Yo, what’s up everybody? It’s Justin Live from B2B Vault, the Payment Technology Podcast, sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy Allen Kopelman, and we’ll be providing you educational information about FinTech. Small business payment processing and the technology businesses are using in the world today.

And in today’s podcast, it’s our, uh, payment technology monthly wrap up where we discuss all the different podcasts that we went over this month. Uh, any, uh, news that may have came in that we didn’t touch on, and, uh, stuff like that. So let’s hop right into it. All right. We got going. You know, we discussed a lot this month.

You know, we were hopeful like with the, yeah, we did Safe Banking Act. You know, it looked like it was like going on, like going in to happen and then they put the kabosh on it. Of course they did. So another kick the can down the road situation on that, which doesn’t make any sense, uh, to. At this point. And then at the same time we have Visa sending out emails through all the, uh, banks saying that they’re gonna find businesses up to $50,000 per machine on the cash ATMs.

And I heard about one, uh, place that got a $350,000 fine. Whoa. And um, what were you waiting? . Huh? What were they waiting for? Like, just, I mean, there’s still places that are using these cashless ATMs and it’s just, it’s basically just a matter of time. It’s a ticking time bomb and, uh, not smart. So that was, that was kind of like one of the biggest stories going because everybody was pretty hopeful the Safe Banking Act was gonna pass and that didn’t, so yeah.

A lot of people who checked out the podcast for that for sure. And then, uh, yeah, it’s, you know, cannabis has been one of the. One subject that everybody likes. I mean, and you know, we talked a lot about cryptocurrency in 2022. Cryptocurrency was like a big roller coaster for a while. I mean, we last month especially, right?

But I’m saying the beginning of the year was a hot topic. People Oh yeah. Accepting cryptocurrency. Crypto was at an all time high, close to 50 to $70,000. Uh, uh, a Bitcoin. These guys were, there was an article we talked about. where these, where young people that nobody ever heard of were showing up at nightclubs at Miami, right?

Showing up at hotels, showing up, renting yachts and boats and luxury cars and with crypto and all paying with crypto. And then it dried up. It went from millions of dollars to, you know, nothing. To bankruptcy. Yeah. Dried up to nothing. You know, the Miami Arena was named at, was, uh, named with the ftx, you know, and then the whole FTX debacle and who knows what’s gonna happen.

Yeah, maybe they’ll, the Smash Bros might win.

Yeah, there was a few interesting, like porn companies that proposed, two porn companies proposed the naming rights on the Miami arena. They got the bread, they got the money to do it. Yeah, they definitely have the money to do it, but who knows if that’s gonna happen. And then, you know, we have. , you know, a bill in Congress that’s covering digital assets.

And in that bill it talks about you’re going really fast. Okay. I’m going too fast. . No, no, I’m just saying that, I mean, it’s good, but I, we didn’t really talk about, we talked about ftx, we talked about crypto this month. Um, but what do you think about, what do you think is gonna happen to good old sbf or Sam Bankman Fried?

Well, I mean, if it was up to. , they’d throw ’em in jail and throw away the key. But I think that there’s gonna be a serious audit. I mean, they already found billions of dollars hidden in bank accounts. Um, they found billions of dollars in Japan. Yeah, it was interesting because I read about, um, Japan and what they do, and then the other crazy thing that happened right after Bankman Freed, they announced his arrest.

The guy from Binance. Binance. Mm. Took all his US assets and moved it offshore. So the thing that, I mean, I, I showed you that article about the Japan thing, right? Right. That’s what I’m talking about. Right? So in that article, Uh, what copied by surprise right away is how come America wasn’t doing the same thing?

That’s what I said to myself. I’m like, why isn’t that so I, they literally figured out the answer, right? So let me explain. What they did is that is they put a law in place that. The crypto exchange where you buy three. So la Yeah, because there was three companies, it was three major companies that all went bankrupt and all these people lost all of their money.

Yeah. Lost. Lost millions of dollars. It was into the multi-millions. So then they separated it and they basically said, oh, on the exchange, this is where you buy and sell your crypto. But the crypto could not be held at the exchange. Whereas in the US all the crypto is held on the same place except. Kind of Coinbase has that, Coinbase has a very small difference.

Has that Yeah. But they have that wallet. But that’s still controlled by Coinbase. Yes. And you know, and, and they figured it out though. I think sort of, I think, well, we don’t know. Sure. Anyway, keep going. So the, so the thing is, is that they require in Japan for there to be a separate company. And it’s basically treated like a bank.

So like I buy the crypto from you. , it immediately separates the two. Right. One, the company doesn’t have the crypto anymore and then it puts the cash in a totally different separate account. Yeah. It puts the tokens that, that this person who’s selling the crypto cannot touch. Right? Yeah. It’s held like at a bank.

Yeah, that’s what they called it. Like a bank, like secured, right. Secure’s in like a bank like atmosphere. Yes, and I don’t know, you know when you see like solution like that you say to. , how come? Like the US just does, just doesn’t enact that. I mean, I say that a lot about different things. Well, no, it’s like I just don’t understand, like, so yeah, man, but they’re the only country that has that.

Nobody else has that. I’m so, and the other thing that I also read in that article, yeah, so was that, that like even if you took your coin that let’s say you bought on Coinbase or you bought it on FTX and you moved it off of there. Or you downloaded it, the serial numbers, right. Of your coin. The coin onto a, let’s say an external drive.

Uhhuh. , they’re no good because the FTX still had the record. No way. Yeah. So those coins are No, no. Good FTX has had so many shady things going on. Yeah. I what I was gonna ask you is I’m interested in hearing about El Madea, though. I, it is like FTX was this big thing, right? Well, for it to be. look at me, but over here, down below, down here.

Well that was all. Hit his research company. Yeah. What’s doing all the other shady stuff. Shady stuff, yeah. And I wanna see what’s going like that little, what’s that woman’s name? Well, she turned state’s evidence her and another guy. What does she know? Well, she’s the one that was running the books and everything.

See, supposedly we’ll see what she knows. But they found, it’s interesting, they found billions of dollars of Sam Bankman Free’s money in a, in one of those Japanese states needs accounts. Yeah, yeah. Which they’re saying that might be enough to pay back some people in the Amer in America. Well, look at Mr.

Wonderful. Kevin O’Leary testified in front of Congress and he just like, you know, whatever. He just couldn’t understand it. So that guy is the truth. Anyway. Well, I’m just saying it’s, it’s, it’s. You know, and then they’re suing all these influencers. Now I agree. If the influencers were getting paid. Oh, you talking about the NFT guy?

No, no. Nft. I’m talking about the FTX influencers. Oh, the Ft Xs there. FTX influencers. There’s a whole bunch of stuff going. Everybody’s getting sued with crypto. So the, the FTX influencers are, Sued and then they tried to throw Shaq in there and he is like, no, they just paid me to do a commercial, right? So he’s like, I wasn’t an influencer.

You know, they paid me to do a commercial, but these influencers, they actually were getting like, Million dollars stock. They, they were getting like stock and stuff to influence people. So to buy the coin, to buy the FTX token. Mm-hmm. , which now is not worth any money. But you know, there’s, there’s, there’s digital a and then what was the other thing that you just mentioned?

No, we were talking about the Al Madea. Yeah. The Al Madea. and then all the companies that bought 140 or 150 companies, ridiculously amount of companies. Right. And then we discussed ridiculous amount of company. Right. But we also discussed how those companies like that one company, Celsius. Yeah. Definitely has some kind of assets.

Because they were loan, they were, they were taking money. They were staking crypto. Right. And then they were letting people buy houses. Right. So somebody owns all those houses. Ooh. I don’t. , like if you, you know how it worked was, let’s say you had 10 Bitcoins worth, right? 70 grand. So that’s 700 grand. You wanted to buy a $500,000 house.

They would loan you, they loaned you the 500 grand and they kept your crypto, and then you were making payments on it, but then the crypto went down to 20,000, so now your 700, it’s only worth two. and you owe 500 on the house. So they just kept your crypto plus you owed another 300 grand. That’s insane. So I don’t know who owns all these houses, you know what I’m saying?

Yeah. And that’s, you know, there’s gonna be a whole mess to uncover because Sandbank been freed. Al Madea FTX owned all these companies and all those companies, like they bought that other company that was also staking Crypto Voyager, right? Mm-hmm. was staking all that crypto and loaning money to Bitcoin min.

So there’s property, you know, out there that they loaned money for those Bitcoin. Remember when we went to the Bitcoin show? Yeah, of course. And they had like those massive like, uh, shipping containers full of those computers. Mm-hmm. and everything with air conditioning and all that. The mining. So who owns that if they didn’t pay the money back?

Somebody owns it, whoever’s controlling ftx, like tunes, all that, whatever. There’s gotta be so much equipment, equipment and houses around New York right now. Can you imagine all the abandoned like warehouses, loft apartments? Well, why would they abandon it? They have the equipment who, they don’t have to make a payment to anybody until they figure out who they have to pay.

Well, they need to just find a big abandoned w. Mining equipment in New York because of the, I wonder who it belongs to. Yeah. Well, they, well, New York did a crackdown on that. Yeah. They started busting people for running Bitcoin miners. They found a couple of abandoned ones not too long ago. Right. That’s pretty cool now.

But now they put all these, they have this bill and they’re trying to put all this anti-money laundering. Uh, requirements on all these crypto companies, which includes crypto exchanges, anybody that was processing cryptos and you know, exchanging it for fiat. It includes bitcoin, ATM machines, and all the companies involved with that.

I wouldn’t want to be dealing with that headache right now. nuts at all. Those companies are all scrambling around to get like audits done. No thank you, and things like that. Who knows if they’re gonna meet the deadline for the audit because it’s comes up. February or March of next year, that’s coming really quickly.

So that could cause some of these crypto companies to go out of business if they can’t get odd pass. They odd. They’re dropping like flies, so. Right. Well a lot of them are closing up now. They’re saying, oh, we’re bankrupt. That’s what I’m saying. You know, and so it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be a big. You know, it’s gonna be a big, a big, big, big mess.

I don’t know, you know? But I still see a lot of, and then you talked about the N F T, right? Yeah. So then there was that whole thing, the Board Ape Yacht Club, and then that guy bought Crypto Punks, and then the S E C came and said, oh, that’s an investment because you were inducing people to buy these things.

And then they would multiply. , therefore we’re making it an investment and now all the people are getting sued for that. So there’s a whole list of celebrities. Justin Beaver, Snoop Dogg, Snoop, Snoop Dogg’s getting sued. Hey, he’s, oh, I don’t even know. There’s a long list of celebrities between the ftx. Yeah.

And he, that one’s got Tom Brady and his, his future ex-wife on there, as you know, probably on the top of the pile. Plus Mr. Wonderful. Mm-hmm. , he was promoting it. . Yeah. He said he lost like what, half a billion? Yeah. Total like, no, like five, like hundred 25 million, some 25 million. Some crazy number. I was like, huh, that’s insane.

It’s a lot of money to be playing around with. Yeah, that’s a lot of money to play around with and, uh, well, you know, listen, supposedly he’s totally loaded, but you know, we don’t know the whole thing. Another. . So that’s just all crazy. That was just in what, December we talked about all that. Pretty much.

Yeah. All of that basically hit the fan. Like, I mean, last week I meant not, yeah, but I’m saying like all of that basically hit the fan like in the last 30 days for sure. You know, just like boom. Just dropped the bomb. What is the CFP D standpoint? The The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Oh, you had, and they’re supposed, yeah.

And they’re supposed to be protecting consumer. You know, and. It’s a whole thing going on because the courts are saying that they don’t have the power cuz it’s was created out of thin air. Mm-hmm. And it’s not really funded by, I remember by Congress about this. So who knows what’s gonna happen with that.

And if they have power or they don’t have power, they should not have power. They’re not, it’s just a bunch of people. Right. But I’m saying they’re like self-appointed, like, it’s like it’s some agency that was just created out of thin air. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s. This works, but I don’t think that they, the, the congress, you know, the financial committees in Congress House and the Senate, which we will invite anybody from the ha those committees, everyone that’s on the Democratic Party.

You should have been receiving an email from Justin at NPSs Bank around, uh, one 30 Eastern time. Please take a look. We invite you to all come on the show. Come on the show. Yes, we do. We’ll talk about credit card processing, crypto, whatever you guys want to talk about. We have suggestions. Can I say something?

Yes. Thank you guys for being so accessible. I really appreciate it. It was very easy to email all the Democrats on that list and the Republicans, you guys did not make it easy. Um, unfortunately, I cannot contact you because I do not have a area code or a personal. Yeah, I know. I don’t like that on some, it’s, it’s not, it’s on every Republican’s website that I went to.

It’s not on any Democrats website. That’s weird. I don’t know. Yeah, I’m sure it’s probably the company that they chose, like the Democrats chose this company to build their website and they, you know, so that’s just a, I’ve seen it on a few, a little layer of security seen and don’t bother me. That’s really messed up though.

I mean, cuz you can’t send that person an email. That’s not right. It’s not, that’s wrong. It’s. But whatever. Carry on . Yeah. I’ve seen it on other congress people that I’ve reached out to of both parties that have that. If you don’t have the, if you don’t have a zip code in their area, in their security code.

Yeah. And they, and you have to have some kind of like neighborhood code. Yeah. Yeah. Some kind of code that they send him so he can’t get on there. And then, um, Ooh, the Giving Project. That was cool. Yeah, so we had a lot of fun with our giving project. We got, went out, visited a bunch of charities and we made them all happy.

So that was a, that was a cool podcast. Say the Sea Turtle Foundation. The Sea Turtles, that equine, which is a group that TE that has, um, veterans. Special needs children. Special needs children come out and they get horse therapy, horse people with special needs, right? Not just children? No, not just children.

And veterans. And veterans. And they serve a lot of people in the Broward County, south Florida area and. Foundation and then we went to the kaba of, in Kai Center in Coral Springs. We helped the Kaba in North Miami. We helped two organ yo yo and pal in North Miami, where every year. Um, and we’ve participated in that a few times.

This year we participated in a big way because each child gets a hundred dollars gift card at TJ Max and then goes in and gets that by clothing. That was really cool. So we helped 50 kids. Nice. So that was nice that we got to do that and participate and go out and visit the charities, talk to the people that.

Run those charities and, you know, help them with all their, all the things that they get to do and hope. We’re looking forward to participating in some cool stuff this year, like going out to the equine and spending a day with them. Oh, and like to do that from afar. , terrify. Terrified of horses. Well, we can clean like the trail.

Definitely not cleaning. Well, we can help them like clear off. They clear off like the brush. I’ll help someone. Get out of their car. Okay. Like we’ll take you to, you keep go. Have you go make cotton candy. Yes. For the kids at Theban. How’s that? As long as it’s vegan. It’s vegan. Cotton, candy, sugar. That’s all it is.

Sponge sugar. And then I’m just joking around and then we’re gonna go hopefully see some sea turtles hatch hatch next, next season. The season coming up, whenever that is. Right. And then we talked about, this is a really, You know, I thought this was an informative podcast, but how to thrive during a recession, and I kind of related it back to things that happened during the time that I’ve owned this business.

2001, we had bad economic times. 2008, 2009, we had bad economic time. And then the beginning of, you know, 2020, the Covid, which was like 2019 or. 2019. 2019, you know, and how we, how we ended up surviving. I’m true. I’m 99% sure that I had caught Covid in 2019. Oh, I d I had it at the very beginning. Yeah, I know for sure.

I had to. And we talked about, you know, you know, it’s not, it’s not before it was covid though. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying. They didn’t know what it was. Yeah. You had the bad flu. Yeah. So I was hallucinating. I’ll never forget that. That was like one of the worst times. I’ve never been that sick in my life.

I was so like, so fever, so bad. Like I was crazy. It was not pleasant. Went through the office and, uh, you know, th thriving during a recession. We talked about, you know, it’s time to take bold action. You can’t just say that. What would be considered bold action to you? What would be something. Someone could do right now to shake up their business and the, you know, their, their industry.

Um, definitely look, well, we talked about, you know, being aggressive with, with, you know, buying product that you think you can sell. Yeah. Like I said, like let’s say you owned a store and you know, , the everybody’s suffering up and down your supply chain. Right? So let’s say, what does that mean though? What does he, what do you mean by that?

They’re suffering, right? So I’m saying like, the guy who makes these bottles needs to sell the bottles. Right? So, but why is he suffering right now? Well, because the, the economy’s slowed down. Right? But maybe there’s an opportunity in that. The opportunity could be. This, this company’s willing to do a deal, right?

You’re gonna buy 10,000, Allen’s got 10,000 water bottles, right? And he’s usually, he sells ’em at $10 a piece, right? But I don’t wanna buy all 10,000, but. It’s a recession, right? So he’s sitting on these 10,000 water bottles, Hey, I half ’em for too long and I have more coming from China. And he’s like, what am I gonna do?

I got no room to put this stuff. So he’s gotta what? He’s gotta chop the price in half, right? So now you can get that same 10,000 bottles at, let’s just say $5 a piece. There were $6 or six. So you, it’ll be in your, you know, if you sell a lot of these in your shop. Right? Right. That’s a great opportunity for you to double up your, your, you know, your profits.

Right. Take advantage of it. You know, like we had a client and I was telling them like they buy half a pallet of water bottle. Right? Mm-hmm. . So I said to the guy, you should buy a full pallet. The company selling the water is offering a discount on the other, you know, if you get the full pallet, it’s only gonna cost you a couple hundred dollars to get double the water.

They’re gonna say, I don’t have room for it. I’d be, I would make room, put it in my garage. I would do, I don’t know, I would get creative and wear to pile it all up. But yeah, I’m just saying it’s, uh, you know, because, And those are two really vague ways, right? I mean, that’s just for Yeah, but products. But it could be anything.

It could be anything you’re doing. Maybe, you know, maybe there’s a trade show and the trade show is not selling the, the booths out. Maybe there’s a, a deal for the booth. You know, maybe it’s Tom’s Okay, we haven’t done a show in a couple years. Let’s spend some money and do a show. Let’s do, you know, let’s do whatever.

Maybe you’ve been holding off on hiring employees. Okay, let’s hire, we need to hire somebody. Let’s redesign the site. Redesign your website. Redesign your website. That’s a big thing. You know, up your, you know, up your technology game. Like, oh, we just had, you know, maybe we need to do, try some different types of marketing, text message marketing, email marketing, whatever it is that you haven’t done.

you know, you gotta try to do that. Thinking outside of the box right now is really important. Right. And the other thing is, and I think every business should do this, if you have a business, you have a retail store and you don’t have a website where you’re selling, even if you’re only selling one product, partial, you know, part of your products, right?

Yeah. You need to have a website that has your products. You need to be selling it online. You need to have to, you need to have in-store pickup, curbside pickup, and a way to someone to get it shipped to them. Yep. Because all the big stores are doing it. So if you are not doing that, they’re gonna go somewhere else where they can get it.

It’s the same thing with the restaurants, right? Restaurants need to get curbside pick up more. Yeah. They need to have curbside pickup. You know, all I would tell you is like delivery. Like I don’t do, I’m not a delivery, I don’t like to do delivery because, and use like a third party. That’s terrible. And a lot of even places, like my son got a pizza recently and like he goes, oh, I just get pizza from Dominoes cuz all these other places, they don’t have enough delivery guys.

So the pizza comes and it’s always cold. Because the guy goes out to make like 10, 10 other deliveries and Del 10 deliveries not, you know, I always, I mean for me, like deliver third party delivery, if, if the restaurant didn’t have delivery right, then the food shouldn’t be delivered in the first place.

Right. Like it’s not gonna travel well. Right. Well, they need to make sure that they take me items off the menu that won’t travel. You would hope that’s what the restaurant would do, but they don’t. No, they should, you know, they should figure it out. And also, like, I saw a restaurant recently that’s near my mom’s house, so they built this restaurant and then it’s surrounded with apartments.

So the guy took a few tables out and then he has meals that where it’s, . It’s like already in like packages. Take it. Go to, yeah. But if it’s packaged up for you to like put it in your freezer or bake it right away, or bake it in the oven, that’s smart. Or some of it’s even raw. That’s really smart. You know, like the steak is raw.

Then you can cook the steak at all. Oh, you want it? But it comes with like all the veggies, all the fixings. Right. So you can buy, I like it, and you can order it in Advanced Nests. That is super smart, man. And they have it in the fridge and you just come get your box out. Oh, here’s my box. I ordered two steaks, I ordered potato, I’ve ordered this, da da.

And then you just go get it outta the fridge and you got rid of a bunch of tables and put that in Smart and, and then, and it’s doing’s doing good. Yeah, it’s doing pretty well because people live in those apartments and they need to get, they need to eat. They need to eat. They need. So it’s a way for them, it’s something different.

Mm-hmm. , you know, and it’s walking, you know, it’s like a walking a area. They made it so you like walking there. Right. There’s no grocery store in walking distance. So that guy’s sort of like the. You know, like go neighborhood meal and you want to prepare it yourself or you want to go throw a few things in the freezer.

I saw right away, right away, while you stay in all that, I just see an opportunity for him to set up like a small farmer’s market area. In this place. He could probably make some extra, no, he has that too. Like they have vegetables and everything. I see. Like that’s, yeah, he’s, he’s smart that guy’s, he’s trying to win.

Yeah. And I saw another restaurant that I go to and they offer, they call it, TV dinners and they have frozen dinners and then you can buy, like if you bet 10, you get a discount. And that’s good too. Cause you know someone’s busy, they can get something. Single parent. Yeah. Single parent. Or you buy bachelor extra meals for your kids.

Someone’s meal prepping. Right? Just one. You’re talking about the take home thing. There’s a pizza spot over in Oakland Park called Times Square Pizza. Guys from New York. He makes baked macho that you can take home and I really suggest you go try. Okay. Well you should get food from there one day it’s far.

Oh, to do a pick? Doesn’t pick, but it’s gonna be little chilly. A little. I don’t know how that’s gonna travel. Okay, so then you have to go and sit down. Okay. Well we could definitely go do that. We could make a field drink. You would? You would catch me eating pizza. Okay. So then the other thing we, so, you know, technology is the great equalizer.

It can make a small business seem much bigger. Yes. . I mean, I can’t, I can tell you that. I’m gonna tell you a crazy story. So I had a friend of mine, Tom. Okay. And Tom called me up one day and he’s like, oh, you know, he goes, I’m gonna sell these blade. , these ram blades that spin around and I go meet him at his house and he’s got like a two bedroom apartment and he’s got all the blades piled up in his bedroom.

What do they do? They cut like tile and pipes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they just spin around like the mir saws or something, right? So, so he’s selling these blades right out of his house. He made this like really cool website. and he’s in there. He is just selling stuff. And the guy was doing like, you know, he started doing, you know, a few thousand dollars a month and before long it was 50 grand a month.

It was a hundred grand a month. He had to move into a warehouse. But was was he getting these saw blades from, he was buying this stuff from like China? No, not from China, from some other country, I don’t remember which. Like South Korea or something. And they just had an excess of saw blades. Yeah, he was buying them at.

And then he would, and then, and then he would sell it with the, with the device. I have so many questions. What made him decide to sell software? He just thought it was like a, was niche market? The niche market. It was underserved, like people needed. How did he come about this conclusion? He, he would, he saw somebody that was doing the bus.

He saw, he heard about somebody doing the business, and then it’s hard to get these blades. They’re like really super expensive at home. . Mm-hmm. . So he found this way to import them and then settled the same blades they were selling in a Home Depot that were like 25, 30 bucks a piece. He could sell like five of them for that price because he was buying so many of them.

It was crazy. Is he still doing that? No. He did that for quite a few years though. It’s a crazy business. Hello everyone. We’d like to take this time to thank our sponsors Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS Printer. We’d also like to shout out the listeners and everyone that subscribed to our YouTube channel.

Thank you for tuning in. If you’d like to reach Alan or myself, Head over to B2B vault.info where you’ll find two forms, one to contact us and another if you’re interested in becoming a sponsor. If you’d like to sign up for a merchant account, click the Apply Now button located at the top of the page of B2B vault.info where you’ll answer a few questions and you’ll be on your way to processing payments in No.

The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, and other popular streaming networks. Thanks again for listening. And then we talked about how much do you really pay for merchant services, and we’re working on like a little worksheet that people are gonna be able to download. And then you’d be able to fill it out and then you can find out what do you really pay for merchant services?

So that was another hot talk. You know, people always ask me, oh, how do I figure it out? And I try to tell ’em, it’s just one easy formula. You just take what you paid and divide by your sales, and then that percentage is what you paid for merchant. Pretty simple equation to me, right? It’s pretty simple, but people don’t understand cuz they look at their statement, they don’t know how to read it, they don’t know how to derive at what did they actually pay because not every merchant processor gives you extremely transparent statement.

To read where you can decipher it. And I, believe me, I’ve gotten in fights with plenty of people on the phone. They send me a statement and I go, no, that’s not what you paid. You paid way more than what you’re looking at. You need to add up this column, and then you need to add up all of this. That’s the total, then divide it.

And then they find out that they’re paying five, six, 7% for credit card processing, and then they’re mad at me. So what’s the equation divided? How much you paid? Mm-hmm. divided by sales. So on the bottom of your sheet there’s about a total of what you paid for that month, right? Right, right. Well, you have to check because let’s say you’re on daily discount, they take money out daily.

Well, you gotta add that up. And then all the, so you have to look at all the expense columns on the statement and add, add all your expenses up, right? Divide by sales, divide by your total amount of. And that’ll give you the answer to how much you actually paid for merchant services, right? And then you also, and then the worksheet that we’re gonna make is you also have, uh, junk fees.

Junk fees, and you need to know what those are, what the junk fees are, and add those up too, because, you know, there’s ways to get rid of that stuff, right? So you need to know what’s going on with. . And then another, you know, topic we talked about, which was pretty cool, was we talked what the F is a merchant account.

And we basically explained what that was and we talked about, we made a little TikTok and Justin said, oh, what’s the difference between a merchant account and a bank account? Right? So a bank account, that’s where you, you get your deposits and you need a separate bank account for your business. And then the merchant account, Why do they need a separate bank account so that you can set, you don’t commingle your funds like Sam Bankman Freed.

I’ll put myself. I don’t wanna laugh. I, I mean, I was a co-mingling funds for many years and I didn’t understand what I was doing. And then, and you overpaid taxes too, because you didn’t have a way to deduct your expenses. Absolutely. I overpaid taxes. No, cuz you were paying on the top line. not the profit, right?

And if you have separate bank account, then your expenses can be accounted for. Therefore you say, oh, I made 50 grand. I had 20 grand of expenses, my profit was 30,000. Now you’re only paying on 30. If you’re co-mingling, you’re paying on top line, right? Because you have no way to prove your expenses because you co-mingled.

Don’t be co-mingled. Don’t co-mingle your funds. And then the merchant, is where, that’s how you process your payments and then they deposit the money into your actual bank account. So it’s not, it is a bank account in a way because it has of a number, you know, you have a merchant number, but the money is only sitting there for, you know, minutes, hours a day.

what, you know, depending on your deposit schedule, but you know, so that that’s somewhere to put it. And then it goes right as soon as it’s ready, sends the money right to your bank account, just traveling through there. When this is done, I have a question about the, uh, invoicing software, how that works as well.

Okay, so basically that’s what we talked about. What’s the difference between a bank account and a merchant account. So we explain that and we go in, you know, we talk about, you know, the, the, your, the merchant account is your conduit to get paid, and then you wanted to talk about how does invoicing work as far as Well, okay.

No, I was talking about specifically for our platform. Right. So, so after I’ve sent an EMO invoice, right? Oh, the person has to click on it and make their payment. Okay. Right, and then they make the payment. Then what? Then the money goes in your banking account the next day immediately. I don’t have to do anything else.

No, you don’t have to do it. It’s all automated. You just have to make sure on the invoice you wrote in there what they paid for. you always want to include. What did they pay for? Well, I mean like the items, right? Yeah. Whatever it is. The item or the service. Mm-hmm. or whatever specific, not just a blank invoice.

Hey, you owe me a thousand bucks. Hey Ken. Right? I’m just saying because I don’t know if I’d be happy receiving that invoice. No, no, but I’m saying like the risk depart. The thing that’s good about using invoicing on our platform is the risk department has access to the platform so they can see if Justin’s sending an invoice out and he writes in there, oh, this is for website maintenance, blah, blah, blah.

Well, they know what Justin’s charging them for. If Justin wrote something in there, oh yeah, by the way, dude, you owe me money. Whatever, some you list, then they’re gonna go, uh, no, no, no, we’re not doing that. We’re not paying for that. We’re not paying for that. Right. We’re gonna take that off of here. We’re not gonna let it process.

Right, right. They’re going return the, the funds. So it’s important, but it’s important because like we have, and, and the other thing that’s good about the invoicing is you can also message the person back. Once they pay. You can drop in like your Google review. Or whatever you’re using, trust power. How much does, how much do we take from It’s 2.9% out of the invoice.

So when you receive your payment, you get a net, you get a net payment, and then minus 2.9%. Right? But you’d be able to see it because when you see the, that the person paid, you’ll see it, the settlement, and then you’ll see in the payout section, it’ll show you how much fees he. and then at the end of the year, you can run a report.

How much fees did you pay for the year and deduct that from your taxes because you did pay the fees? You know,

it’s like 30 bucks. Like what is it? What’s 3% on a hundred dollars? $3. That’s what I saying. Yeah. It’s three bucks. So I said 30 bucks on 3000, but it’s, but it’s, but it’s 30 bucks. It’s very effi. It’s, huh? That’s $30 on 3000 is my math, right? $9. Why am I adding it to extra zero? Three times three? Ah, yeah. No, so that, it’s very efficient because then you can also message with the customer and say, oh, thank you for paying in the message tab.

Can they pay with a credit card? Like an actual credit card. Yes. It doesn’t have to be a debit card. No, it’s like PayPal. You know you can’t take credit card. Well, some accounts can take. Some can, right. But the majority is not, they’re not allowing you to take credit card. Right? So you can pay with a credit card or debit card, but you can also communicate back and forth.

So if you’re doing invoices, let’s say you want the person to leave you a review, you put the link in there, Hey, thanks you for paying, would you mind leaving me a review? Then they could leave you a. Now their invoicing stuff is really nice. Uh, I’ve been, I’ve sent my first invoice, all right yesterday.

Congratulations on that platform. So it makes it, but it makes it easy for you to have communication with your customers too. And I killed my PayPal indefinitely. So, Brad, for you, PayPal, you’re dead. You did to me, bro. And then we also talked about this past month about digitizing your business for 2023, and what does that entail?

So we’ve talked about, you know, you kind of mentioned that a little bit, right? We talked a little bit about technology, but this was specifically about social media. Google having a Google My Business page, getting reviews for that page, update your website, which we talked about, tech update, you know, . So we’re always looking at different stuff like we were just experimenting before with looking at a couple of different platforms where you can scan this code looks like a QR code, but it’s an augmented reality code.

Mm-hmm. . And then you scan, the person can scan the code and then let’s say they have to, then they have to point their camera like at your business card, and then it can make a, a video. . It’s pretty cool. Like when R two D two broadcasted Princess Leia and telling them to come, come and save me, right? So that’s pretty cool.

That’s a pretty cool thing. So we’re looking at a couple platforms and seeing how we can incorporate that into our marketing. I’m excited to see how, um, augmented reality, um, comes into the fold. You know, it’s still rather young. Um, people aren’t adapt, you know, that adaptive to it yet. Um, There’s not a lot of ways that we’ve been able to, well, we’re trying to use it, right?

We’re trying to get, use this because we’re trying to get attention to our platform, right? Right. So I say, we hand out a postcard and we say, Hey, go put a little instruction on there. Find out more about our product, scan this code, and watch the video. They’ll be able to scan a code. They won’t have to go to YouTube.

They can watch a video about the product. So it’s that. That’s pretty cool. I mean, you know, and it’s not that expense. And we’re looking at a couple platforms to see which one would work. You know, which one are both best, well, which one is gonna be the most cost efficient bang for your buck? Get the most bang for your buck.

I always say whenever you want to buy something and you’re not sure what vendor to use, check three vendors minimum. And then that way you can learn about a product that you never bought before. That’s good advice. Yeah, when I was a chef, I learned that like, oh, you’re gonna buy, my boss said to me one day, oh, we have to buy it.

You need a new oven. So I didn’t know what, uh, you know, there’s a lot of where to start. Well, no, I was like, I never bought a oven before. Right. So I’m gonna spend like 20 grand on this, you know, fancy oven, these four big ovens. Right. For the kitchen. It’s like 20, I remember it was like 20 or 30 grand.

Right. Wow. These four massive convection ovens. So I was like, Ooh, you know, how do you figure out what, which oven to get? So, you know, we so called three different companies. Had the got sales rep come out, uh, which, which brand of oven do you carry? What are the, the features of the oven, right? What are the features?

They’re all basically the same. I like. Then it came down to. what? What we really wanted was we wanted to make sure we had a lot of, you know, when you put stuff in a kitchen, you know, you don’t necessarily want to put stuff that you can’t move, right? So, because there was a lot of stuff in the kitchen that you can’t move, then it makes it hard to clean or whatever.

So we wanted to make sure that these oven, these ovens had wheels, wheels on them. And not all the ovens came with wheels. They’re big wheels. Because, you know, obviously they lock in place, but you know, sometimes you gotta clean the kitchen or whatever. Right? Right. You do. Or maybe you’re gonna rearrange the kitchen.

I’m gonna be able to move these things without getting a forklift . It’s just not something that you can move. Now some items are really, really big, like a steam kettle, right? Yeah. Okay, well that’s gotta be bolted down. There’s steam, there’s, and it’s actually, you don’t, and what’s used to surprise me is, You don’t see those in a lot of kitchens anymore, these steam kettles.

It’s actually really, really super efficient because What did you, what would you use that for? Oh, to make like soup. Oh, okay. So instead of a steam ket. So what’s really crazy is instead of using like electricity or gas mm-hmm. , what’s really efficient, you turn this thing on and. , it was hooked up to the water and the water heated the pot up.

Right. So super hot. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Right? And, and it was way more efficient. Even though you’re using gas to heat the, you know, to, you know, you’re using the, the water is going into the. Into the inner case. Yeah, but you’re already using that steam for some anyway, right? Most likely that steam is hooked up to your right.

It hook something hooked up to the hooked up in the building. Yeah. But it’s very, very efficient, you know? And our bills were very low. No, melt your face right off too. Oh yeah. So, but I’m gonna tell you, it was incredible. So the ovens, we wanted to oven that also had steam capability too, cuz we had all that steam in that kitchen.

That particular kitchen had a lot of steam equipment. Got it. So it was very, very efficient to use those steam kettles. And then we, then we also answered questions from, uh, from listeners. So people wanted us to ask, can you explain exactly what I’m just waving to listeners? Oh, they wanted to us to explain exactly what is a chargeback.

So we got into the whole process of what is a chargeback somebody wants to get, doesn’t want to. and we talked about different types of chargebacks where there’s out and out fraud, where there’s friendly fraud and that friendly fraud is happening in both e-commerce and Key entered. Yeah. And card present transactions.

And you know, I read an article that said that only that merch merchants and the card present were only winning 40% of their chargebacks. You guys gotta talk to me cuz. You, you have to really hone in on the le on writing the, the rebuttal to these chargebacks so that people can’t win these chargebacks.

That might be a good download to offer What, how to win a chargeback. The letter for. . Well, the letter’s gonna be different. You just have to, I mean, you can make a template though, couldn’t you? Not really, because you have to, you have to address what the person’s complaining about. Sorry. They could be, and they could be complaining about 20 or 30 things.

You know what I’m saying? And that’s kind of a problem. Yeah, no. So you have to just look at what they’re complaining about and address it specifically. The other thing, The question was asked, oh, I’m swiping cards. Cuz they don’t have an EMV reader and they keep getting chargebacks and losing them. Well, you need to upgrade to the EMV that happened October, 2015.

And without EMV you’re gonna get fallback chargebacks. Right? And then you can’t win those. And then we also got a question about why are we getting chargebacks when people leave over a 20% tip? And that’s because the credit card. Their credit card issuer is not honoring those tips. They’re not contacting the card holder to get an okay, and there’s only a threshold.

So the only way around that, and I wrote an article recently in a. Industry publication talking about that you, you’ve gotta do tip at the time of the sale, the green sheet. So you gotta, it’s the only way to avoid that is tip at the time of the sale, especially we’re the holiday season, you know, you go in, you want to tip your favorite waitress and then you know, $150 tip that waits on you all the time if you go to the same place and then they might not get the money if they’re not doing tip at the time of the sale.

We did a whole podcast. About that. And we also, you know, did that on a FinTech Friday. Friday very, it was very informative for me where we answered, you know, a lot of questions. And then basically we talked about, you know, how does cash discount work? and why are so many businesses using that? And we have a website, nationwide cash discount.com.

It’s on nationwide payment systems.com. Explain a little bit about cash discount. There’s two prices. One’s the cash price, and then if you don’t want to pay for cash, then the business is adding on, let’s say anywhere from two to 4%. So if your bill’s a hundred bucks, they’re adding on 4%. Your bill’s 1 0 4.

If you pay cash, you just pay the. I love it. So, but many businesses are switching to that and you know, gas stations have been doing it for years. The government’s been doing it for years. Education’s been doing it for years, and the amount of businesses doing that is growing all the time. I would say absolutely.

I would say more than at least 50% of the people who sign up with us are doing that program. at least 50%. And then we talked about subscriptions for businesses, you know, having subscriptions. Although I would say that the commercials on TV right now are at all time high of every single company that says, they’ll look in your bank account and notify you about what subscriptions you have so you can cancel them.

Yeah, I had one that was called like Rocket something, but they. . They were bought by another company, so I can’t remember what it was, but I, it was real. It was, yeah. Rocket. Rocket bought the other company. Rocket Mortgage bought that company. No. Yeah. But yeah, but it was called something else before, right now it’s called Rocket now.

That’s what it’s called. Yeah. Well, I, yeah, and I mean, I forget what, what, anyway, it was a very efficient, uh, service. Like, and it also would tell you, like, maybe, let’s say you’re paying like a high plan for. Yep. And then you could dial the plan back. Yeah. And they have a way to contact those companies too, right?

Yeah. They would literally do unsubscribe from the service for you, right? I was, or that’s your funny that you brought this up, because I literally just cleaned my personal email out this morning. Yeah. Uh, well, yesterday morning anyway, and there was a huge block. automated emails for myself, and I’m like, what is this?

So I open it up and it’s, that service unsubscribing me from whatever, you know? Yeah. Subscription that I was in. Yeah. I love that. That was great. One thing I’m totally sick of, and I don’t know how I, I’ve gotta make some time one morning to call Comcast, you know, or one night to call them. , but I’m totally sick.

Like every single channel that you wanna watch different stuff on is a pay channel. You wanna watch Star Trek, you gotta pay for cbs. You wanna watch, um, you wanna watch the New Maverick movie, dude, you gotta subscribe to Paramount. You get used to that. You want to watch something else. It’s not gonna be more networks anymore.

It’s on Hulu. Yeah. That’s how it’s gonna do. I don’t know. Did you ever see that graph? Like, I don’t know. I I feel like it’s at least 10 years. Whereas it showed you all of your subscriptions. Yeah, and then like the individual companies that own them. Companies. Yeah. And basic, it’s like it’s going from one company to now, it’s all these other separate companies.

To now it’s just you’re gonna be buying Disney, Netflix, Hulu, blah, blah, blah, showtime. , hbo O and you gotta buy each one individually. I know. It’s crazy. That’s how it, but that’s, I, for me, I’m not surprised. I’ve been, been watching it happening for, I know. It’s, it’s, it’s nuts. I think Comcast needs to change how you buy, like bundle, there’s like no dashboard, like, but there’s no bundle either.

It’s like, okay, so if I want stars b o max and. There’s no bundle. There’s no bundle for that. Right. That’s what I’m saying. Like they need to have Yeah, but there’s no, they also, like, in their dashboard, they don’t have a way to control it. No. That’s just totally, it’s totally messed up. The TV network, cable network is trash.

It’s done. It’s what they’re trying to, what, what they’re doing now. I feel like they’re just trying to recoup before they finally, I mean, I’m, I’m like ready to think. I, I was thinking the other day, I said, you know what? I should just call up. I’d say, I’m just gonna get basic cable. You’re not gonna save shit.

Excuse my French, you’re not gonna save anymore because that’s what I got at home. I have the highest internet package, right, and the lowest basic television package, right? And I’m like, well, how much am I paying a month for my TVs? She’s like, I don’t know. It’s like six bucks. I said, so I’m not gonna say that’s what she’s like, no, you actually will end up paying more because you got, there’s.

I’m not bundled. I know it’s so messed up. So I . So I have this huge, you know, like the craziest internet package that you can have through Xfinity. Right. Which I love. Shout out. Thank you. Since you’ve fixed your in my neighborhood, you know, that’s great. But no one watches TV in our house. Not one person like.

the TV in my living room hasn’t been turned on and I don’t even know how long. Yeah. Everybody’s watching on their devices. Yes. And then streaming it on their own tv. Right. That’s what I’m saying. It’s totally messed up. Like the whole cable will tell me. There should be a way to like bundle it all up.

Like, oh, go on Comcast, go, oh, what do you want? Oh, I want this. I want no commercials. I want the ESPN. , cnn. Yeah, that’s the problem. If you want espn, you gotta get an upper package. Yeah. You want the S ECC network. You need the sport package. You want N News and also News. News. I’m gonna tell you what thing news.

I am not paying. Okay. , this is one thing. I am not paying for it. I am not paying for NFL package to watch NFL on YouTube. F nfl. Okay. You know that other thing jumped to. , okay. That’s just outta control. Like YouTube, I love you, but I am not paying for YouTube to watch the NFL next year. So nfl, if you’re on, I don’t like the transition that YouTube is going into as far as like the video platform for creators into this television network.

I’m just not a fan of that. It’s very weird. I don’t know what exactly the end game or what the approach is for that. . I mean, as far as creators go, like, yeah, YouTube was the place for us to put stuff at. And no one would take, you couldn’t take it down. Right. You know, it could, it would live there forever.

Right. And over the past couple years, that is slowly, yeah. They’re like a TV channel. I mean, I mean, I just don’t know what to do about TV anymore. It is like a TV network that where you can upload your own shows to. Right. But it’s not as free as it used to be. You know? I mean, free. As in, uh, like unregulated?

No, but I’m saying is like they have regular TV now. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. You can watch whatever. Like I don’t just watch slickers. The whole, the whole TV thing is just, the whole TV thing is just. You remember that movie, don’t you? Yes. City slick. It’s one of my favorites. I know I tell you guys about some of my movies and you guys are like, what?

I don’t know. Ferris Bueller’s Day off that me. I do remember Ferris Bueller’s Day off. You know what’s funny is there’s a show on it. I didn’t even know there was a show on Hulu cuz there’s like this skit that I keep seeing on the reels. Mm-hmm. And this teacher walks in the room and he is like, Hey, hey Ron.

a, have you seen that? Is Jordan his peel from Jordan and Peel? Right. I never, I didn’t know that shit. Or is it Jordan? I can’t remember. There’s some show, I thought it was just some skit, like some YouTube skit, like some sh you know, some guy doing the skit. Then my friend goes, No, that’s a real TV show. So I sent it to this friend of mine named Aaron, and he is like, uh, you think that you’re the first person?

He goes, that’s a TV show. I said, oh, l o l . A Aron, yeah. That he was butchering everyone’s name. Yeah. D nice. Don’t tell me, don’t tell. Yeah. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. But that guy’s hilarious. Yeah, he’s funny. But I’m just saying like, I wanna watch that show. Oh, you gotta subscribe to. . Like another thing, like I don’t even know how to find my TV shows.

Listen, I just go home. I want to relax, put on some law and order, you know, law and order. . Yeah, I wanna see like iced tea. Like bust somebody. I heard iced tea doesn’t have any like words anymore in show. No, he does. They, they feature him now cuz they got rid of like, everybody’s gone. So now ice tea is like the main, he’s like the main guy on s v.

Shout out to ice tea man, because you know now the lady, Olivia Benson, she’s the captain, she’s in charge. The, like the detective lady? Yeah. She’s in charge now. She’s Oh, wow. She’s, she’s the boss of the, of all the detectives. No. What’s crazy is I’ve never watched this show in my life. Yeah. But all of my kids love this show.

Right. I love they love that show. Law and ordered special victims unit. . They know ’em all. Criminal intent. They know ’em all. And I’m like, dude, I’ve never said, how did, where did you guys like this Grandma ? No. So now like the lady, Olivia, she’s the, the captain or the sergeant or whatever in charge.

Interesting. And now I teases like the one, the main, he’s like the season, the main detective guy. Since we’re watching, talking about tv, I’ve just finished the first season of the recruit on recruits. How’s. It’s pretty good. It took about six episodes for me to be like, if am I gonna really watch this the next season if it comes out?

But then sixth, seventh, did you watch, like, did you watch Wednesday? I’m gonna wait till my granddaughter gets here. Oh, I watched that. It was actually really good. Alan did the dance. I didn’t do the dance yet. Nobody filmed me doing the, I cannot do that. I’m not a dancer, so forget it. So I didn’t, but the reference from that in that show was from the original Adams family.

Yeah. She danced the same way, but Morticia did. No, the little girl went. The little girl did. Yeah. She danced the same way. in, in, in an episode of the Adams family. Of the Adams family. Interesting. In black and white version, of course. Okay. That’s a, it’s a very interesting show. I actually, I was, I saw it on Netflix and I was like, oh, I gotta watch that.

But I told you that. Is it true they killed thing? . No, I can’t tell you that dude. If they killed the thing, bro, I’m not watching. I can’t kill the thing. All right. They tried to but they didn’t kill Uncle Fester. You can’t kill the thing. Uncle Fester hooked the thing back on Uncle Festers The Man . But uh, the other show that I watched on Netflix, which was really good, it’s this Emily, the criminal.

Of course you’re telling me about that. I know. You gotta watch it cuz it’s about credit card fraud. So it got me fucked. Yeah, I’ll have to. So Doppy Hook, but it was back to the swiping days. Ah. You know, but it was like, I watched that and I was like, it was a brutal show, like to why it was just crazy stuff going on, and it’s definitely the criminal.

So that’s the monthly wrap up for 2022. December, December, 2022. And we’re gonna have some upcoming episodes. We’re gonna talk. predictions for where the future of credit card processing is gonna. In lie, we’re gonna talk about what kind of things we thought were gonna happen in 2022 and what happened to those things.

We’re talking about that Friday, right? FinTech Friday. FinTech Friday, we’re gonna talk about that, and then we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna delve into some other subjects and. We got all new thing whole we batch of episodes coming up before we forget to let everyone know over the next couple weeks, um, we’re gonna be taking a break from posting, um, new episodes.

New episodes. So you’ll be seeing, um, some recaps of older episodes, maybe some new clips and shorts of some new stuff. , we’re just doing that so that we can keep, uh, keep up with the content for you guys for 2023. We don’t wanna miss any, uh, posts any, any days. Yeah, we’re gonna have some new, some, some new types of, uh, contact for everybody to consume.

So you’ll see us posting some of the most popular episodes of 2022 over the next couple. But every Friday we will be going live, yep, live on FinTech Friday, where you can get, you can ask questions and get answers. Peace out. Have a happy New year. I hope everyone had a happy, he knew it would be holidays and all that stuff, right?

Yep. Happy holiday. Hope everybody enjoyed and have, and we’re looking forward to 2023 and hitting 200 episodes of B2B fall. Woo. Okay. 2023.