enron had core values, right? And the next thing you know, it’s one of the biggest scam and scandals, you know, in a decade. And so for us, though, everything starts with our users. And so when we’re thinking about how to conduct our business and how do we kind of enable people to do a good job, everything that we’re doing. Every single day is trying to make sure that we are doing work that enables the people that are using our product on these cruise ships as an example to have a better financial life. And it kind of all starts with hiring people that are drawn to that. When we had a we had an all hands today meeting as an example, and we bring our new hires up and we introduced it to the company. And one of the questions I always ask is, look, there’s plenty of places to go and work here in Atlanta, and you know why, right? Well, and over and over and over, we hear people joining our organization saying that one of the reasons I’m here is because Brightwell seems to have a bigger mission in what they’re doing than just than just a job.

Larry Hipp: [00:12:57] And so that that enablement is part of like find people that love the mission that we have that is empowering people from around the world to get access to their money. And then those people come in and they just conduct business in a different way. How do you say good on the compliance side? Our fourth core value is honesty and integrity and everything we do. And we talk about this one over and over and over. Cross-border payments, cards, privacy, security. There is no black and white. There is no gray for us on that. It is all black and white. And so you are either on the right side of compliance or you’re on the wrong side of compliance. And we from every meeting that we have where we’ve got a corporate gathering, so to speak, an all hands meeting, town hall, those type of things we’re stressing as an organization. Yeah, we need to move fast because fintech moves fast. Our users need things fast, but everything we do has to be held in a compliant way. And honestly, it’s just built into our DNA and there is no gray on these things. You’re either right or you’re wrong. And staying on the right side of the compliances is core to who we are.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:05] Now, you mentioned kind of having your employees buy into this bigger. Why and being mission focused. Do you think that that kind of belief in that, you know, walking the walk, not just talking the talk, is what is helping you kind of survive this great resignation that we’re having where a lot of folks are struggling in this area. And staffing is a big issue, especially in a competitive area that fintech industry is.

Larry Hipp: [00:14:37] Certainly it’s part of it. You know, one of the things that, look, we’re not immune to the the job turnover that we’re seeing right now, but we’re actually hiring. We actually just like I told you to certain ago, we had an all hands meeting. I bring up new hires. I think I introduced six people today. And one of the things that is really helping us go through this, yes, there’s the mission focus, but the core staff that we have, the people that went through COVID with us that were here in the good day before COVID, we’re here through the days of the cruise shutdown and everything that we had to go through and are now are here on the other side, when the kind of the return story for Brightwell emerges and the new beginning merges with new products, I think we’ve got a group of people that are just bought into what we’re doing, and I’m really, really grateful for that. We talk about it all the time. You mentioned it a second ago. We won one of Atlanta’s top places to work for years in a row. We actually jumped from 67th place to 22nd place. And I think every bit of that starts from our mission of people wanting to be a part of that mission. But I also think there’s a there’s a little bit of, hey, we’re going to do this thing together. We’ve been through the hard times together, and we want to see what it’s like on the other side of this thing. So I think it’s a mixture of all of those things, but definitely everything starts with that user and that mission that we’ve got.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:03] Well, for people who aren’t familiar that Atlanta is this payment and fintech hub globally, not just in the Southeast or even the United States. Can you share with them how you’ve seen Atlanta evolve in this space and how it’s really impacting the world?

Larry Hipp: [00:16:22] Oh, my goodness. It is. You know, Atlanta is the home of payments and it’s one of these places where the talent for payments is just off the charts. The companies moving into Atlanta to be a part of payments is just off the charts. And if you need to be in a payment world, you know, I’ve got some some people I know who are in Seattle, for example, that do payments. And all the time I’m like, why are you all in Seattle? You all need to come down here to Atlanta. You want a compliance person who understands how to do payments. They are here in Atlanta. And so the talent for what we do, I don’t know that there’s a better city in the United States for recruiting. The hard part is that recruiting has exploded over the last few years, and it’s a very, very, very competitive space. But we’re starting to see is the the universities start to kind of jump on to the fintech. Even the high schools are starting to jump on to fintech. So I think that we’re going to see over the next few years more and more people coming out of school with an edge towards fintech versus just general technology. And Atlanta has just been a wonderful, wonderful place for us to do business. And there are so many companies here in the payments space affecting people around the world. It’s it’s fun when a lot of the payments groups gets together and you just get to hear what everybody’s doing because there’s really, really some unique things going on here.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:53] So what’s next for Bryant? Well.

Larry Hipp: [00:17:56] Yeah, for us, we’ve got hopefully an exciting year for us that is launching these student products that we’ve built, expanding cross-border payments, expanding payment security. And we’re doing research right now on things like crypto, like what’s happening in that space is fascinating. It’s evolving super, super fast. And if you’re in the business of doing cross-border payments, you better keep your eye on what’s happening over there. And I don’t know that we’re going to be doing any crypto say in 2022, but we definitely think it’s a part of the world in 2023 and out into 2024. So we’re doing a ton of research right then, right now on what might happen out in the next couple of years. Certainly a lot of really cool payments companies in Atlanta are already doing crypto things and so there’s a lot of lot of activity to watch there. But for us, we want to keep growing. We’re hiring a lot of people here in Atlanta. We’ve got a great company, great culture, great product, and just looking forward to having a much better 20, 22 than we had in 20 and 21.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:55] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, maybe get on your radar as a prospective client or a prospective employee. What’s the website for? Bright Well.

Larry Hipp: [00:19:04] Bright, welcome. And you can find us, find all the relative information and contact information for us. Very welcome.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:11] Well, Larry, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate, you.

Larry Hipp: [00:19:16] Know, thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:17] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.