ISV Talks
ISV Talks
Transforming B2B Payments with USTPay and D365 BC
On this episode, Carol Livingston interviews Wade Tetsuka, CPA and Kate Coffey-Bacon from US Transactions Corporation (USTP). Wade, a former CPA turned entrepreneur, unfolds his fascinating transition from the medical device industry to founding USTP, a trailblazer in creating versatile payment solutions integrated with Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. Meanwhile, Kate sheds light on the transformative UST Education initiative, offering over 200 free webinars annually that are rich in content across finance, leadership, marketing, and business strategy, earning valuable CPE and CAE credits along the way.
Discover how USTP leverages its nimble size to bring exceptional service and cutting-edge innovations to the Microsoft Business Central ecosystem, positioning itself as a standout entity in the competitive payment processing market. Through real-world examples, we explore how USTP adeptly navigates complex payment scenarios for clients like multinational auto parts manufacturers and government contractors. Learn about USTP's creative marketing approaches and strategic collaborations with Microsoft partners that enhance their visibility and adaptability.
Embark on a journey to becoming a "category of one" with USTPay's unparalleled offerings that set it apart from the competition. Wade and Kate delve into the power of choice and superior service as USTP combines its payment solutions with educational initiatives, fostering a community of thought leaders. Be inspired by their commitment to swift response times and community involvement, including their work with Northern Virginia Community College. Join us for this engaging conversation as we explore the dynamic impact USTP is making in the payment processing industry and within the Microsoft community.
Well, welcome to this episode of ISV Talks. I'm Carol Livingston, the owner of Dynamics Connections and your host of ISV Talks, and on this episode I'm excited to have two people from USTP, wade Tatsuka and Kate Coffee Bacon, welcome. Thank you, carol.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, carol, and thank you for your leadership in the community and for doing things like this.
Speaker 1:Of course, I really have fun talking with people, so can you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and how long you've been with UST Pay?
Speaker 3:Sure I'll start. So I Wade Tetsuka. I started the company in 2009. So it's been 15 years now Started as a payments processing company. It hasn't been my background, but I started my career as a CPA similar company to Carol, actually, ernst Young but I got tired of being a CPA. I went into the medical device industry and moved around a lot and decided when our son was born that that was not the industry to be in, and so I fell into the payments industry through somebody that I knew from the college. I graduated from the Wharton School of Business University of Pennsylvania, so from the Alumni Association, somebody there was working at her own payments company. She got me into the payments industry and later I started US Transactions. One of our first clients for sure our largest initial client was a government contractor in the state of Virginia that was on Microsoft Nav. So from the very beginning we were involved in the Microsoft space.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting, I did not know that. And yes, we're both recovering CPAs right.
Speaker 3:Recovering CPAs yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, kate, introduce yourself and tell us how long you've been with USTPay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I am Kate Coffey-Bacon. I am VP of Marketing and Events for US Transactions Corporation. I started about two and a half years ago. Previously, I worked with a marketing agency where I oversaw all of our digital marketing strategy for our clients and specifically branding, creating strong brands. So that was my history. I started with Wade about two and a half years ago, right before we came onto the scene with USTPay, so it has been such a fun journey. I'm getting to where we are right now.
Speaker 1:All right. Yeah, I feel like I see both of you at all the events. You guys are everywhere on LinkedIn, so you're doing a good job getting that brand out there. So tell us the basic description, wade of kind of what are your products, what do you have for the Dynamics ERPs, and kind of what are your unique features or value.
Speaker 3:Sure. So our main product as an ISV solution is called USTPay. The product is a credit card and ACH payment solution integrated into Business Central. What makes it different from anything else? I mean, I like to say we make the Microsoft Dynamics platform an open and modern solution for credit card processing, ACH, and what that basically means is, in our case, any user, any partner developer that uses our product on AppSource, USTPay. With that one integration, they are automatically connected into 120 different payment gateways and processors.
Speaker 3:Wow, so anything from like you name it Authorizenet, Paytrace, PayPal, Cybersource, Card Connect, BluePay, Apple Pay, Google Pay I mean, I can't even name all 120. At the end of the day, you have the freedom to choose whether you're working on the developer partner side implementing a solution or whether you're the end customer using Business Central. You have the freedom to choose whatever you want, and that's really unique, but that's really the philosophy of Microsoft themselves. They want their customers to have a choice and an open, modern platform to work with. This is what makes Microsoft Dynamics the best product in the market to work with.
Speaker 1:So I know you also have some other side activities or interests, like I know you have an education branch.
Speaker 3:I'm going to let Kate talk about our UST education, but it's something that we started about five years ago and we did these educational roundtables called Presidential Forum Forum just to kind of get association leaders together in a at that time before the pandemic, in an in-person setting, to industry executives to get together in a informal format in a safe environment where nothing's recorded and really there's no like outside vendors, so that they can talk and learn from each other and openly talk about what their business issues, what their successes and failures and challenges are, and that kind of blossomed into a full scale educational platform and offering. And so I'll let Kate describe that a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Sure. So that is UST Education, and we offer over 200 webinars a year. Those webinars are eligible for CPE and CAE credits, they are no charge to attend and they are led by really dynamic, powerful thought leaders in the space. We are fortunate in that they sort of seek us out now and so we get to have those conversations and start talking about. I love to work with a speaker to figure out what they're going to talk about, their session, their title, course description, learning objectives, all of that. It's so much fun and it gives us an opportunity to talk to so many people in the community because this is an offering that we have. So we have, like I said, over 200 webinars a year, that's, you know, over a hundred speakers a year that are bringing thought leadership to the community. It's it's really fun. It's really fun If, if you're curious about anything, I'm sure we're teaching on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, are these like financial topics? Are they, you know, leadership topics? They are, yes, carol, yes, all of the above, the answer is yes.
Speaker 2:So it can be organization, communication, financial ethics, marketing, you name it you name it Leadership business strategy.
Speaker 1:Yep. So not just like a technical kind of you know like, oh, here's a class on how to do bank reconciliations, so that's there too that's yeah, we've had a microsoft mvp.
Speaker 3:Talk about bank reconciliations and uh and in fact, if I'm not mistaken, that was one of the most highly attended webinars. Still is Like over 60 or 70 people, I don't know, I can't remember.
Speaker 2:Wow, and all of our webinars are reported and they live on our media library so you can check them out even after the webinar is over. We have hundreds, hundreds of hours of educational content there, nice.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 3:Our tagline for UST education is called a conference every week. A conference every week Because we believe that you shouldn't have to like, if you need continuing education as a professional, whether you're an executive, you're a manager level, you're a staff level and particularly staff level people they can't afford, the company can't afford to send all their staff to a.
Speaker 3:Microsoft conference or any other conference you know clear across the country pay for the hotel, pay for the airfare and food so they can get their professional development and continuing education. So this was our solution to that and it's also the philosophy that we follow wanting to be integrated with the community that we work with.
Speaker 1:Kind of going back to the products that you work with. What ERPs, what other than Dynamics are you compatible with?
Speaker 3:Well, that's another area where we differ, carol. As a payment solution, we have a lot of competitors out there. I mean, kate likes to say, if you go to one of the Microsoft conferences and you throw a stone in any direction, you're going to hit a payments company, whether it's accounts payable or accounts receivable payments. You know customer collections, we're on the receivable side.
Speaker 3:One of the things that makes us very different is that the other payment companies they try to be in every possible ERP solution as possible, because they've built a solution that really is universal in many ways. They try to integrate or they try to be in every possible ERP solution out there, whether it's Oracle, netsuite, sap, acumatica, sage, intact. We chose only to be in the Microsoft Dynamics space because we believe and we see this every single day when we're interacting with customers, when we're interacting with the Microsoft partner community is that they want to see that we are experts not just in payments, but that we are experts in the underlying ERP solution itself. So, in this case, business Central. And so when we're on a requirements call, when we're doing demos, when we're doing follow-up conversations with the client, with the partner, they very clearly see that we have, through our software engineers an equal level of expertise in Business Central that the partner does and we're working together with the partner at the same level and that's very, very important because the end user.
Speaker 3:they want to do their work in Business Central. They're not doing their work outside of Business Central. They want everything done within Business Central, and this is how you have to show it to them.
Speaker 1:Is there any particular industries that you specialize in or work with?
Speaker 3:So it's pretty much all of the industries that are a good fit for the Business Central solution. So in our case we have a lot of government contractors, being that the company started here in the Washington DC area, so there's a lot of government contractors that use Business Central and one of their partners, extivia, has a great extension for government contracting accounting to make that DCAA compliant for government contractors.
Speaker 1:But we have a lot of government contractors as clients. We have food wholesale and manufacturing product, just general B2B distribution, product distribution companies, professional services, staffing, okay, so just kind of changing gears a little bit. So what operational challenges are you seeing with partners are trying to solve for their clients, or just customers that are trying to solve their issues?
Speaker 3:Well, a couple of things come to mind. I alluded to it earlier.
Speaker 3:I mean the partner and the customer wants to work with somebody that really understands the underlying ERP solution very well, somebody that really understands the underlying ERP solution very well. And so if they have a question about credit card processing, about an ACH payment that a customer is trying to make you know to pay an invoice, these are vital transactions. It's the lifeblood of an organization, right? So if they come to you with the question, we need to be able to answer that question because maybe the issue could be with the processor, you know the credit card processor. The issue could be with the integration between Business Central and the payment gateway. The problem could be all within Business Central itself, but we have to be able to uncover that without having to like point fingers and say well, it's not our problem, you got to call.
Speaker 1:It's usually one of those right Like no, that's the payment gateway, no, that's the software.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly Right. So that happens very frequently in our industry that there's a lot of finger pointing. So we solve that by giving the partner and the customer a single point of contact. I mean they, you have a question about something, you call. You know you call a deal or you call it Mikaelo. A deal would be on our software engineering side, mikaelo would be on our customer service side, on the on the credit card processing piece. But they have access to all the right people that they need in order to get the answers that they need and they don't need to have to like just put in a ticket and wait a week to get an answer back.
Speaker 3:I mean they'll need to have a phone call if they need to get on a Teams or a Zoom call with a client to get an answer or to iron something out. And this happens a lot, and oftentimes we have to initiate the call even to get people on the same page. But that's what we'll do. The other thing I wanted to mention about the challenges from partners and customers is that they're often forced to use one solution provider because, payments solution out of AppSource, they have to use them as a processor.
Speaker 3:Well, what if the customer already has a merchant account, already has an account set up for credit card process and they want to keep that account? They don't want to have to switch just because they're migrating from QuickBooks to Business Central or Sage to Business Central or wherever else to Business Central. Right? So this is how we solve it, with our freedom of choice, 120 payment gateways and so- that's a really good point.
Speaker 1:So they can keep their gateway.
Speaker 3:If they have a gateway they've already working with, and that's great they can keep their gateway and their existing what we call merchant account right, their processing account. They can keep that and just use our solution as a SaaS integration solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they can have more than one right, Like maybe they have different companies and things like that too right, that's right, we have a lot of clients that they have an companies and things like that too.
Speaker 3:Right, that's right. We have a lot of clients that they have an operational entity in Canada. They have two different or three different operational entities in the United States. Each of them have their own bank accounts, which means they have to have their own separate credit card processing or merchant account.
Speaker 1:So we can have all of those different accounts just layered right in one on top of the other, and some of them could be different gateways, but it's all through the ust pay app, so it's very, very unique in that sense there's another question I had about just you know, how are you successful being kind of a smaller organization versus kind of these big global payment processors which seem like they're all getting bigger by acquisition, right, but you guys are still kind of that small, nimble organization. So how do you find that you're able to be successful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think Wade's already kind of answered that a little bit, in that we have a very focused business plan. We are experts in the VC space and payments in the VC space, so that works to our benefit because we have a laser focus on what we do and what we do well. Being small means that we can pivot very quickly If changes need to be made. You're very flexible to move faster, to make those changes, to act on decisions, business strategy, whatever that may be.
Speaker 3:Just one word on our ability to like as a small company, like, go up against larger companies and have the level of success that we've had in such a short period of time. And it comes down to one word and it's in many strategy books it's speed. So because we're fast, we're small and we can be faster than any larger corporation, and we see that every day.
Speaker 2:Wade and I work very closely together. You said it, carol, like you see us everywhere we're at every conference we can be at, and again, exclusively Business Central. That is our only focus and that is to our benefit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's huge because it's growing and it's nice that you guys are experts right With the software and that whole ecosystem.
Speaker 2:So I was joking that I'm going to make some little like sheriff badges stars that say payment experts in the BC space and start handing those out, because that's kind of that's our 120 payment gateways and being payment experts in Microsoft business central. Those are our biggest two differentiators. That's what we're bringing that's huge.
Speaker 3:I mean talking about visibility. I mean kate will go to a lot of creative, creative avenues to try to get us visible.
Speaker 2:Like at the last microsoft conference she was gonna walk around with a helium balloon I had a huge star gold balloon at the entrance so that, so that people could easily find us, it was a massive gold star helium balloon and undoubtedly healing's not allowed in a conference center. So they took it right when I walked in the door.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that would have been a great idea. So, wade, maybe, I know you talked about some kind of scenarios right where customers have used our solutions. Can you kind of go a little bit further and tell us a little bit more about some customers that have been successful with the product, and why?
Speaker 3:Sure. One example that comes to mind auto parts manufacturer and wholesaler operations, big operations in Canada, in the US, five different legal entities across the two geographies. So they needed, like credit card processing in Canadian dollars, credit card processing in US dollars, again with different legal entities. So we're able to have these five different accounts set up just within our one app and they were able to bring their own processor that they already wanted to bring. So we were just doing the SaaS solution for them. And I should add that they also wanted to be on a nav version. So we worked with Agunia, one of the Microsoft partners, on this client.
Speaker 3:Another example I really like is one of our government contractor clients. They run a base supply store on Norfolk Naval Base and they do card present transactions because there are purchases that are made by the military, you know, in person, and they've got to swipe the card or read the card chip reader. They've got to handle government purchasing cards, which is also a unique animal. I mean it's Visa or MasterCard, but government purchasing cards are. There's a special way to handle them so that you get a unique animal. I mean it's Visa or MasterCard, but government purchasing cards are. There's a special way to handle them so that you get a lower rate. So we're able to do that.
Speaker 3:These are large dollar transactions so there's a lot of times high risk or it could be viewed by the processor as high risk. We have to proactively manage that situation so that the client gets their money on time. And actually, because that store that works or employs some visually impaired folks, we had to work with some software that does visually impaired, gives accessibility to people that are visually impaired. So we worked with a well-known ISP Insight works on that, as well as Stivia, which I mentioned earlier. They have the government contracting extension and ArcherPoint. So we worked with several of the Microsoft partners on that.
Speaker 1:It takes a village. It sounds like yes yes.
Speaker 3:So I mean, these are not like that straightforward or easy situations to work with. And that goes back to what I said. You have to really have an expertise in Business Central, in Microsoft Dynamics, just as much as you do.
Speaker 1:You kind of said something that made me think. I don't think we've talked about this before, but you have the option of doing sounds like level two, level three transactions, which means you can include more detail, right Like for government you mentioned. Government always requires more detail, line item detail. It's crazy. Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 3:Well, I think you said it exactly.
Speaker 3:So level two and level three data and level three data is the most important when you're dealing with these government purchasing cards, in this case, or Fortune 500 companies, they would often use purchasing cards when they make purchases.
Speaker 3:So level three data is basically taking every line item that's on a sales order or an invoice and sending that data over to the payment gateway so that the payment gateway can then send it over to Visa and MasterCard. And when you do that, when you send all this extra like payload of data, which is a lot of data, many people would think, well, that must then make the transaction cost more. Well, actually, it makes the transaction cost less because all of the extra data that's being sent is an indicator that it's a less risky transaction. Sent is an indicator that it's a less risky transaction. And so Decent MasterCard have set a certain rate pricing for those type of level three transactions. So where you're sending line item detail of the invoice, they set a lower rate for those. So the client pays a lower percentage rate for those transactions, much lower 1%, almost 1%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, isn't that interesting. Can anyone get those rates and take advantage of that being able to get the lower transaction fees?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so any business, central user or client enterprise, they could get that as long as their customers are paying them with a purchasing card or a corporate card. So and this is where B2B comes in when you go to a retail store, people are not buying things with purchasing cards there. They shouldn't be, you know right.
Speaker 1:They might, but it's not them.
Speaker 3:They might. Yeah, and I wanted to just mention one other example too, Carol. We work with a company that is in the food manufacturing and distribution.
Speaker 1:Same situation.
Speaker 3:Canada, the US, so they needed to have Canadian dollars in Canada. The advantages that it offered to them, one of which was the level three data and some other automation features. But also we work with CommerceBuild, who is doing their e-commerce site, so that the payment information is integrated back into Business Central properly, and with another partner in OVUU we work with on that as well. So, we love working with all the different partners.
Speaker 1:Kind of looking in the future. What are some new things, wayne, that USTPay is looking to introduce to add value, help people move on their journey to the cloud, if they're on-prem or want to move to Business Central.
Speaker 3:So there's a couple of things that we're going to start to push and we're going to be making some announcements on this in the next two or three months. One is ACH solution. We've got a great ACH solution, so again, this is collecting payments from your customers with ACH. So the cost of credit card transactions is actually very high, I mean when you start adding up all the dollars, it gets to be a lot of money.
Speaker 3:It gets to be one of the most significant expense line items on the income statement of any of these enterprises that are using Business Central. And so we get the pushback all the time and I mean I understand it. And so ACH is going to be a solution that we're going to start to push. It's going to cannibalize the credit card processing segment, but it's what the customer wants, the business central end user, in order to manage their P&L, in order to manage their cost, and what it's also going to do, carol, it's going to help them with with automation, because today let's say, on average, about 20% of collections in a B2B business is credit card, 20% is around the medium.
Speaker 3:The other 80% is checks. So they're still collecting checks from customers. Manual checks right, and ACH payments okay, but when manual checks, it's obvious that it's very manual, right, I mean I? Don't need to describe how manual manual checks are.
Speaker 2:Lots of room for error.
Speaker 3:Yes, but ACH is a very manual process also. So the BC user tells the customer okay, here's our banking information. Go ahead and ACH us a payment. Well, a bunch of ACH payments come in 20, 30, 40 a day. Well, they get all batched out by your bank, don't they All at one time? And you get one big batch deposit of ACH.
Speaker 3:And now you've got to sort out who made those payments. Who did it come from? There's not much information about each ACH payment that your bank gives you, so it's very difficult for you to figure out who the heck made the payment. So it becomes a very manual process to figure all this out. And then you've got to'll automatically post in Business Central that they just paid invoice number XYZ456 for this dollar amount. And now Business Central is automatically going to post the payment against the invoice. Market is paid, send them a receipt, it shows in the cash receipts journal and it's posted against the general ledger and it's all done. And what is that worth to the company? It's huge from a labor perspective, right? So that's one. And the second thing that I'm really excited about one of our solutions, one of the 120 solutions, provides real time funding for the business central users.
Speaker 3:So today, today, carol, what happens is when you accept the credit card payment from a customer, you got to wait till that credit card transaction batches out at the end of the day, is out at the end of the day, okay, at the end of the day. So I take the, I take the transaction at nine in the morning and run the credit card. But or the customer pays with their credit card, but it's nine in the morning. I got to wait till the end of the day when it batch settles right, cause everything settles out at the end of the day as a batch, and then it's going to take one or two days for that batch to get sent to the bank and then or to the processor, and then the processor is going to send an ACH payment for the entire batch amount back to your bank. Well, that's already two days later and it's just one lump sum that goes into your bank account and that one lump sum.
Speaker 3:You now have to break it back out. What are all the transactions in that batch? Hopefully it matches exactly with what you thought you had sent out. You know, in the original batch, but with real time funding, every single transaction is going to hit the bank account of the business central enterprise. It's going to hit the bank account separately. Each individual transaction will hit the bank account separately and there's no waiting for that transaction to the bank account two days later. It's going to hit immediately. When it at nine in the morning, when they process the credit card, it's going to hit that, it's going to hit their bank at that time, immediately. So this there is no other solution out there today that offers this now and you know, and let's say, maybe you don't need the float for two days, maybe you can wait for a day or two for your funding, but you know what it's going to take away the bank reconciliation process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. There's that two days of waiting to get your cash right. And then there's the reconciling that.
Speaker 3:There's the reconciling that yeah. So imagine if you have a thousand transactions a day what kind of reconciliation effort that would do. So here's two very exciting things that we're going to be marketing Kate's going to be marketing to our-.
Speaker 1:To our tiers badge and our payment expert badge. Yeah Right. Well, I know you guys saw that you've been in the channel for a few years now, but how have you gained momentum so quickly?
Speaker 2:You know again, carol, you said it a few minutes ago like we are, we seem to be everywhere. We are on LinkedIn. We are at every single conference that we can attend. We have a very strong community presence. I'm volunteering at as many different conferences as I can. We're speaking at conferences. We are just we.
Speaker 2:From the minute we started in this community, we plugged in and we plugged in hard. I remember I had told several people this story, but two years ago, at Community Summit, I think we knew maybe half a dozen people there and I had my little iPad with the entire expo floor. We had done research together. We knew the partners, the ISVs, the people that we needed to meet, the connections that we wanted to make, and we went in and just booth to booth, met people, plugged in. It was one of the longest weeks of my life. It was just tons of talking being memorable. And then we showed up at directions a couple of months later and it was a different story.
Speaker 2:And I think that's why because Wade and I have been so diligent in being truly plugged into the community. We go to cities, we meet with partners, we meet with other ISVs Genuinely Wade said it like the more time that we spend with partners, we understand their specific offerings and their clients and those specific needs so that we can tailor our services for them. And again, that goes back to that being able to pivot quickly and move quickly. So it has been two years of strong plugin and into the community and the people and the relationships that we've met. Yeah, it's unlike any, any other, any other place. The sense of community, the giving, the teaching each other, the locking arms with each other. It has just been a joy to be in this community and we are looking forward to the long haul.
Speaker 2:Being so present in the community also sends that message to our partners that we are literally here. We are here, we are plugged in. If you have a question, you can find us, like you can find us in a city near you, like we are there physically present. You know we're always a phone call away. Like Wade said, we have a single point of contact for all of our clients. So, yeah, I think that's it. It just is being physically there and I mean I have a backpack that all time's ready to go.
Speaker 3:I'll also add that you know, okay, one of one of our culture principles, carol, is to always add value, always adding value, and with the UST education that we talked about, we've had many with our conference. Every week, we've had many MVPs, microsoft MVPs, be instructors on the UST education platforms, whether it's Shannon Mullins or Kim Dallafield, aj Ansari, andrew Good, dave.
Speaker 2:Weiser yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, kristen Hosman, I mean they've all been part of the UST education platform, so we're trying to add value to the community and not everybody needs credit card processing services.
Speaker 1:But what are you seeing that's driving partners and customers to come talk to you, Wade?
Speaker 3:That that we're different. When we were at Directions earlier this year, I gave one of the general session talks and the title was how to win, be a category of one. And the concept of being a category of one is basically to be in a position where you're actually not competing. So what we do, the combination of everything that we do, our UST pay solution, the UST education, how we use that, as you know, to add value to the Microsoft community, I mean that puts us in a category of one. There's nobody that competes with us in that regard. I mean there's there's nobody that does anywhere near what we do, exactly the way we do. And then the other thing, the two other things that are more just I would say just kind of the usual kind of technical or whatever is number one freedom of choice. That nobody else gives that type of freedom of choice. Bring your own process.
Speaker 3:We have 120 gateways that are built right in there and you can just turn it on or off according to how you need it. You have immediate redundancy, but we don't care. If you have your own processor, that's fine, that's what you should use. And you need international currencies and this gateway doesn't handle it. Well then you need that gateway. Well, we do have that gateway available, so it's not a problem. Then the second thing is so this attitude is just very different from anybody else's that does the same service that we do. And then the second element is the service level. That, again going back to our Microsoft expertise and how we're going to, we do understand our partners and what they need to be successful, and that's how we're going to. And you know, we know this is another cultural element of ours is be a fanatic about response time. So what that means is the partner emails us with a question, we're getting back to them you know, not, not in 24 hours.
Speaker 3:We're talking, we're getting back to them in minutes. Maybe it's an hour or two, but you know it's, it's, it's not. It's not like, hey, we'll get back to you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:No, we're going to get back to you in minutes. Wow, that's phenomenal.
Speaker 2:We have culture fundamentals that we follow at UST and you even mentioned it. Like we have a very good grounding and fitting in who we are as a business and that really a lot of that comes out of Wade's culture fundamentals and being aligned with those. We also have these fun compelling sagas and one of those is to make other people famous. So we love to boost other people in our LinkedIn and our conversations. We love to push other people forward and to truly make other people famous. That is a part of UST education and offering thought leaders a space to share their ideas and helping them to carve themselves out as that, and some of the speakers that we've had from the BC space have really really great ideas and don't always have the platform to share those ideas, so we're happy to provide that.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Can I add one more thing, Carol? Just in conclusion? I just wanted to share a short story on yesterday.
Speaker 3:One of the things I do for my community, like local community philanthropy, is I'm on the board of the Northern Virginia Community College Foundation.
Speaker 3:So Northern Virginia Community College is the community college system around this area where I live, and yesterday I participated in a mentor, a student mentor, like a networking event where we had like 10 executives, industry executives and there were about 30 students, information and engineering technology students from Nova Community College, and the hour and a half session was around like different tables and five or six of the students with two of the mentors.
Speaker 3:So I was on a table together with Stephen Jolly. He's the data center director for AWS here in the Washington DC area, so he's got you know, obviously, this humongous, massive company and me, this entrepreneurial company, USTPAY, US Transactions Corp. And so we gave our perspectives to our group of five students and then later another group of five students came to our table. But the point I'm trying to make, or I want to get to, I guess I talked a lot about how exciting it is to be in the Microsoft space and the things that we do and the impact that we have, and it really is exciting to be a part of this community. Couldn't be more exciting.
Speaker 1:I definitely feel that way too, wade, and thank you, kate and Wade, for joining us today, and it was a really interesting conversation about USDPay and how you help customers and partners with your solution. So, wade, kate, do you want to tell how people can reach out to you?
Speaker 3:Sure, feel free to reach out to me directly Wade Tetsuka, and my email address is my first and last name. So Wade, like Dwayne Wade, the basketball player, w-a-d. Last name T-E-T-S-U-K-A. So Wade Tetsuka, all one word at U-S for United States U-S trans. T-r-a-n-s corp. Ustranscorpcom.
Speaker 2:And I am Kate Coffee Bacon. I am on LinkedIn. You can find me under that name, Kate Coffee Bacon. Email super simple, Kate. At USTransCorpcom. Please reach out to me. I really love funny memes, so if you want to send me one of those, I would appreciate it. But please find me on LinkedIn, reach out. We have a fun time on LinkedIn and you can also find us online. Ustranscorpcom slash USTPay. We're also on LinkedIn. Us Transcorp is on LinkedIn. Follow us there. There's lots of really great pieces of information about our products and our offerings, so you can kind of stay up to speed about some of the new charities on top that we'll be offering in 2025 that we just talked about.
Speaker 3:Nobody prohibits helium balloons. On your LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:That's right. Healing and balloons welcome.
Speaker 1:All right, all right, friends. Well, thank you for joining on this episode of ISV Talks and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye-bye.