What is the primary use case for customers who choose Finix as their payment processing platform and what makes Finix stand out among its competitors?

One note -- the idea of platform payments is something that has been growing pretty considerably. I think Bessemer has some reporting out that, for publicly traded, vertically focused software companies, the market capitalization has increased 10x in the last ten years. And if you look at some of the private funding rounds and market capitalizations, it looks like there's a wave of these vertically focused software companies that are just now starting to come to market and will over the next five to ten years. So the commentary I’d make on the general market is that this is already big and it's going to get much bigger. I think Toast is a perfect example of a company who has recently gone public to good effect. They're making almost 80% of their revenue as a software company, actually from payments. That is the market that we serve and focus on. 

The reason someone would use Finix is, first and foremost, the payments operations that are necessary for a platform are an order of magnitude more complex than a single merchant. If you are a merchant who's selling something, you can go use platforms like Shopify or sign up directly with Worldpay, Fiserv or things like that. When you’re a merchant and you have a settlement, dispute, refund or anything like that, it happens once -- maybe multiple times, but it's all for you, under the same entity. If you’re a platform who intermediates transactions between the buyers and sellers, you have to do this N times. Imagine you have 10,000 sub-merchants -- the complexity in operations is considerable. Our clients use Finix because our software helps decrease that burden and increase the efficiency and the simplicity of interacting with the underlying providers to make that happen. So the first distinction is just, you’re a platform, and that's why you would use Finix. That’s one of the main areas we focus on.

The other use cases that we're seeing are folks who want to get started processing payments today -- it's efficient, it's fast, it's straightforward -- but have an eye on the future, where they eventually want to grow to be that Toast-size company, with the economics, the customer experience, and honestly the lifetime value that companies like Toast are seeing. They work with Finix to get on that path to future-proofing their payments. They get started with us now on a much lighter-weight product offering, where they use our API, and a lot of the payments operations are offloaded to Finix. Then, as they grow, they can take on more and more of the functionality and capabilities as they see fit, for both the economics and customer experience reasons.