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.
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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
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