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companies & people
6 Payments Visionaries
We asked you and other Paybefore.com visitors to tell us who you believe are the visionaries in payments and financial services. On the following pages, you’ll meet six visionary executives who received the most votes in our poll.
drew edwards
Founder and CEO, Ingo Money
Drew Edwards wanted to see the world from above. His dream was to be a Navy pilot, but when allergies kept him from the cockpit, he
changed his focus. But the path he took wasn’t a straight one. The quintessential minister’s son, Edwards bucked tradition at every turn. He finished high school early and then attended two small colleges near Atlanta where he grew up.
The fearlessness that comes with forging his own path —and adapting to unexpected turns—has served him well as an entrepreneur.
“Entrepreneurs don’t usually visualize a business end to end and then execute,” Edwards tells Paybefore. “You start with a concept, but once you start peeling the onion, you really see what the opportunity is and you adapt.”
After three years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta —where the jeans-loving Edwards was a fish out of water—and a stint in correspondent banking, he struck out on his own. From 1995 to 1999, he was founder and CEO of Towne Services, an e-commerce company that serviced over 1,000 banks. After taking the com- pany public and spending time in the Bahamas, Ed- wards discovered his next opportunity. The idea was remittances for immigrants, but it quickly morphed into the first full-service, hybrid bank in the Southeast ca- tering to Hispanics, El Banco Financial Corporation.
“We were trying to sell money transfers, but our cus- tomers were walking in the door with checks,” Edwards recalls. “We got into check cashing because we had to.” The bank was sold, but the technology assets became the backbone of Chexar, a pioneer in distributable check cashing technology and fraud decisioning.
Enter Mobile
Fast forward 13 years and Edwards views check
cashing as the gate- way to the prepaid deposit relationship. Add mobile phones, and you’ve got the vision of his latest venture, Ingo Money, a technology provider that enables financial institutions and pro- gram managers to
offer mobile deposit capture with instant irreversible good funds availability.
“For people like us, mobile makes life more convenient,” says Edwards. “But for a consumer, small business or micro-merchant frequenting check cashers, mobile changes everything.”
Although mobile check cashing is still less than
15 percent of Ingo Money’s business, it’s by far the fastest growing. With clients like H&R Block, Regions Bank and a national prepaid rollout with Visa and MasterCard underway, Edwards is bullish on growth. He also plans to add mobile P2P payments to the mix, given 85 percent are still checks.
He credits Ingo Money’s success to his type-A team members—who aren’t afraid to speak their minds— and the power of fostering positive relationships.
“I’m not the operations guy,” he says. “I’m the vision guy. If I do anything well, it’s understanding customers and building relationships.
“Every time you come into contact with someone, you exchange either a ‘good coin’ or ‘bad coin,’ and it goes into our pockets,” Edwards says of his driving principle. “After 49 years, whether I’m hiring, raising money or looking for partners, what I do is cash in good coins.”
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