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Could Your Payments or Card Program Be Paused or Shut Down?

The payments world has gone digital, and while many organizations are still playing catch up, the need for modernization has reached critical mass.

Client management, operations, technology, treasury - is it possible that all the moving parts that make up your successful organization are being held back? And, even worse, that it’s going unnoticed and unquestioned?

As demanding as the past year has been, Qolo continues to demand more of ourselves and the industry, while encouraging our clients to do the same.

Betty, hello! Qolo’s growth has been incredible this year - as the Chief Client Officer you’ve been intimately involved in this upward trajectory. Tell us about how you came to Qolo and what the journey has been like this year.

In the past, we’ve been attached at the hip to our method of payment. Whether it was a satchel of gold coins, a wallet of cash, or a card in a sleeve, commerce and trade have always been conducted with the need for contact.

The news is bad, to put it mildly. Coronavirus is impacting nearly every facet of life around the world: cities on lockdown, shuttered schools, wild gyrations in financial markets. In the U.S., we’re only beginning to see the human toll as infection rates rise rapidly.

The act of exchanging money for goods and services has been around for thousands of years, but only in the past few decades has it morphed into a complicated web of currencies and payment platforms.

Today, we’re sitting down with Qolo’s Darren Beyer, Founder & Chief Product and Strategy Officer, to get the inside scoop on the launch of Qolo Accelerator, a unique fast-track solution that allows businesses to get to market quickly while future-proofing their growth and giving them an autonomy option down the line.

An omnichannel platform with more firepower, scalability, and security to payments

Imagine everyday being payday. For employees, no more waiting for the two-week pay cycle to complete; the freedom of deciding when you get paid. For employers, the ability to reduce workplace turnover while providing an essential service.Wouldn’t that be nice? The good news is, an on-demand payments solution is already here and ready for those businesses who want to access it, with significant benefits for employers and employees alike. So, what’s the hold up?

As consumer behavior around payments evolves at an accelerated pace - catapulted by the Coronavirus pandemic and other factors -- it is important for new entrants in the fintech world to respond to these changing demands. And it starts by picking the right payment network.So what are all of the different solutions available to fintech product companies and how should they navigate the process of picking a network?We’ve broken it down.

As the modern-day labor force increasingly moves away from the confines of a traditional 9-5 office job and towards alternative avenues, the gig economy is experiencing incredible growth, effectively reshaping the global marketplace and giving us a glimpse into what the future of employment could look like.

In mid-November, Qolo CEO Patricia Montesi spoke at the 2020 Finance Magnates Virtual Summit panel, “Where are Payments Heading?”

We spoke recently with Eric Bachman, former Chief Operating Officer of Marqeta and one of Qolo’s newest board members to discuss the biggest needs not being met in payments right now, and how Qolo is set to change the industry.

Go direct. Get as much payments functionality as you can under one roof.

Alongside the fintech industry’s reputation as forward-thinking and fast-moving, lies a parallel universe of notoriously slow players and systems that are still nostalgic for an era gone by.

There’s a new year ahead of us, and an energized base of companies and fintech firms looking to improve the way they do business. Qolo continues its acceleration. Stick with us, we’re just getting started.

VISA is now elevating the fleet card world by enforcing a set of standards that fuel merchants must adhere to, creating a framework to facilitate a more standardized process. In doing so, VISA is tearing down barriers to entry that once excluded smaller merchants to provide a larger footprint and enable fleets to fuel up at more locations with fewer limitations.

The past decade has seen a sweeping transformation of consumer behaviors, yet major payments providers have not proportionately reflected this shift. Not until a global pandemic hit did we see a concerted effort by the financial sector to elevate products and services. This era of change has contributed to the rise of fintechs, which now account for 7.1% of all startups globally. We’ve even seen growing investor interest in the fintech space, with the likes of Marqeta estimated to be valued at $4.3 billion after filing its IPO. However, with this rapid transformation arose an entirely new and dangerous risk: tunnel vision.

As pandemic lockdowns became a new reality back in March 2020, our blog post urged that businesses should be prepared for a post-COVID 19 recovery. As we revisit those predictions, it’s evident that world markets have not reached the moment of universal recovery. In fact, concerns regarding the Delta variant are showing us that we might not see a definitive end to the global crisis for a while.