PAYOMATIC’S MODERN MONEY MANAGEMENT
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PAYOMATIC: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TOWARDS MOBILE ENABLEMENT WRIT TEN BY
JOHN O’HANLON PRODUCED BY
ANDY TURNER
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For more than 60 years, Payomatic Corporation has filled the space between the formal banking system and the cash economy for millions of New Yorkers. Today money works differently than it used to, catalyzing a new digitally enabled customer focus
T
he blue and yellow PAYOMATIC banner is a familiar sight in and around New York, standing above almost 150 stores or
Money Centers. Nearly half of these are open 24 04
hours a day. Since its origins in the 1950s, the company has provided an essential alternative to the formal banking system, providing the ‘underbanked and unbanked’ population with the facility to cash checks, pay bills and remit money overseas, among other services. The New York metropolitan area has always attracted a huge population of migrant and immigrant workers, and though these are by no means the only group to benefit from such services, they typically work irregular hours, maybe in multiple employments and get paid in cash or by check. Not infrequently they are supporting dependents overseas, necessitating a reliable and quick way to remit funds. For these customers, the bureaucracy of the traditional banking route is not easily accessible. However, at PAYOMATIC, they can take care of all
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of their business in one place. At the
“We endeavored to build a single source of truth for the customer” — Steve Mayotte Chief Information Officer, PAYOMATIC 06
same time as cashing a check, they are able to pay utility bills, buy money orders, and even try their luck with the NY Lottery. The ability to walk in off the street into a welcoming store environment is important to them, and for the many shift workers whose labor keeps the city humming, the latenight availability of so many stores is a boon. PAYOMATIC is the largest financial services provider and Western Union’s biggest reseller in the New York area.
FROM CONSULTANT TO CIO Like everyone else PAYOMATIC customers are busy people who want to take full advantage of the tools technology affords them. As a retail-type business with a large high street presence and the overhead costs that go with that, PAYOMATIC decided some eight years ago that it needed to bring all of its systems up to date and take advantage of the technology that had infiltrated the traditional banks. It partnered with Modus Agency, an
07 award-winning digital innovation
150 locations, each one had a dispa-
consultancy, to develop a multi-
rate view of the customer and each
year plan focused on modernizing
transaction was a function of that store.”
PAYOMATIC’s legacy software
Each time a customer came in with
platforms. Modus’s Steven Mayotte
a check to cash, the customer service
and his team worked on this plan and
representative (CSR), or teller at the
developed a roadmap, working closely
counter, had to take a risk on behalf of
with PAYOMATIC’s CIO and COO.
the company, making decisions about
In 2013 Mayotte transitioned from
that customer and the issuer (‘maker’)
Modus to become Vice President for
of the check – and underwrite that risk.
IT at PAYOMATIC, and in 2015 he was
“If someone hit one location with a fraud-
appointed CIO. It was a seamless
ulent check they’d probably move on to
progression, he explains. “When I first
hit ten or 15 other stores because the
engaged with PAYOMATIC the company
systems did not talk to one another.”
faced problems that are familiar in the retail and financial service space. With
Another issue was that the stores leverage distribution of around 15 w w w.pa yo ma t ic. com
FinTech. MarTech. HealthTech. Whatever your tech, it’s all really HumanTech.
Driven by innovation, design thinking, and a deep understanding of human behavior, we create digital products and experiences that businesses—and humans—love.
The HumanTech Company modus-made.com
partner products. Each of these, like
a single source of truth for the customer,
PAYOMATIC’s largest partner for
as well as an online transactional
remittances and international payments,
system that could integrate with every
Western Union, has proprietary
third party in real time through applica-
procedures. “There were disparate
tion programming interfaces (APIs).”
systems that tellers were expected to know how to use, then enter back into
DIRECTED TO DIGITAL
the main transactional systems, mostly
This was an ambitious goal but an
in real time. Losses from fraud and
essential first step in the digital journey,
teller error were high. The company
he says – to consolidate data from the
had not really evolved to make use of
customer, the maker, and all other
the more modern technologies
sources, create better analytics to
available. We endeavored to build
understand customer behavior, achieve 09
E XE CU T I VE PRO FI LE
Steven Mayotte Steve Mayotte is responsible for building and developing technology systems and infrastructure for all the PAYOMATIC businesses and for leading the company’s digital transformation. He is responsible for developing and implementing PAYOMATIC’s information security strategy and data engineering, analytics, and machine learning strategy. Mayotte has more than 12 years of experience in financial services and hightech consulting. Prior to joining PAYOMATIC, he served as Service Delivery Manager for Modus Agency. w w w.pa yo ma t ic. com
PAY O M AT I C
transparency into fraud patterns as well as underwriting models, and align these within the business so that accurate information would be available to its leadership for better decision making. It had been tackled before in the financial space, he acknowledges, but having looked at existing platforms, his team found that none of them would fit PAYOMATIC’s unique hybrid business model in the space between retail and financial services. Partnering with Modus Agency for 10
software development, a custom-written platform known as TL2 was created that can not only encompass the inventory management and tracking of the product
have seen dramatic cost savings and
(cash) but also recognize all of the
efficiencies at every level,” says Mayotte.
treasury functions required by the
“This plat-
Federal Reserve and the banking
form paved the way for us to automate
system as well as multiple partner
back-office processes and enhance the
systems. The new platform removed the
in-store customer experience.”
burden from 800 CSRs of working with
Building on the success of new
multiple platforms when completing
transactional platform PAYOMATIC
customer transactions, dramatically
turned its focus to data. From data
reduced fraud losses and made it
silos, the company has achieved data
much easier to manage the peaks
democratization. “At first we leveraged
and troughs that the stores exper-
external partners to help us with data
ience on paydays, holidays and at
warehousing and ETL processes, then
different times of day or night. “We
as our capabilities matured we hired a
“Migrating to managed cloud solutions lets our team focus on delivering business value rather than on hosting and setup” — Steve Mayotte Chief Information Officer, PAYOMATIC dedicated team internally focused on
cloud solutions lets our team focus on
data engineering. The team partnered
delivering business value rather than
with analysts and built a platform
on hosting and setup.”
enabling on-demand data exploration
He’s proud of the way his staff has
and reporting in our on-premise
been able to develop their skills and
infrastructure. As we’ve grown, the size
learned how to leverage the efficiencies
of our data continues to expand
presented by the public cloud. For
exponentially. To deal with the problem
example, PAYOMATIC uses AWS
we are architecting our next generation
managed Kubernetes to run their
data platform running on the public
microservice workloads. “Previously
cloud.” Mayotte is looking at Tableau for
our deployment times weren’t bad but
data visualization and Apache Hadoop
they took the better part of a day running
for large-scale data processing on the
a mixture of automated scripts, manual
public cloud. “Migrating to managed
procedures, and testing: now with our w w w.pa yo ma t ic. com
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investment in DevOps, continuous integration, and continuous delivery we can deploy our microservices workloads to Production in minutes!” It’s especially gratifying to him to have built a focused, tight-knit team that has delivered results like these when other companies might have engaged Big Four consultants costing millions of dollars. These days, development teams have a big tool chest they can raid. For example, Terraform, the infrastructureas-a-service (IaaS) tool from HashiCorp 12
has, Mayotte testifies, played a huge
“The organization, having tackled the behind-thescenes technology was ready to start engaging with customers in a new channel” — Steve Mayotte Chief Information Officer, PAYOMATIC
part in the DevOps work of his teams, enabling them to easily access Amazon or other cloud resources. Cybersecurity laws are evolving, he points out, with New York being the first state to publish financial service sector information security regulations. “Our CISO and his team are responsible for security compliance and we use IBM QRadar and other cloud-based SIEM (security information and event management) monitoring software tools to detect cybersecurity attacks and network breaches.” PAYOMATIC has
+ 5mn
Checks cashed annually
1958
Year founded
1,000
Approximate number of employees 13
invested scrupulously in tools and aud-
government checks like tax refunds
iting from a risk management perspec-
directly deposited, all without a trad-
tive, and is fully compliant with the New
itional bank account. The inPOWER
York State Department of Financial
card, accredited to the highest PCI
Services (NYS DFS) Part 500 cyberse-
Level 1 standard, has not been on the
curity regulations for financial institutions.
market long, having been launched in November 2018 but, linked to a new
INPOWER: CARD ON THE RUN
mobile app it’s already transforming
Two years ago, Payomatic started to
customer engagement, he enthuses.
develop its hottest new offering,
“The organization, having tackled the
a prepaid MasterCard that allows
behind-the-scenes technology was
Payomatic customers to pay bills,
ready to start engaging with customers
withdraw money from an ATM, shop
in a new channel – mobile.”
online, or have paychecks and other
Payomatic partnered with a mobile w w w.pa yo ma t ic. com
C O M PA N Y FACT S commerce specialist to identify the highest value opportunities to transform consumer experience and extend the familiar store experience into the digital world. Assigning a dedicated product team, Stuzo researched the customer base to produce a product strategy and roadmap. The result was a mobile app for iOS and Android that launched with the inPOWER card. “All of the services supporting the mobile app run on AWS cloud. The app’s initial features focus on 14
inPOWER customers with plans for new products and features in 2019. Early customer adoption has been excellent. We are really excited about mobile as an alternative distribution channel to the stores. It gives us a much closer relationship and understanding of the customer and their behavior.” Connecting the in-store experience with the digital experience will be his focus over the coming year, he continues, adding features like staging transactions, which are making it easier to complete them in store or even ‘on the run’ using mobile technology. “Utility payments make up a large portion of our bill pay-ment transac-
“We are really exc about mobile as an alternative distribution chan to the stores” — Steve Mayotte Chief Information Officer, PAYOMATIC
cited
nnel
tion volume. Say a customer has been saving up to pay multiple bills at the month’s end. When they come to visit a store there is a lengthy data entry process to complete all their transactions. Our vision is that customers store their bills in our mobile app and choose to process their payments in-store or through the mobile app. ” Steven Mayotte has a palpable relish for his role as CIO of PAYOMATIC, which he says is not really about technology so much as about customer engagement. “Younger customers would probably rather not come into a store at all, but they are always going to need our financial services. My view is that we must meet the customer wherever and however they want to be met. We need to be relevant to all our customers for the next 30 years or more and the technology is just serving to advance that strategy.”
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PAYOMATIC 160 Oak Drive Syosset New York 11791 T +1 516 496 4900 www.payomatic.com