So you want to be in payments. I think everybody is in payments. The question is is, what role do you play in payments? That can be anything from a simple buyer-seller relationship where you're accepting payments for a widget that you sell, or it could be as complex as owning an end-to-end solution on behalf of merchants or sellers.

When it comes to payments, payments are very complex, but they're probably the most important facet when it comes to being able to conduct business. Transacting is the lifeblood of the economy, and understanding the role that you, as a platform, can play within that landscape is key to optimizing how you're trying to meet the business goals of touching the payment itself. The way we look at payments is on a spectrum or a continuum. You're either a payment acceptor, or you're a payment facilitator or somewhere in between. But at the end of the day, finding the right place along that continuum is going to be important for you to be able to sustain your business long-term in order to meet those goals, both for you and your clients.

The key is understanding what role you play along that spectrum and knowing which questions to ask because I think the thing that gets companies upside down at times is not knowing what they don't know. I think one of the key times where you start thinking about payments a little bit differently is when payments evolve from being a product to a strategy. So once it becomes a strategy, what does that mean for you?

When we think of the term platform, that means different things to different people. It could be something as simple as a merchant that has built a platform from which to accept payments of which it has direct relationship with customers, or it could be a platform where you're actually facilitating payments on behalf of downstream merchants. Lots of terms that you hear out in the world today like payment facilitator and marketplace and service provider, those all denote and require different things.

They all sit on that payment spectrum, but understanding what impact that has for you as a business is key to your long-term sustainability in terms of building out your payment strategy. We are here to help you understand all the aspects of what it means to be in that payment flow, everything from regulatory and knowing who your customers are and onboarding your customers and managing them to what it means to be in or not be in managing the settlement of the funds themselves.