This episode was recorded at the Money 20/20 event in 2019. On this episode, PaymentsJournal’s editor-in-chief, Ryan McEndarfer, sat down with Vidya Peters, chief marketing officer at Marqeta.
PaymentsJournal:
Vidya, thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode. Could you give us a little bit of an overview of Marqeta to set the stage for our audience here?
Vidya Peters:
Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to be here, so thank you for having me on your podcast series. Marqeta is the first modern card issuing platform. We have improved how physical and virtual payment cards are developed and deployed. Our platform was built from the ground up as the first open API, fully modern, fully documented processing platform with no legacy infrastructure. So, if you think about your favorite services that you’re using today, whether that’s ordering food, applying for a loan, or using digital banking services on a mobile app, chances are Marqeta data is powering that experience for you on the back end.
PaymentsJournal:
Excellent. Thank you very much for that overview there. Now, obviously the payments industry has seen tremendous evolution that’s been ongoing for the past couple of years. Let’s narrow it down to the last 12 months. What have you been seeing on your end that has you excited within the payments industry?
Vidya Peters:
Yeah, it’s a very exciting time to be in the payments space, because what we’re realizing is that there is no part of this really large and complex market that is safe from disruption. It used to be that this space was entrenched with old legacy technologies, and they were pretty protected from anyone entering the new market. The barriers to entry have dropped significantly. What we’re finding now is that it’s no longer about the big eating the small; it’s really about the fast eating the slow. The reason that’s happening is that customers are demanding very new experiences. They’re expecting everything to be digital, to be connected, and they’re expecting to be served in very new ways. We’ve seen the rise of the on demand economy and of digital banking. And we’re seeing almost every experience, whether it’s lending, financing, ecommerce, etc., become more digital each year. Behind every one of those digital experiences, it’s a payment experience that’s enabling innovation.
That’s where Marqeta comes in and has really been able to serve a variety of different innovative companies. Our sweet spot is enabling the disruptors that want to serve their customers in a whole new way. Many of them are being powered by Marqeta on the back end, and what’s been really fun is to be able to sit at this intersection of innovation. We’ve now doubled our revenue four years in a row, and we’re finding that companies across industries are able to use Marqeta to issue and process card payments in a new way to enable how they serve their customers. If you think about how you’re paying your on demand worker to fulfill an order, if you think about how a payment is being made to a customer that wants a loan while they’re in line at a home renovation store but are unable finance it immediately, without a new technology platform to help serve them there. If you think about how digital banking is made possible, chances are Marqeta is on the backend making a lot of that magic come together.
PaymentsJournal:
Thank you for that. So the payments industry is, as we just mentioned, evolving so quickly and a lot of that has to do with the technological advances being made available through Fintech partners and other organizations that are coming to the table. I’m curious to get your thoughts in terms of regulation, which usually is a little bit slower. Do you feel like we’re getting to an impasse, where technology is advancing so quickly that regulation isn’t keeping up? Could there be a better job done in expediting regulation to make sure that things are secure, and that everybody is playing by the same rules? Or do you think that we need to take a step back and allow more time for regulation to catch up, even though we do have all these new technological advancements available to us? So what I’m trying to ask is, do you think that regulation should speed up, or do you think that we should have technology slow down, or do you think that both of them should go as fast as they possibly can?
Vidya Peters:
They both have to go as fast as they can. The reason is that the customer is not waiting around any longer. If these companies don’t innovate and serve these customers in a new way, they are going to be quickly disrupted out. Regulation plays a very important role, particularly as we think about payments, as more and more are happening online, so it’s important to ensure that companies coming to market are minimizing fraud, keeping transactions as secure as possible, and protecting customer data. Regulation plays a very important role in that. It’s very important that they move quickly with these companies so that they can keep up with this pace of change. What’s also interesting is that even within the existing regulatory framework, companies are learning to use technology to not allow regulatory concerns slow them down. So we’re finding them using technology to their advantage to meet those regulatory requirements, whether its transparency of data or minimizing fraud, and ensuring that they’re keeping transactions as secure as possible.
PaymentsJournal:
I think that’s great, and you brought up a really great point there in terms of using technology to your advantage to help with the regulatory side of things. I know there’s a lot of nuances, but for some of the high level things, it’s almost from a software development standpoint. You can kind of write a bunch of “if” statements, as in, “if it’s this way, then do that to make sure it meets regulatory requirements.” Once you get into more specifics, things are more nuanced and not as general as you’d like them to be in software programming. Now if we could move on from that particular topic, I know that Marqeta has made quite a few announcements recently. Can you enlighten our audience to some of those announcements that have been made?
Vidya Peters:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had a series of product launches this year as a result of listening closely to our customers’ pain points, and where we can enable them to move faster. Our first announcement was Marqeta Reserve Financing that was born out of a problem that we saw our customers having. Customers have to fund their reserve accounts to launch debit and prepaid cards, which created some stress on customers because it tied up their working capital that could otherwise be deployed to grow the business and serve their end users. So, we ended up listening to that pain point and feedback and launched a new financing option that allows customers to seamlessly fund their reserve accounts and takes away one of the major friction points of launching these prepaid card programs.
The second product we launched is a new digital banking solution that’s tailored to our European banking clients. We find that as a result of that launch, we’ve been able to support European banking innovators like Lydia, Capital on Tap, YAPEAL, and Twisto, which has been really exciting for us. The third major announcement was our launch of Push-to-Card, reinventing the lender-borrower relationship by allowing funds to be loaded through Marqeta onto a virtual card into a digital wallet in just minutes. This has helped our customers be able to go to market in a whole new way. Last but not least, we announced a new partnership with Visa. Marqeta is now a certified processor in 10 markets across Asia-Pacific. That footprint is three times larger than any other issuer in the region, where most issuers are usually only active in around three countries. This partnership combines our capabilities with Visa’s global reputation to help customers launch and help innovators and customers to be able to quickly expand into Asia by working with us. So as you can tell, we’ve had a series of exciting product announcements, and we’ll continue to have exciting product launches that Marqeta will be making in the first quarter of the year. I’ll be happy to circle back with you and share more on those in a couple of months.
PaymentsJournal:
Excellent. Yes, I would certainly love to touch base when more information on those becomes available. Now, I’m curious in terms of taking a look at the whole Asia market there. Obviously, I know that there are some tensions in terms of the political side of things, but I’m curious to get your take from a business perspective on how well the organizations you’re partnering with are developing their relationships in Asia and how businesses are doing across the border there.
Vidya Peters:
We find that so many companies are eager to expand to Asia. I mean, it’s just a tremendously large and growing market opportunity. If you think of the average incomes are going in Asia, the spending capital that’s now available, you find companies, particularly based in the U.S. but also European companies, that are eager to tap into that market opportunity. The biggest challenge, however, is that it’s a very fragmented continent. Every country has a very complex and very distinct regulatory framework, which is very challenging for most of these companies to navigate on their own. That’s where Marketa comes in. With our certification, what they can do is continue our partnerships that they may already have with us in the US to not worry about meeting those regulatory requirements for issuing and processing and allow Marqeta to do the heavy lifting on the back end.
PaymentsJournal:
Alright. So Vidya, a CMO at a B2B Fintech company is quite a unique position. Why did Marqeta choose now to bring in a CMO?
Vidya Peters:
Marqeta has been doubling its revenue for four years in a row, and it’s just been so tremendous to see how much this company has grown from inbound interest and word of mouth. We now realize that while we are proud to be the secret sauce of many of the innovators that you see in the news, we are excited to get the word out and talk about the story of the impact that we have and the value we bring to customers. It just felt like the right time in Marqeta’s growth trajectory to actually start talking about that and shaping the market conversation together.
PaymentsJournal:
Excellent. Well, thank you, Vidya, for taking the time to speak with me about Marqeta, and I hope to have you back on the podcast soon.
Vidya Peters:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
