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Fran Duggan
Name: Fran Duggan
Title: CEO And Co-Founder, Payrailz
Age: 55
Experience: 30 years
If your customers hate taking valuable time to pay their bills, a new fintech firm based in Glastonbury, Connecticut may have the perfect solution to help make their lives easier. Payrailz, a “do it for you” payments and money transfer solution that aims to partner with small and regional banks and credit unions, uses artificial intelligence to deliver insights about consumers’ billing and payment accounts to make paying the bills easier. By leveraging bank data, the application gets to know the consumer and makes recommendations that, with the user’s approval, will help streamline the bill-paying process, and ultimately greatly reduce – or even potentially eliminate – time spent paying bills. Fran Duggan, a 30-year banking veteran who spent a third of that time running his own fintech consulting firm, co-founded Payrailz in 2017 and is currently the company’s CEO. Payrailz raised $6.1 million in funding from First Data, Live Oak Ventures, Woodforest National Bank, Webster Bank and TTV Capital in early December. “Payrailz came about from where my passions have always lied, from the payments side,” he told Banker & Tradesman. “There has to be better ways to help banks deliver more value to their customers.”
Q: How does Payrailz work?
A: Without getting bogged down in all the technical details, here is the simplest way I find people can appreciate what Payrailz provides. I’m sure you have bills to pay each month. When you go home on a Friday and want to sit down to have a beer, the last thing you want to do is pay your bills. And it gets worse when you realize you forgot to pay that bill that was due last Thursday. With Payrailz, you can pay all of your bills on this one platform.
We tried to come up with a tool that doesn’t just pay the bills, but has the ability to pay the bills for you. We want to find a way to help make your life easier. We are addressing this “do it for me” mentality. The platform can recognize patterns in people’s spending and make recommendations. For example, the bank might say, “Hey, I notice you don’t get paid until Thursday; let us set up those bills to go out after you get paid.”
Current providers don’t have this technology. A company like ours has access to the resources needed to take the payment experience to a whole new level. And in doing so, we can help banks and credit unions deliver more value to their customers.
Q: How does the artificial intelligence factor into the platform?
A: While we would never want to take control of people’s money away from the people, we can use machine learning and data to make recommendations. Our banks have a lot of data. They have information on customer’s paying habits from who you pay to when you like to pay. We can leverage that data from the bank and use it to sense certain paying habits, but we always ask and confirm that is the way you want to do it. We are taking the data banks already have, and using the power of our platform to deliver new value to customers.
Nobody likes doing bills the old way, I can tell you that. Payrailz came about because it’s a new approach to an old problem. For example, let’s say there is a house you want to build. You can build it yourself or work with us where we are taking the next step and saying “Would you like us to deliver the house already built just the way you like it?” Nobody has ever told us they like paying bills the old way, so we think we have hit on something.
Q: How well would you say banks and credit unions have done at integrating technology into their infrastructure?
A: I think it’s been tough for them. I think existing technology providers have tried to lock them into their old stale solutions. Having been in banking, we all wanted to do more. But how do we leap frog past the Venmos and PayPals of the world? A lot of banks are starting to break out of the handcuffs. We want to support them instead of going to straight to customers, which other fintechs have done.
If I had to sum it up, banks need to find a way to add more value, and payments is the place. For banks, they need to add customer relationships. If you are doing transactions and paying your bills through a bank, that is a real relationship, and that is why we think banks need to grab those relationships, and regain the space they are losing to the non-bank offerings. We are about enabling them to take back market share and be back at the center of customer’s financial lives.
Q: What is your plan for the future?
A: We want to expand along everything we are talking about now. There is a lot of uses for the intelligence and data we are talking about. The data we gather, we pass back to banks, and we are helping those banks and credit unions to really jump ahead by leveraging our platform. The one thing we like about our platform is it is not a one-point solution. We have a platform of tools that allows us to create unique solutions for our clients. We have been leveraging our platform to develop new solutions for end users and I don’t see us stopping that.
Duggan’s Five Tips For Forward-Thinking Innovation:
- Trust your focus groups, especially your kids.
- Study other industries: they have a wealth of information.
- To quote Wayne Gretzki, “Skate to where the puck is. Not wear the puck has been.”
- Seek to provide solutions that add value to the actual user of the service or offering.
- It is not about technology for technology’s sake. Think of how to apply technology to solve real problems.
