FinTech is both an undeniable tech movement, as well as, an ambiguous buzzword that founders can use for caché. So what is it and how can startups truly utilize tools from the FinTech world to give their own companies superpowers. Our guest today, Joe Keeley, is the Co-Founder and CEO of JustiFi, a platform that allows Vertical SaaS companies to add sophisticated FinTech to their service offerings and how that can save companies in processing fees and give customers more flexibility in payments. We also discuss how startups should think about choosing third-party service providers when entering the embedded fintech arena and why it may not be the smartest choice to build your own in-house payments team from scratch. They recently announced a Seed+ round led by our good friends at Crosslink Capital aligned with existing investors Rally Ventures and Emergence Capital.
About Joe Keeley:
Joe is the CEO and Co-founder of JustiFi Technologies, a venture-backed fintech business providing payments and fintech infrastructure and strategy for vertical SaaS platforms.
Prior to JustiFi, Joe founded and grew College Nannies, Sitters & Tutors (CNST), the nation’s largest in-home childcare and tutoring company. He led CNST to over 200 franchises in the USA and United Kingdom (a milestone less than 5% of franchisors achieve) and over 13,000 employees. In 2016, College Nannies, Sitters & Tutors was acquired by Bright Horizons Family Solutions (NYSE: BFAM), the largest corporate-sponsored childcare operator globally.
He has been named the prestigious Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of The Year”, the “Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year”, “Top 25 under 25 to Watch” by Business Week Magazine, “20 under 30 Who Will Change the World” by Citizen Culture magazine, one of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s “Young Entrepreneurs” and “40 under 40”, Glass Door’s Top 100 Companies to Work For, Minnesota Business 100 Best Companies to Work For, and Entrepreneur Magazine's top 100 Franchise concepts many years running.
A word from our sponsor:
At Ripple, we manage all of our fund expenses and employee credit cards using Jeeves.
The team at Jeeves helped get me and my team setup with physical and virtual credit cards in days. I was able to allow my teammates to expense items in multiple currencies allowing them to pay for anything, anywhere at any time. We weren’t asked for any personal guarantees or to pay any setup or monthly SaaS fees.
Not only does Jeeves save us time, but they also give us up to 3% cash back on our purchases including expenses like Google, Facebook or AWS every month. The best part is Jeeves puts up the cash, and you settle up once every 30 days in any currency you want, unlike some other corporate card companies that make you pre-pay every month.
Jeeves also recently launched its Jeeves Growth and Working Capital initiative for startups and fast-growing companies to enable more financial freedom for every entrepreneur. The best thing of all is that Jeeves is live in 24 countries including Canada, the US and many other countries around the world. Jeeves truly offers the best all-in-one expense management corporate card program for all startups especially the ones at Ripple and we at Tank Talks could not be more excited to officially partner with them.
Listeners of Tank Talks can get set up with a demo of Jeeves today and take advantage of our Tank Talks special with a $700 sign-on bonus and skip the waitlist that already has thousands of companies by visiting tryjeeves.com/tanktalks - Use Referral Code - TankTalks to get setup today!
In this episode we discuss:
02:42 Joe journey to creating CNST
04:19 How Joe embraced technology as a solution for childcare and tutoring
05:42 Why Joe’s first company was bootstrapped
07:51 Why Joe and his co-founders decided to launch JustiFi
11:21 Solving the processing fee problems for small business
13:06 The history of FinTech and embedded FinTech
16:05 How smaller businesses can benefit from embedded FinTech
18:53 Why startups benefit from outsourcing FinTech tools
21:02 How businesses should choose an embedded FinTech partner
23:45 Choosing a generalist vs specialist service partner
26:40 Why being the best at what you do is the most important thing as a startup
28:32 Why Vertical SaaS is JustiFi’s current target market
31:48 What lowering fees has meant to JustiFi’s customers
34:12 How bigger is JustiFi’s Total Addressable Market
35:58 Plans for JustiFi’s recent fundraise
Fast Favorites
Podcast
The BBC Minute
Newsletter/Blog
Morning Brew
Tech Gadget
Sonos
New Trend
Back to office
Book
The Giving Tree
Life Lesson
Work Hard and Be Nice
Follow Matt Cohen and Tank Talks here!
How Every Startup is Becoming a Fintech Company with Joe Keeley, CEO of JustiFi