An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
“Up your game” when I shared a pitch deck with a former CEO who tore it apart and gave me some tremendously helpful advice on what investors would expect before writing me a large check!
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patricia Montesi.
Patricia Montesi is a founder and CEO of Qolo, the omnichannel payments platform for Fintech. An accomplished business executive with over 20 years of global management experience across a diverse set of industries, Montesi sought a better way to serve the payments industry in a meaningful way. Today, Qolo’s investment in infrastructure, streamlined systems, and commitment to its clients powers its innovative approach where they encourage fintech’s to demand more from their payments platforms.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I always admired the entrepreneurs I met and worked with, and honestly, I always wanted to be in control of my own destiny. I have had the good fortune of working for multiple startups at various growth stages along with working for industry titans. I believe that my 15 years in executive roles across all sectors of the payments industry, leading teams to industry firsts, and deploying award-winning technology solutions for clients led me to this particular career path.
I’m fortunate to have founded Qolo with people I admire. They have all been and are incredible thought leaders and payments experts in their own rights. While working together at a previous company, we sought a better way to serve the payments industry. We saw, and still do, many companies who try to cobble together or reengineer their platforms to do what Qolo has built from the ground up.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
I like to say that we have yet to meet a payments model that we can’t power. The pandemic hurled us into this cloud-based and virtually-dependent world. Consumers, vendors, and clients needed payments options to be seamless, and our business model was engineered for that very purpose. If you think about it, fintech is the enabler of today’s economy. The pandemic disrupted the accepted theories of supply chain. Commerce is being forced to pivot (just look at last week’s BBBY results) and rethink how to ultimately deliver goods to consumers. The changes that are coming are going to demand new ways to rapidly and efficiently make payments along the supply chain all the way through the consumer’s final purchase. That’s a big whitespace we think is unmet from legacy payment providers.
Capitalizing on this moment we are rolling out new products following our Series A raise, like the Qolo Accelerator program. Accelerator is a unique engagement model that allows fintech to quickly get to market while maintaining product flexibility, program control, and enhanced economics down the line. A lot of legacy payment providers talk about “Future-proofing” fintech by wrapping APIs around decades old platforms. Qolo is all about present-enabling our clients to win…TODAY.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Mistakes I equate to market feedback: absolutely invaluable. I’d probably say the “funniest” was when we pitched our first investor for our Series A. . As prepared as we thought we were, I remember saying what I thought our raise was worth. I’m not going to lie, it was hard to say. However, as soon as I put out the number, I thought I actually undervalued our endeavor. As we went through the process all I kept saying was, “thank goodness they didn’t make an offer.” We laugh now because it was really just us putting ourselves out there and plowing through a process that is stacked against the uninitiated. The lesson I learned, or rather reaffirmed…never sell yourself short.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I look back at the people I have worked with and for, and it’s all about managing conviction and risk. I have worked with people with great ideas that couldn’t make an idea marketable. Others along the way proved that fear can be the the greatest impediment to success. It’s amazing how much you can learn from both. As we started Qolo I had to wrangle my fear of finally putting myself out front and center. While I never doubted that I could do it, I was tasking myself with starting an organization for the first time. My husband, a executive at one of the largest Fintechs in the world, is my closest advisor. He really just broke through my apprehension and said to me “No one has what it takes to do this more than you, so please stop talking about it and just do it”.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I guess that is really a matter of perspective. If you think about it the macro principle of Commerce has stood the test of time. Medieval farmers bartered with the merchant class to procure goods they couldn’t produce such as housing or clothing. However entrenched commerce is to our very essence we evolved from direct exchange, to value exchange based on some type of currency (e.g. silver). It took hundreds of years and acts of Congress to move off those standards into government backed currencies, and now we even have crypto currencies. I would say nothing is sacrosanct. Change agents spur the evolution of efficiency. Whether that’s an online bookseller trying to disrupt global retail or a fintech taking the extreme inefficiencies out of global money movement. The free market will determine if your disruption is valuable.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“Up your game” when I shared a pitch deck with a former CEO who tore it apart and gave me some tremendously helpful advice on what investors would expect before writing me a large check!
“Stop your Series A and do bridge financing” — before we had enough proof points to demonstrate our ability to execute, a key advisor, now an Independent Board Member, showed me the power of convertible notes.
I will switch it up here and tell you the advice I chose to ignore — “Specialize in one vertical or function so that people can more easily digest what you do” — we doubled down on being the infrastructure layer for all things payments, and because of our platform design, we can power any use case or vertical. Our client base validated that thesis and the VC’s that got it were the ones we were looking for anyway.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Our focus is on providing intrinsic value and gaining market share by listening to our clients and prospects. We are solving their needs not ours. We will combine their expression of need with our expertise to enhance our prized asset: the Qolo global omni-channel payments platform. Our platform is purpose built for solving use cases through configuration. Our clients are never limited by our platform.. We aspire to gain new clients and insert ourselves into broader verticals — some exciting ones being international money movement, gaming, and crypto — one deal at a time.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Hair and makeup in today’s Zoom video world, anyone else long for the occasional old-fashioned conference call! Kidding aside, I think women have been less apt to take the risks that men traditionally have as it relates to founding new start-ups. How many of your readers in the Gen-X age group are reading this thinking, “I wish I had….”? As a mother of an 8 year old daughter, I am especially keen to demonstrate that there are no limits or challenges that we cannot break through.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
For me it was reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography when I was at university. I went into it thinking I would hate it but came away inspired about focusing on oneself and self-improvement above all else — it changed my perspective on life. I was already driven to succeed, but that book became a guiding light for me — to never deflect and to always take accountability for my own circumstances.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Qolo is an acronym for Quality of Life Organization, which is really the founder’s culmination of a lifelong journey to do what we love with people we respect. We enjoy seeing our offering support that same thesis on a grander scale. Qolo is part of a coalition called PaaL, which stands for Payments as a Lifeline, and we enable getting funds to those in need in a clear, transparent, and reconcilable way which is sorely needed in charitable organizations and government needs based programs.
We also partner with some great clients that are looking to transform banking and payments for the underserved communities by providing access to services like earned wage access and lending products that are not predatory in nature just because you haven’t had the opportunity to build a credit file or have a bank account.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
It’s my own interpretation of likely similar quotes that abound, but it is something I always say to my children “There will always be people that have more than you, and there will always be people that have less than you — stay focused on improving yourself”
How can our readers follow you online?
Sure. Readers can follow me on my LinkedIn Page and Qolo’s social media platforms –
Personal LinkedIn page — https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-montesi-ab697b/
Qolo’s Twitter — https://mobile.twitter.com/QoloPayments
Qolo’s Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/QoloPayments/
Qolo’s LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/qolo/?viewAsMember=true
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Patricia Montesi of Qolo On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.