Fintech veteran solves big banking problem: how to securely send money around the globe

Gary Palmer is no stranger to the world of banking innovation. The serial entrepreneur has been building software for the finance world for more than 20 years.

In the late 1990s, the fintech pioneer co-founded WildCard Systems, credited with inventing prepaid Visa cards and Mastercards. That company sold for more than a quarter of a billion dollars in 2005 and its acquirer, Efunds, was purchased by publicly traded FIS for $1.8 billion in 2007. Palmer continued on with FIS for a couple of years. He went on to found and chair Adaptive Payments, which sold to Mastercard in 2015, as well as invest in other banking technology companies.

“I’m the most boring guy at cocktail parties because all I talk about are bank technologies, payment processing, FinTech regulations, risk mitigation, all that stuff,” he said.

While investing in a couple of companies in Europe, he realized that it was a nightmare transferring money abroad — “just a complete disaster.” So in 2018, he decided to bring the band back together to go after this problem.

“We fix cross border payments through banks. This is a big idea, and we know how to execute,” says Palmer, founder and CEO of Payall, the winner of the 2021 Miami Herald Pitch Competition.

His experienced team includes many executives he has worked with before. That includes his chief technology officer, Chuck Hutchison, who helped design and build Zelle; and his head of operations, Shelly Schneekloth, who previously was chief operating officer of MetaBank, a leading U.S. fintech bank. “We have experienced folks who know how to tackle this big idea.”

Here’s the problem: Cross-border payments are expensive because they are largely a manual process; in a world where cybersecurity and money-laundering risks are high, such payments are also risky. Payall (payall.com) uses AI technology to make the system more efficient and less costly, as well as safe and secure. It partners with banks rather than compete with them and offers a turn-key solution.

“The current process is broken, and we are results oriented,” Palmer said.

“For the first time ever,” he said, “a bank in the U.S. that is clearing a payment initiated abroad can see the source of funds, the economic legitimacy of the payment, and the owners of the business making it; this is a breakthrough. We are the first-ever global single-shared platform for moving data and money around the world. We get the money delivered in minutes or seconds — versus days — and we do it safely.”

Payall’s products also support unbanked consumers through a mobile wallet solution or prepaid card.

Payall’s go-to-market strategy is to target about 1,000 foreign banks that have lost their ability to make payments into the U.S., along with about 10,000 smaller banks that can’t currently make cross-border payments. The platform could also be licensed by a large global money center bank to power all its correspondent bank relationships around the world, Palmer said.

“We aren’t building a dating app or a food delivery service. You’ve got to construct your software in a way that meets the highest standards of data integrity, security and all of that. So it took us a while to build proof-of-concept of the technology.”

The service launched in the fall of 2019, processing some basic payments in the U.S. In 2020, he said, the company earned about $850,000 in revenue; this year Palmer projects revenues of around $5 million.

The company currently is a team of about 30 — and growing.

“This isn’t my first rodeo. When you make a lot of mistakes, as I did in my first couple of companies, you apply that pattern recognition, and you’ll find that it’s a little bit easier this time around to see those challenges that some new entrepreneurs don’t have the benefit of seeing.”