Jareau Wadé is Chief Growth Officer at Finix. We talked with Jareau about Finix's strategy of selling payfac services to platforms and vertically focused software companies, competing with Stripe's ecosystem of payments products, and what the future holds for how online merchants accept payments.

1. Let’s start with the context around Finix, a brief history of the space, and how the team came to the idea.

2. Can you talk about the positioning of Finix against tools like Worldpay from FIS?

3. For those customers, what’s the core use case? Why choose Finix?

4. What kind of transaction volume would you say the typical customer is doing?

5. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between a company going with the standard payment take rate versus going with the SaaS fee? What might be behind that decision?

6. How do you think about the cost aspect of it? From what we understand, there's some upfront cost in having an engineer on it, as well as the cost of compliance. How does that factor into the thinking around what companies are good fits, and where is the break-even point that you've seen?

7. Would you be able to name a few of your customers on the earlier startup side? I’m curious what they might look like.

8. Are there benefits for the end user, the merchants themselves who are on the platform? Is it beneficial to them to be on a platform that pays through Finix versus something else?

9. I’m curious about the idea of a network effect with, say, Stripe, in the second category. Have you seen a tendency for companies to want to bring along Stripe as their payments provider, where they might not actually mind having to outsource because it's something they're familiar with? Maybe that depends on the market. For example, a health club in Cincinnati probably doesn't necessarily have a preference for Stripe. Is that fair to say?

10.  So you're not seeing companies who already have Stripe accounts and are wanting to use them.

11.  Finix has some partnerships with both neobanks and banking-as-a-service. I’m curious how you think about partnerships and supporting each other's growth. Is it an alternative to the Stripe vision of an all-in-one ecosystem or the PayPal vision with Braintree, where you can offer many different things under one hood?

12.  Is one of the motivations for switching to Finix the idea of—Starbucks gift card-style—using abandoned revenue as float, in the sense that this might be an advantage of running payments internally versus via Stripe or another platform?

13.  Is there anything else that we didn't get a chance to cover that you think is important to understanding the space or Finix?