Innovation never stops, and neither does Payveris’ Karen Buell. So when she made the switch to fintech, it was a breath of fresh air to be in an industry where she felt like she could spread her wings and fly.
Buell is the SVP of Operations for Payveris, a company that provides a money movement platform. More specifically, it has an open API cloud-based platform that helps financial institutions to simplify digital money movement.
Buell has worked for Payveris for about four years. Before joining the fintech company, she worked in the banking industry, a sector that can get bogged down in regulation, sometimes stifling innovation.
Now, Buell oversees Payveris’ payment operations, client support and compliance components and has more than a decade of experience in the financial services sector. Payveris works with more than 300 financial institutions.
Buell spoke with FinLedger about the new products the company has launched, advice she has for women in the field and more.
I know you helped launch the company’s loans payment microservice. Explain what that is and why it’s important.
On the loan payment side of things, we definitely get a lot of requests from our banks and credit unions to also offer the ability to pay loans, where they may or may not have a checking account with the financial institution. Maybe they don’t even have digital banking access or things like that. What we’ve built out is the ability for them to pay their loan payments without even being authenticated. It’s probably not a lot different from going to the doctor’s website and paying one of your medical bills by just entering a couple pieces of information.
The banks or credit unions are looking for that to be on their website or within digital banking, but making it easy to pay. And then, using all the different payment methods available, whether that is paying with your checking account or if that’s paying with a debit card … that ability for banks and credit unions to be able to take in those payments. And then we’re expanding that further by giving them self-service tools.
What is your strategy going forward?
What we’ve discovered is that you can have all the tech available, but if your clients don’t know how to use it or take full advantage of it, they’re really missing out. They’re not getting the full value of Payveris. One of my major priorities this year has been what we’re saying internally is the CX 360. Basically, it’s taking the client experience and looking at it from all different angles. We have totally mastered implementations, and we are great at conversion.
What we’ve discovered is that you can have all the tech available, but if your clients don’t know how to use it or take full advantage of it, they’re really missing out.
In the industry, you’ll hear us tout things like ‘100% conversion.’ But the part that we have not been doing as much of, and need to do, is show our clients how to use all the tools that we have and how to use them most effectively. The 360 part of this goes beyond implementations. It’s thinking about how the member experience will be. How will the customers on the other end of this take this new technology?
What is your advice for women in fintech?
Own your space. I feel like this is probably going to be a little bit of an overgeneralization, but I feel like women are really creative and they’re very good at problem solving. That’s exactly what fintech needs. We’ve been handed this 150 plus year-old legacy infrastructure problem in the banking industry. And we’re good at solving problems. Just like I made that transition and went from pushing so hard to try to get people to see the vision to all of a sudden just executing the vision. It was so refreshing for me. I would just encourage other women in fintech or thinking about moving to fintech to just do it. Own your space, speak up, be creative — you have what it takes to solve some of these really complex problems.
This article has been edited to read clearly and concisely.