Fintech South 2023: Patrick Williams with Visa

Intro: Broadcasting live from the beautiful Georgia World Congress Center for FinTech South. 2023. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, FinTech South. 2023 Broadcasting Live, celebrating fintech leaders from around the world. Right now we have Patrick Williams, fintech partnerships with Visa. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick Williams: Great. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: Well, tell us a little bit about your role. What do you spend your time doing every day?

Patrick Williams: I spend my time focused on….

Lee Kantor: Your boss wants to know. That’s why I ask that.

Patrick Williams: Yeah, I think I think she’s got a pretty good idea of what I do. I’ve got numbers to report, so I think she’s. She’s clued in. Yeah. I focus on our fintech partnerships. And really what that means is I spend all my waking hours focused on driving a visa business, transactions, money movement, new flows, new use cases within the financial services space across all of our client base that are fintech oriented. That includes lots of different segments from Neobanks to Remitters to wealth management companies and so on.

Lee Kantor: So Visa is so ubiquitous, is there still opportunity to grow? How much more is there.

Patrick Williams: Tons of opportunity? If you think about the amount of cash that’s out there, the number of checks that are still happening. There is so paper checks.

Lee Kantor: Paper checks. They’re still paper checks.

Patrick Williams: They’re still paper checks. They’re not just coming from my mom either. There’s a lot of people, especially in the commercial small business universe, lots of checks happening.

Lee Kantor: Absolutely. Do you know the numbers? Is it more than people imagine? Because everything seems so digital nowadays. It’s hard to imagine a lot of paper checks going back and forth.

Patrick Williams: Yeah, it’s a lot more than people than people know. I don’t have any numbers off the top of my head, but if you you look across consumer versus commercial, it’s really a lot of that’s being driven through the commercial space. But still a lot of consumer checks that are still flowing out the door. You’ve got other companies here that are in the Atlanta market that still have a check business and it’s thriving. Wow.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, it’s just hard to imagine because everything seems digital that every like no one is clamoring for. I wish I could write a check, at least in my circle.

Patrick Williams: Yeah, we should maybe put you in some of our advertising.

Lee Kantor: So how does how do you handle a show like this? A conference like this? What do you have to do here? Get here in order to be high fiving back at the office?

Patrick Williams: For me, it’s about connecting with different people and sharing ideas and getting really involved from a thought leadership point of view. So we want to, one, share out the different programs and ways that we support the fintech and technology space and payments. So that’s important because not everybody knows exactly what we do every day and all the things that we offer are into the into the payments universe. And then just connecting with people and hearing back their ideas and some of the things that they’re up to that we think could ultimately be new innovations that are going to be the future of technology in the payments universe. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So now so Visa has a presence here in Atlanta. They have an office. I’m sure we do. How long have you been here in Atlanta?

Patrick Williams: We have been here for a little over a year. We started in a temporary space and then now we’ve got a permanent space at 1200 Peachtree where we planted the visa flag with our logo at the top of the building. That was one of my my.

Lee Kantor: You were charged with that?

Patrick Williams: I was I was leaning in on that as far as the negotiations went. I wanted the signage. I let the our corporate real estate guys do the rest. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So now when you decided to move here, what was kind of the the reasons behind that?

Patrick Williams: It was, well, a variety of different reasons. One, the culture at Visa, it’s really important for us that we look like the constituency that we serve, so consumers and small businesses. And that means having a culturally diverse mix of employees. So that was certainly part of it. There’s a meaningful talent pool in Atlanta from a payments point of view as well as a really diverse population here that we wanted to take advantage of as we continue to evolve our culture at Visa. So that was one. And then there’s lots of payments activity here. We’ve got a lot of clients based here. There’s a lot of I’ve mentioned it multiple times now, but thought leadership coming out of Atlanta for payments and we wanted to be part of it.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned serving the small business community. What are some maybe not so obvious ways that Visa serves the small business community?

Patrick Williams: We have different programs that we’ve put in the market to be able to support small businesses. We have some programs that are focused on minority led small businesses. We’ve got a. Program called She’s Next that provides grants to women owned small businesses. So we’ve got a number of different programs that provide funding and education and that type of support into small businesses. And then we also have, of course, just ways that we can support their products, frankly. I mean, we’re a commercial organization making money. We’ve got a lot of value that we add and wrap around what we do for small businesses in the way of research and providing different reports and helping them stay educated about the business universe.

Lee Kantor: So how would a small business kind of plug in like, say, like we’re a small business? Like, you know, obviously we take if somebody wants to do a digital payment, we can do that. And that might be happening right now through Visa. But like, say we want to tap into the other resources, like how does a small business even find a person at Visa to have a conversation with?

Patrick Williams: Well, one, they would start out going through our website, but typically by way of the distribution that we have of of our products and services, that’s through other players, acquirers and merchant processors. And they can work with those entities to be able to tap into the different solutions we provide.

Lee Kantor: Right. But it’s one of those things where you don’t even know where you don’t know, right? Like they.

Patrick Williams: Sure. And we’ve got education out on visa.com for them to go learn a little bit more just about payments generally because you’re right it is it’s a hard space to navigate. And I’ve had personal friends of mine that have come to me that have small businesses and ask, how do I get my my fees down? Right. And those kind of and they’re not really sure where to go. The best place is, of course, always to start with our partners that are working directly with those small businesses. And then again, we’ve got educational resources and other things that we can we can offer up.

Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to learn more and have a conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s the coordinates to do that?

Patrick Williams: If someone wanted to connect me directly, the easiest way is probably just to go out through LinkedIn and search for Patrick Williams at Visa and I’ll pop right.

Lee Kantor: Up Now, what about online? If there’s a fintech partnership that they want to discuss with you, is that within the Visa website there are some fintech partnership. That’s right, somewhere in there.

Patrick Williams: That’s right. Through our fintech fast track program. They can go out, learn a little bit more about it, and there’s ways for them to actually apply for the program through visa.com.

Lee Kantor: All right. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Patrick Williams: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This Lee Kantor will be back in a few at FinTech South 2023.