Chase Payments Solutions & Payroll — a Customer's Perspective

Customer trust is necessary to offer new value-added services, but it's not the only ingredient you need to be successful. Chase Payment Solutions has a long history of providing point-of-sale and payments capabilities to its small business customers. These products are key to starting and running a business. By adding payroll, Chase Payment Solutions has extended its ability to serve as a one-stop-shop for key financial services that businesses require to operate and grow.

Join us to hear from a Chase Payment Solutions customer on why they decided to switch to Chase Payroll and what the experience has been so far. Jessica Young from Chase Payment Solutions will also discuss the partnership and journey that brought Chase Payroll to market. Moderated by Gusto Embedded, Chase Payment Solutions' payroll partner.


Transcription:

Josh Reeves (00:10):

To get started, I'm really excited to be the moderator for this session. I was in a different seat earlier, but excited to put on this hat. My name is Josh, I'm the Co-Founder, CEO of Gusto. And what's really exciting about the session today is we're going to be deep diving into the story and the actual journey of a small business, and I'll talk about them in a second. And it's with this backdrop of what we have enabled, what JP Morgan Chase has enabled, what Chase Payment Solutions has enabled this amazing product that's now accessible and being used called Chase Payroll. As a quick introduction of the folks we have here, we have Jessica Young over at the end, she's the Managing Director and Head of Product with Chase Payment Solutions, close, close partner to make this possible. And then we have two folks from a small business with us.

(01:03):

This is Kirk Strickland. He's the Owner of Southwest Flooring Supply and a Chase Payroll customer. We're going to talk about that located in Fort Worth. And then we have Leah Bostick, who is the Office Manager for Southwest Flooring Supply. That means wearing many hats including being the payroll admin as well. Like I said, as quick context, we're going to then dive into questions. I have about half the session questions for Jessica, about half the session questions for Kirk and Leah, I just want to give a little bit of backdrop here on and why we're talking about this domain. If you were in the previous session, business owners are wearing many hats, dealing with many different pain points. They have this really strong, trusted relationship with their bank. You combine those two ingredients and it's what led to this powerful concept of banks offering payment or payroll solutions themselves.

(01:55):

The win here is not just the revenue or the business impact, it's actually solving that customer pain, having them not have to go to multiple locations all at once. And then given the way that payroll and banking work together, it actually can be a better solution than working with a third party payroll solution. So we're going to get into all of that and talk through their journey, their story, but really excited to have all of you here today for the conversation. So first question here is for Jessica in a nutshell, who is Chase Payment Solutions and what is Chase payroll?

Jessica Young (02:27):

All right. Well, chase Payment Solutions refers to our suite of card acceptance products for small business owners. We have a wide range of products for various payments use cases. So if a small business owner wants to take card payments on the go online in a retail location or over the phone, we have products such as mobile card readers, terminals, point of sale software, third party solutions, and even very simple solutions like we most recently launched Tap to Pan iPhone, where a small business owner can accept payments just using their phone. And Chase Payroll is our newest value added service that we offer exclusively to Chase payment solutions customers. And at a high level, the small business owner logs into our portal. Chase business online, enters in some information about their employees and where they're located, and then they're able to go in and run payroll and Gustos technology behind the scenes is helping to ensure when that small business owner goes to run payroll, that all the various appropriate taxes are withheld and then ultimately filed with the right state, local and federal agencies.

Josh Reeves (03:39):

Yeah, exciting. So this decision to launch payroll, obviously, I know there's a lot of thinking thought process behind it. There's so many different product lines you all can help your customers with. How did you all net out at deciding to do payroll?

Jessica Young (03:53):

Yeah, so a couple years ago we were thinking about how can we serve our small business customer needs more holistically? And so we were thinking about what value added services should we roll out? And we really started with a blank sheet of paper and thought about it from a couple of different strategy dimensions. One was just how commonly used is this particular service among small business owners. And the second was how willing might they be to get that particular service from us as their payments processor and bank? And then lastly, is this a service that's highly adjacent to our core competencies and something where we could offer perhaps some unique value and point of differentiation? And in our research and in talking to our customers, we found that payroll ranked highly on each of those dimensions. So many small business owners have started adopting various payroll solutions. When we asked would you be open to getting this type of service from us as your payments processor and financial institution? They said, yeah, that seems to make sense. And then it was highly adjacent. We already help customers pay and get paid, and many of our customers are logging into Chase business online today to pay vendors and contractors and other use cases. So enabling them to just log into that same portal and pay employees and have again, all those tax components handled as well, felt highly adjacent to what we do today.

Josh Reeves (05:16):

And I think banking, payments, payroll are all just such foundational parts of running a business. I always say for payroll, if you don't pay someone, they quit pretty fast. And so definitely, definitely a critical task to help with. So once you all decided to help with this pain point, you have the choice to build it from scratch partner or maybe buy a company to do it. How do you think through that decision?

Jessica Young (05:40):

Yeah, it's a great question and something that we always think through and we launch a new product is how do we want to go to market? And sometimes it's a really difficult debate and decision, but I feel like with payroll, we pretty quickly narrowed in on partner being the way to go. Payroll is highly complex. I mean, I don't know about you all, but I find it hard enough just to manage my income tax filing each year. And I live in a state without income tax in Texas, and I recognize that if we were to have embarked upon building this from scratch nationwide, we would've had to get super smart on every state, payroll nuance, local tax nuances, the federal rules, and they're not static, so they evolve over time. Payroll is always changing, and so it just would've taken a ton of effort to just get that off the ground and then also resources to stay abreast of all the changes. So it made sense to us to say, okay, instead of building from scratch, let's partner with a company that is a payroll expert. And so that's the benefit of leveraging the Gusto embedded solution is we then can leverage Gustos payroll expertise as a leading provider in the small business payroll market. And so that's why we decided to go that route versus building from scratch.

Josh Reeves (06:57):

Definitely faster to market I think is the common thread we hear versus tackling over the 15,000 payroll tax rules and requirements across the US that keep changing, like you said. One more question then we're going to get to Kirk and Leah. I think in business we always talk about scorecards. What are the goals we have? How are we going to measure success? There's a component here on how it affects your customers, but also how it affects the business you're building, how will if you're successful or not.

Jessica Young (07:26):

Yeah, we're thinking about benefits and the measures of success from both dimensions, like you said, from the customer's perspective and from our perspective. And on the customer side, as we talked about the start, I recognize that time is one of the most precious commodities that a small business owner has because typically the owner and their full set of staff have many hats, different roles. And so really hoping that this solution will save our customers time as one key benefit. And then a second benefit is around just the ease and convenience of the solution, giving them peace of mind. Again, payroll is complicated, and just having that assurance that, okay, I feel comfortable, I'm using a solution from an organization I know and trust can just help with that peace of mind aspect as well. And from our perspective as Chase, again, part of our goal is to really create deeper stickier relationships with our customers by serving their needs more holistically.

(08:27):

And so our hope is that clients who use this service will have overall higher satisfaction, lower attrition rates. And so those are some of the metrics that we'll look at as you mentioned in a scorecard to see is that coming to fruition? First and foremost, meeting our overall adoption goals. Do people like the product? Are they signing up for it? And then once they use the product, are they overall more satisfied with their Chase payment solutions relationship and are they staying with us longer? So that's how we're thinking about it in terms of what success looks like.

Josh Reeves (09:01):

Yeah, I talk a lot about, and I think it connects to your statement, the incentives are aligned, right? Providing more value, helping that business owner makes them more successful, and that makes anyone that's such a good partner as more successful as well. Let's jump over to talking about not in theory, but in reality an actual small business owner and team. So first question here, again, thank you both for joining us, but Kirk, let's start with you in a nutshell. What is Southwest Flooring?

Kirk Strickland (09:29):

We are a wholesale flooring supply company that services the installation companies. We're in the largest market in the United States in Dallas, Fort Worth for new construction right now, and we service everybody that does installation, employ.

Josh Reeves (09:50):

Yeah, very clear need, clear market. But let's get into a bit of the history you actually purchased the business. Maybe share more about that and why did you take on this responsibility to be an entrepreneur? That must've been a big choice.

Kirk Strickland (10:05):

Sure. I always wanted to own my own business and this opportunity came about this time last year, and I saw what I felt like was a pretty good opportunity for myself to jump in there to service this market. So we purchased the company from the original founder who started the company in 1975, and so we've got a long-term business here that we knew we could grow. I just felt very strongly that I could come in and grow that market, that business, and we've got 10 employees and we service, we're in Fort Worth, but we also have another brick and mortar location in Abilene. We service West Texas.

Josh Reeves (10:57):

Yeah, so 10 employees, I was mentioning there's 6.2 million employers in the US, and 4 million are less than five employees, so him being 10 employees makes him larger than by far the average business in the us. So let's talk a little bit about the connection to Chase. How long have you been a Chase customer? What made you decide to bank with Chase when you were navigating that decision?

Kirk Strickland (11:20):

So for, I'm brand new to Chase, and so we started off the business with another regional banker and quickly realized that there weren't as many products that we needed to be efficient. The business the former owner was using Chase got an opportunity to meet with his banker, and the decision was made pretty quickly to jump on board with Chase. And I'm very thankful I did. I don't know that Leah would've stayed on if I hadn't, but no, the products that Chase offers, they were in line with what we needed. And so we've been very pleased with, and it's relationship driven. I mean, without having the relationship with the, like you stated earlier, without having the relationship with the banker at the local level, then I don't know what direction we would've gone with that. So yeah,

Josh Reeves (12:15):

I think relationship will always matter and be kind of the foundational door opening process, but with all the different pain points and now all the different technology solutions, the desire to do it all in more one place. Well,

Kirk Strickland (12:27):

And previously we were with another company that we didn't have that relationship, so it wasn't an easy question and answer. So yeah,

Josh Reeves (12:36):

Let's jump over to Leah. So when you think about the overall relationship with Chase, yeah, just open-ended, what comes to mind?

Leah Bostic (12:43):

I love that Chase is always willing to help. Their customer service is just, they're amazing. And I knew when they rolled this product that it was something I really wanted to use in our business, and I was so glad that Kirk said, yeah, let's try it. I was just really excited. I knew that having all of my, we're making payments with Chase, we're using the credit card services, we're using everything Chase offers, so why not put payroll in that and be able to exit it from our portal? So I was super excited to go with Chase.

Josh Reeves (13:13):

Yeah, I mean it builds upon that trust that

Leah Bostic (13:15):

Yes.

Josh Reeves (13:16):

That was in place already. So when you first heard though that Chase had never done payroll before, so now there's payroll from Chase, I'm sure you think a lot of folks doing payroll. Tell me more about that thought process.

Leah Bostic (13:27):

We were previously with another payroll service and it was very hard to get on board with them. I'm just getting my employees set up. The customer service wasn't strong. I just felt very uneasy that it was done correctly. And when he came to me, it's like, Hey, chase is rolling out this product. I was like, let's do it. Let's go with it. So yeah, it's a great product and so simple to get started, get all the employees on. I literally had 'em all set up in one day. It was super easy. So

Kirk Strickland (13:57):

You've done payroll, go ahead with, we had a previous provider for it, and we hadn't used a payroll service really for that long. We implemented a new software program in April, and at the suggestion of the software company, we went to an online payroll service. Prior to that, Leah had been doing payroll in office, and so she knew the ins and outs and what the needs were. And so the change to a online payroll service and then to a better online payroll service was great.

Leah Bostic (14:32):

Yes.

Josh Reeves (14:33):

Tell me more about your journey running payroll. Actually, I'm very interested. When did you first start? How long has it been?

Leah Bostic (14:38):

So I, having been doing payroll for the last five years for Southwest Flooring, initially we had a software system that supposedly calculated all the taxes. We found out that wasn't correct, but I would also use their calculations to use Chase ACH to pay those employees. So I knew that that works great. It's super easy. So we tried the new payroll service that we went with, their compliance was a little harder to understand. I wasn't confident in my employee's paycheck With Chase, it's like all the calculations were accurate. I had peace of mind just going forward with the whole setup was just, it was effortless really.

Josh Reeves (15:22):

And then the money movement is already there because,

Leah Bostic (15:24):

 Yes, the money movement is, yeah, it's all in one portal. It's amazing.

Josh Reeves (15:28):

We like hearing amazing, but we're going to get to, we want to hear how we can get better and improve the experience too. But yeah, one thing I'll just add, when we started Gusto 13 years ago, it was pretty remarkable then. But back then 40% of companies in the US were doing payroll by hand on pen and paper, and you had close to that amount, close to 40% every year of companies in the US getting fined or penalized for incorrectly doing payroll. I think that's not a correlation, that's a causation, right? Payroll is complicated. There's lots of different rules, requirements. It's definitely not why a business owner goes into running a business. So the peace of mind this, what can you now do with that time? Are you spending time on other things?

Leah Bostic (16:06):

Well, it's just good to have. My employees are confident in their being taxed correctly. They're not going to be sent a letter later on down the road. And I have other 20 minutes payroll, less than 20 minutes to get all the payroll completed, and I have the rest of my day to, oh, grow Southwest floorings, fly here. You were many. Yeah, that's our main goal.

Jessica Young (16:30):

So how long did it take you before? I'm curious.

Leah Bostic (16:32):

So previously when I very first started doing the payroll, it was about an hour to hour and a half process just because I had to manually enter and then calculate and come up with the number that I would then submit direct deposit. Before I was literally trying to call into the other provider's customer service to get help, which was so time consuming. I was on hold or waiting for someone to answer. Yes, the 20 minutes that I can run payroll is really great.

Josh Reeves (17:04):

That's awesome. So I guess, yeah, let's go back to Kirk. What's next for Southwest Flooring? Anything you're looking forward to either on the business front or on the personal front? Business and personal and small business. Be very interconnected.

Kirk Strickland (17:21):

Very much so. We want to see Southwest Flooring Supply go to all four major markets in Texas with brick and mortar. And that kind of growth is, we're looking three and five year plans for how we get there and what we do to make that happen. We also see smaller markets within Texas that we want to be in those places as well. So the growth is our key initiative and we want to be very service oriented. That's who we are is there's a lot of competition out there and we want to service the customer the best way possible to drive that opportunity for growth. So we see the ability with what construction is doing in Texas right now is being a great opportunity for us.

Josh Reeves (18:16):

My brain only works, definitely defaults to a payroll lens. I heard multi-location and multi-location has lots of complexity, comes to payroll or Chase payroll can solve it for you.

Kirk Strickland (18:28):

And the opportunity might be in New Mexico, Oklahoma City. I mean different places with different structures, right? So yeah, that's the goal for us.

Josh Reeves (18:40):

Yeah. Well, I think this is the fun backdrop is you clearly got involved in the business and decided to make it your business, not because you love taxes and forms, because you want to go provide your product to your customers.

Kirk Strickland (18:54):

That's right.

Josh Reeves (18:55):

And yeah, our goal is to obviously with Chase, take that responsibility of paperwork and forms off your shoulders. Let's get into the fun juicier part here. How can all of this be made better? Could be specific to Chase payroll, could be specific just to the small business journey. What are the current pain points, frustrations, things that you want to have folks have Chase get even more helpful in solving for you?

Kirk Strickland (19:21):

I guess probably the only thing that we really came, it takes about four days to process payroll.

(19:28):

And the speed at which that is, it's cashflow, right? And so every day, that's the number one thing that I'm looking at every day. And so four days, the speed at which that can be done would certainly help us, but other than that, the services is super accessible, extremely efficient, and those are key terms for small business for us because as you said, we wear many hats.

Josh Reeves (19:57):

Yeah, well the path is not longer, it's shorter. Four day, two day, one day, same day. That's the beauty of the connection to the bank system. Jessica, do you want to add?

Jessica Young (20:05):

I was going to say that's definitely something that we're working on as we continue to enhance the product. So it's always so validating to hear the positive feedback and for the constructive feedback to say, oh, I know someone in my team is working on that right now, so it's great to hear.

Josh Reeves (20:24):

So I wanted to make sure if people do have questions in the audience, we can definitely, and I might be putting the AV team on alert here, but I'm happy to get to any questions. Could be for Jessica from Chase, could be for the small business owners or anything connected to Gusto. Any questions from the audience? Yeah, should we run a mic there or should they just shout it out? Mike's coming. Mike's coming. We might need it for recording reasons. Sorry. Thank you.

Audience Member 1 (20:53):

Thank you. Kirk, you mentioned that you went to Chase from another regional bank because Chase was able to offer you services or do things differently that aligned with your business a little bit better. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What were the things that drew you to Chase specifically or was it just the payroll solution? Was that a big draw? Just looking for a little bit of elaboration on that.

Kirk Strickland (21:20):

Sure, absolutely. The payroll obviously came down much further into the process when we started so much as to buying checks, I mean having our name on checks and so forth, that service, it was a third party service that we had to go to with the other bank. Merchant services was a third party service for us for the other bank. We were able to step into Chase's merchant service immediately, and that was a key point for us. I've got two showrooms where purchases are made. We sell specialty tools to the installation market. We have installers come in every day and we went with Chase's merchant service and that to me just said right there that look, they have the products there for us. That's the step we want to take is more efficient. And again, it's easier for Leah to process those things and keeps it all in house.

Jessica Young (22:21):

And I recognize I talked a little bit about the different payment solutions products that we offer, but I forgot to ask you in this session, which specific Chase payment solutions products that you're using? I think you have a terminal and some online as well.

Kirk Strickland (22:35):

Yes, we do. We have two terminals and both locations and

Leah Bostic (22:40):

I utilize about everything. They have the ACH payments, the authorized.net, the terminals, everything they offer. I use it every day and it's all working well for us, so we're excited to use it.

Josh Reeves (22:53):

I think I'll add, I think a key part of the embedded concept is to kind of speak about it from a technology lens. Companies can partner, chase has partnered with Gusto, but embedded means that the customer never leaves Chase. The entirety of the experience if folks are technical is through APIs and embedded workflows. And so it's the equivalent of a product Chase has built, which they did build. They just didn't build all of it from scratch. And I think that's a trend in technology. We use different folks for hosting, but the key is how to have the user experience be as simple, intuitive, and centralized as possible so that the customer doesn't have to figure out where to log in, which website to link to. All that stuff becomes hassle and headache that they don't want to navigate. Any other questions from the audience? Yeah, one more in the back. Thank you for walking the mic over.

Audience Member 2 (23:52):

Thank you. On the embedded nature, what about if there's an issue and you have to, Leah might have to pick up the phone and call. Is she calling Chase? Is she calling Gusto? Is she calling Gusto but thinks it's Chase? How does that work?

Jessica Young (24:04):

Yeah, it was very important to us as Josh was saying a moment ago, to really have control over the customer experience and to have us serve as that first point of contact. So if the customer does have a question about Chase payroll, they pick up the phone and they speak with someone at Chase, and our staff is able to address the majority of questions. It's only if there is something very nuanced about some aspect of the tax component where we then would warm transfer to Gustos embedded payroll servicing team for more specific nuanced questions. But we find that we're able to address the majority of those questions ourselves and felt that was important to really provide that one-stop shop and cohesive experience and the type of service that our customers have come to know and expect.

Josh Reeves (24:53):

Just a big plus one, it's Chase payroll, so that's what the customer expects. That's what it is. Three ingredients to enable what Jessica just described. One great, great products should just work. And so there shouldn't be a lot of questions or issues. It just does the job it's best to do. And unfortunately in the technology industry, that promise gets made sometimes and then not delivered upon. And on the flip side, to me, what is just the do north? If you're going to be a technology company, solve the problem you're committed to solving, then we try to do all that we can to equip the team through training. And the fact that we have done payroll for 13 years and serve over 300,000 businesses, there's a lot of lessons in learnings we try to transfer over, but our whole purpose here is to equip Chase to be as successful as possible in serving the small business. Yeah, good question. Any other questions as we're getting close on time, and I know lunch is what is next? Any final remarks or No, we have one here. Let's go to this question and then we'll have final remarks from the panelists.

Audience Member 3 (26:02):

This is a great case study. Thank you for sharing. What did it take to actually integrate with Gusto and have that really seamless experience for the customer in terms of actual amount of time and how easy that is to launch together?

Jessica Young (26:18):

Yeah, I would say overall a couple quarters of development effort to code to the backend APIs. And really we started the journey with, as I was mentioning at the start, customer research. So there was certainly those upfront phases even before the actual hands-on keyboard coding with our engineering team, we engaged in the strategy work, met with customers, tried to think through the exact experience we wanted to deliver, and then worked closely with our design teams to think through the actual look and feel of the product and the user interface. And then our engineering teams were able to pretty easily code to the APIs. There's public dev documentation that's quite easy to consume. And so it was again, just a couple quarters of development effort and then up and running.

Josh Reeves (27:10):

One thing I can add that's a big, big part of what makes it possible to be smooth is actually more organizational. So in whatever bank you're a part of, is this a goal to go expand the product portfolio? Where does payroll fit in that prioritization list? And obviously we can help equip you all with whatever you need in terms of your organizations, but if a company has already decided to do it versus they're like, what is payroll? There's a big spectrum of conversations there to navigate to make it a priority internally because it isn't just a couple of people doing something, it is a new product that the bank would be offering. And then how do you inform your sales teams? How do you inform your support teams? And again, the beauty is you don't have to build it all from scratch. So we have partners that really want to get live as quickly as possible and are just using kind of more templatized workflows all the way to folks that really want to customize every single component of the user interface to map to their specific design preference. Both are possible in this context. We're more like AWS, we're an infrastructure provider that's here to make you as successful as possible. The cool thing is we do have a lot of learnings from working with many partners that then benefit all the folks that we work with.

(28:24):

So I was going to say again, any additional comments, things folks want to add here before we break to lunch? When we start with Jessica and then we'll wrap with Kirk.

Jessica Young (28:32):

Yeah, I'll just say it has been a journey from just starting with that blank sheet of paper and thinking about what value added services we wanted to offer to now being live. It's a very exciting milestone for us to now be available for all Chase payment solutions customers, and it's been great to spend time with two of our actual real live customers. Kirk and Leah had dinner with them last night. It's just so wonderful to have those discussions and to hear the feedback directly and please keep it coming. Even after this session, we can continue to build our roadmap to serve your needs.

Leah Bostic (29:08):

Just with Kirk's vision to grow Southwest Flooring Supply, that does mean more employees. So I have peace of mind knowing that I will be able to add those employees to payroll and get everyone paid accurately and the taxes will be filed and compliant. So yeah, I'm excited about the product and growing. For more employees.

Kirk Strickland (29:27):

The most important thing for me is knowing where my money is, where my money's going. And having that in one location serves a big purpose for us. I mean, it's extremely efficient, it's reliable, and it's very trustworthy. Those are three big words that as a small business owner, you have to deal with those every day.

Josh Reeves (29:49):

It actually is a great connection to my parting comments, which is there used to be all these categories, whether you're in banking or payments or payroll or HCM or, and the reality is to the customer, they don't care about the category. They just want to have a partner that can help solve pain in their life. And that's now becoming more possible than ever is these small business platforms that solve many, many pain points. And I think that's just fantastic. It's a wonderful time to be serving small business and hopefully as an outcome, we make it easier for you all to not just survive but thrive. Thanks everyone for joining.