2406 -Smart Payment Processing and Compliance Strategies for SMBs with Nationwide Payment Systems' Allen Kopelman

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15 minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages, like this one. That includes your free PodVerified score, free PodVerified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Alan Kopelman. Alan, you are the CEO and founder of Nationwide Payment Systems. You're found on the web at nationwidepaymentsystems.com. And you are the host of the B2B Vault podcast, which to our friend that's listening, you could just do a quick search and you're going to find Alan's show. Alan, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me on today, Josh. Yeah. Before we get going, talking about your superpowers and what you do with nationwide payment systems, I always love hearing what leaders are into when they're not at work.

1:31And so what have you been into lately? one of my things that i like is reality tv shows so that kind of takes your mind off everything and some of the silly stuff some of these people do and you go okay life is not that bad and you get you know there i think there is something about that you just you see wow i i got it pretty good when it comes to interpersonal skills you know just having a moral compass sometimes i think you know we see some of that uh but uh yeah my wife is a is a fan of real households of salt lake city and i mean i i i can't get into it i appreciate it but uh maybe there is something uh to seeing someone else's mess that makes you feel a whole lot better about your own yeah there's something yeah exactly you see somebody else's mess and you go okay what's going on in my life's not so bad and you know some sometimes you just you know you just need a good laugh to relax and take your mind off things.

2:36I was at a convention one time and they said, Oh, the speaker today is Mark Wahlberg. Right. But it wasn't Mark Wahlberg, the actor. It was Mark Wahlberg, the host of Temptation Island. Oh, here we go. How you doing? So what are three reality shows that you've watched that are kind of your guilty pleasures? Jersey Shore, which I should never admit to. um love is blind there was a new one on last night about this age thing people didn't know they were dating and they didn't know what the person's age was and they weren't allowed to talk about it until they were ready to say okay let's commit to each other and then the first couple the lady was 54 she was praying the guy was like at least 35 he was 27 oh my goodness wow literally twice his age yeah and she had a son 29 i was oh no oh my goodness you know um alan you know i think some people might throw their nose up at this and tell pish boss it's too so beneath me but you know i look at you know what folks like you and i accomplish in a day, accomplish in a week, and how serious we have to be and how on we have to be.

4:00I really think that there's something to being truly unproductive and indulgent, you know, if you will, during certain times like that is absolutely therapeutic. I got to be honest, I think I could use a little bit more myself. It's like, you know, just like, it's like, you know, you know, attending a sports game you go to a sports game and you know you're just get involved in into the game you know yeah it's a game so yeah yeah yeah well i listen ellen uh tell me uh about nationwide payment systems what you do who you serve so we've been in business since 2001 so 25 years in the payment space and payments you know has changed drastically over 25 years Our focus today is pretty much on technology and providing businesses with not just payment services and processing payments, but making sure that they're using technology in a way that's helping them save time, save money, get paid faster, work more efficiently in their business, and giving them the tools that they need to run their business.

5:17Well, give us an overview of the payment systems world and what most business owners kind of typically start with. And can you just maybe just kind of give us a one-on-one of that world, particularly, again, for an SMB founder audience that we just maybe just kind of default to Stripe or whatever and don't realize that at a certain point, it might make sense to evaluate that? Well, a lot of times founders will go to Stripe because it's easy. And they make a couple of missteps with doing that. One, usually they don't read the terms of service. They don't look at their restricted and prohibited list.

6:03And Stripe doesn't really give, since there's no one to call on the phone, they're not going to tell you whether you're compliant or not. So there's a lot of businesses and compliance is huge in our business today because from a compliance standpoint, so many businesses are under the looked at by the FDA, the FTC, and you have to really maintain compliance when you're in what we call regulated spaces like travel, CBD, EMP, and any other kinds of businesses, gaming. There's a whole, there's probably 50 businesses that have to deal with strict compliance. And people will say, oh, the credit card company is doing this.

6:46No, it's not Visa and MasterCard, and it's not Stripe, and it's not their bank. We have to follow the rules that the government lays out. So So that's one of the things that we really specialize in is helping businesses, not just with, you know, rates and fees and technology. It's also compliance. And, you know, sometimes with rates and fees, one of the things people don't realize with Stripe, you just get a flat rate. With us, we can give you a variable rate. And then a lot of those variable rates have to do with your SIC code. So if you're not coded correctly, then you're not getting the benefit of special interchange fees that are assigned to like insurance companies, education, and all different types of businesses have their own special interchange fees.

7:34Like, you know, your accountant gets you the best deal on taxes, right? We try to get you the best deal on interchange. Interchange, we don't make any money from interchange. We only make money on the spread that we charge above interchange. And in flat rate, there's more spread going to the credit card processor. Yeah. Can you maybe share a few more of those or kind of list off as many industries as you can? You're like, listen, if you are in this industry, you're doing this kind of work or whatever, you really should look at like you're entitled to save money. You mentioned education, insurance.

8:15Yeah, it's not a trick. You know, we met with a nonprofit once and we were like, you're paying retail interchange. If you were signed up with us, you'd be paying nonprofit interchange, which was about a 50 point spread. Now they were processing a million dollars a month. We were like, just give us a chance, you know, give us part of your business and you'll see the huge amount of savings. And there's tons of businesses, insurance, there's utilities, there's different types of recurring payments, medical has special rates. There's so many businesses that get special rates from businesses. We've even seen restaurants misclassified because maybe they have the word deli in their name and they got classified as a retail location instead of a restaurant.

9:04and that could be costing you 20 or 30 basis points. So the coding is super important that your business is coded correctly. Yeah, and so when folks work with you, what is that? I mean, I would imagine there's probably some discovery and I would imagine that discovery is, I don't think you charge for that. How do you normally engage with folks? Well, we'll do a discovery call. We ask a lot of questions. When do you take a payment? How do you do that? How do you take the credit card? Is it through your website, over the phone? Do you send out a link? And we try to go from there so we understand how they operate their business.

9:51Are there any contracts that are signed? And, you know, lots of businesses have contracts. We also try to look at those, especially if they're having any kind of problems with chargebacks or disputes, so that we can advise them on, like, how to change your contract to make it so that you can't stop people from doing a chargeback, but you can put the ball more in your favor if you have a good, strong contract that when they do do a chargeback, you can win. Because nobody likes to lose chargebacks. I definitely don't. You know, and then we, you know, also, let's say somebody's, you know, using, we come across people, they're using a point of sale system that's really old.

10:33And recently we were taught, somebody called us, they said, Oh, we're interested in NCR CounterPoint, which is a enterprise level point of sale system for retailers. and after we got into the conversation with them, they were using like Windows 8 on their computers and they had a lot of equipment that was basically sunsetted. So we made sure that, you know, we explained to them, okay, well, we got to get everything up to date. We do a quote and then we got the whole new system installed for them. So, you know, you know, people graduate, like they might start their business and they're using Square or Clover and then they just outgrow those systems because they're opening up multiple locations and need to transfer inventory or the amount of inventory they have.

11:21And with NCR CounterPoint, we have, you know, our largest client has over a hundred thousand items in inventory. So it, and it can sync to your website. So, you know, you can really level up your business. And today businesses who are retailers and they're not on the internet with their product, they need to really level up because that's where a lot of sales and discovery is taking place. It's on the internet and also in the large language models, chat, GBT, perplexity, Claude, the way people search has changed. You know, someone's going to look at a website, they go to that website. When somebody has a question, they're asking the, they're asking the, you know, the AI the question.

12:07So, you know, you really need to make sure that you have a presence on the internet. Mm-hmm. What do you talk about on B2B Vault, your podcasts? So we generally talk with founders of different companies. We recently, we've had on the director of B2B payments for Visa. We've had on companies who do earn the chargeback space and explaining what's going on with chargebacks today, how businesses can deal with chargebacks in different ways. We've had on, we had on a guy from a company called Grant Match, where they help nonprofits find grants for their non-for-profit. All kinds of businesses, companies offering virtual credit cards to pay their expenses and all different sorts of businesses, AI companies.

13:00So we try to give educational information to business owners so they can learn about, you know, a founder story, maybe in one episode, and then find out about something they can use in their business. Like we had somebody offer an answering service, an accountant, a lawyer talking about, you know, why it's important to read all the agreements you signed. You know, people will say, hey, the number one thing you buy in your life that's your biggest investment is your house. Probably the next thing in line with that, if you're starting a business, that's a huge investment and a huge risk you're taking.

13:35You know, you need to get legal help when you sign a lease, when you're signing supplier agreements, you need to understand your, what are the risks that you're taking? What are you responsible for? That's what, and also picking names like today. So, you know, people are starting businesses at a really rapid rate right now, especially online businesses. Coding is faster than ever. And so when you're picking out a name for your business, you need to make sure, you know, you can get the domain name. You just didn't pick, you know, before you incorporate and do, you know, do that background work so that you're covered.

14:11And all of a sudden you don't get a cease and desist letter in the mail from somebody. Super important when you're starting a business to do, to cover your, cover yourself and make sure that you get good legal advice. No doubt. Alan Kopelman, your website nationwidepaymentsystems.com. When somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? Go to the solutions page. And on the solutions page, you're going to see all the different solutions that we offer. We break them down by business type or by functionality. and you'll see NPS1, which is our payment platform where you can send out payment links.

14:53We allow you to take credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and ACH all on one platform with one vendor. We have our smart invoicing product, which does all of that, plus controls all your invoicing and does a two-way sync to QuickBooks, which can save businesses a lot of money when you when you have a lot of your staff using QuickBooks, because we give you unlimited licenses and maybe most of your staff, if they're just sending out invoices, they don't need access to your QuickBooks. So it makes it run, and it runs more efficiently with automation and a little bit of AI in there and helps people get paid faster.

15:37On average, when you use our electronic invoicing. People will pay in zero to eight days versus you waiting for money. You got to make it easy for customers to pay their business bill, just like you pay your personal bills. People converted to that during COVID. Oh, I just got to get a link and pay my bill. So people want to do that in their business as well. So you got to make it easy for customers to pay you. People don't want to call up on the phone and give you the credit card number. I just want to click a link and pay. Alan Kopelman, you're the host of the B2B Vault podcast. You're found on the web at nationwidepaymentsystems.com.

16:24Alan, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining me, and thank you for inspiring me to find a trashy reality show. Thanks, my friend. All right. Thank you for having me today, Josh. Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds.

17:07And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com. You can start for free with your podverified score, along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success.

17:49Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.