From the continued relevance of paper checks to the rapid growth of digital technology, payments continues to be one of the most fascinating — and important — areas in fintech.
In this week’s Streamly interview, William Mills, CEO of the William Mills Agency, talks with Kevin Brown, CMO and Head of Corporate Development for Onbe. The two men discuss a variety of key issues in the payments world, including the potential for AI to revolutionize payment systems and the future of cross-border payments.
“One of the very prevalent modalities, or payment instruments, that still exist are paper-based checks. We did research with the team at Oliver Wyman and, in 2023, there were still 1.7 trillion dollars of paper check or cash-based B2C payments. A huge amount of paper that’s out there. Checks are dated, not a great customer experience, require action on behalf of the consumer and they’re really expensive to corporate clients … As an industry, we have a huge opportunity to still alleviate a significant amount of pain, both for the ultimate enterprises and then their consumers and recipients, just by the doing away of paper checks.”
Onbe manages and modernizes consumer and workforce disbursements for corporate customers. The company’s technology platform powers a suite of turnkey managed disbursement solutions that enable its customers to outsource their entire B2C disbursement operations. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Onbe was founded in 1996. Bala Janakiraman Iyer is CEO.
In his role at Onbe, Kevin Brown leads marketing, corporate development, business development, and communications. A fintech and payments operator with experience at both public and private equity-backed businesses, Brown is a graduate of Marist College (BA) and Pace University (MBA).