Doing Well by Doing Good – A Brief Reflection on Past Months

Republished from PYMTS.com eBook: What did you Change? – Sept. 2020

Looking back these past several months, I think the most significant change our organization made in response to the pandemic was to lean into our purpose and to our own growth. Amid the horrible human and economic impact, we chose to invest, extending offers to new employees and showing up every day to help our clients serve some of the most affected on the way to the best five months of revenue our company has ever had.

Perhaps more importantly, we gained a renewed sense of meaning in our work. A recognition that you actually can do well by doing good.

Leaning into talent

Seeing a spike in demand as a result of further electronification of payments, we identified an opportunity and responded by growing our sales and marketing organization. As other businesses failed and struggled, we reached out to their best talent with offers. Since the advent of COVID-19, we‘ve added 536 new employees.

In all my years in the industry, I’ve never hired so many people in such a short time and met so few face-to-face. I can‘t wait for this to be over to give them a proper welcome and thank you.

Stepping up for clients

Early in the crisis, we heard experts recommend cutting costs and holding onto cash. We saw it differently. If cashflow was king, never would it be more important to help keep it flowing for others. As a result, we helped improve payouts and earned wage access for gig companies like DoorDash and Lyft working with clients like Payfare and PayActive to provide people with the money they needed to live.

On the small and medium business side, we partnered with Bento, Brex and Payoneer to help keep businesses open and operating by quickly streamlining digital flows and processes through our platform. With Comerica and Direct Express, we‘ve helped ensure the rapid delivery of vital benefits.

Black Swans

By now it’s no secret that the issuer and payments processing businesses have done well – a point underscored by Visa’s recent report of perhaps one if it’s most historic global gains on cash. Any awkwardness associated with the idea of doing well during such an awful time is offset by the objective fact that Black Swans (an unpredictable event beyond what is normally expected with potentially severe consequences) can be good for certain segments of business, but also by the knowledge that we are helping serve many people around the margins and people dislodged by the crisis by literally putting payments and something they can spend into their hands.

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