Visit our guests DealHub 360 here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H030plB0

Tired of chasing documents and updates across spreadsheets, inboxes, and shared drives? We bring together the creators of DealHub 360, Deepika Shahani and Paul Manley, to show how a centralized loan origination portal helps ISOs, lenders, and equipment vendors move faster, stay compliant, and reduce risk without adding headcount. Paul Manley shares two decades of payments and architecture experience—from ACH roots to international builds—while Topeka Shahani connects the dots from equipment finance to a platform purpose-built for modern lending.

We introduce DealHub 360, an AI-powered loan origination portal built to replace spreadsheets and scattered emails with a single workflow for ISOs, lenders, and equipment suppliers. We talk risk, compliance, and how a pilot client helped cut processing time by 50% while setting the roadmap for CRM, servicing, and payments.

• origins in payments, ACH, and equipment finance
• why spreadsheets break at scale for lenders and ISOs
• pilot-driven design with Brad and measurable time savings
• financing beyond equipment: rentals, subscriptions, MCA, SBA
• risk tiers, automation for small tickets, human review for larger
• state-level compliance controls and configurable notices
• AI screening, data gathering, and future RAG agents
• out-of-the-box features, no lock-in, easy onboarding
• security model with roles, encryption, and audit readiness
• roadmap to CRM, collections, and payments under one roof

We dig into the real bottlenecks: fragmented data, slow underwriting handoffs, and state-by-state rules that derail momentum. You’ll hear how a meticulous pilot client helped shape features that matter in the field, from eSign and credit pulls to notifications that keep agents and merchants on track. The result is a measurable impact: application processing time cut by half and a cleaner path to scale. We also unpack the shift from traditional leasing to rentals, subscriptions, SBA, and MCA, and why small-ticket automation paired with human review for mid-range deals strikes the right balance between speed and safety.

AI plays a targeted role here. Today, the platform screens businesses and personal guarantors, pulling from public sources and surfacing insights an underwriter can act on. Tomorrow, retrieval-augmented search and action-oriented agents will help teams find similar cases, summarize financials, and propose next steps—always with a human in the loop. Security and governance stay front and center: role-based access, field-level permissions, encryption, audit readiness, and a roadmap that adds CRM, collections, ACH, and payments for a true one-stop shop.

If you’re ready to replace manual chaos with a system that adapts to your programs and compliance rules, this conversation shows what’s working now and what’s next. Subscribe, share with a teammate who lives in spreadsheets, and leave a review with the one feature you wish your lending workflow had.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

PEP Links:

https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/podcasts/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2176695

A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

Payments leaders love to say risk is everywhere, but most teams still chase it with spreadsheets, screenshots, and crossed fingers. Our conversation with Noah Fitzgerald of Qredible (visit Qredible: https://na2.hubs.ly/H02-3Md0) cuts through the haze. Our guest traces a path from pre-internet POS software to big-processor leadership and into startups that zero in on the same unsolved pain: compliance takes too long, costs too much, and fails too often at scale.

The core idea is simple but often ignored—high-risk is usually operational risk, not product risk. When merchants change products weekly and rules shift daily, human checks can’t keep pace. That’s why continuous audits, product-level validation, and transparent data sharing between merchants, processors, and banks now matter as much as good underwriting.

The CBD and hemp space highlights the problem. Onboarding a merchant with dozens of SKUs and lab reports used to mean manual COA review, endless back-and-forth, and slow time to revenue. With OCR and structured data extraction, those COAs become searchable fields. Processors can instantly locate banned cannabinoids, confirm potency claims, and flag mismatches against rule sets dictated by their bank or card brands. The win is not just catching risk; it’s enabling compliant businesses to stay live without disruption. Instead of black-box decisions that punish merchants after the fact, a shared layer of visibility gives them alerts before they trip wires. That turns compliance from a source of fear into a daily habit.

This shift extends far beyond cannabis. Any enhanced due diligence sector—gaming, adult, firearms, online alcohol and tobacco, nutraceuticals, functional mushrooms, cosmetics, and online lending—faces similar pressures. Municipal rules stack on state and federal mandates. Card brands push VAMP and portfolio scrutiny. Without a living map of requirements tied to real merchant behavior, providers rely on hope. Worse, merchants bear the brunt: reserves, MATCH listings, and sudden shutdowns. When a platform continually crawls product pages, pulls certificates, and matches claims to approved lists and rule sets, it empowers both sides. Banks get traceable evidence. Merchants get early warnings and clear steps to fix issues. Portfolio risk drops while revenue stays predictable.

Pricing opacity is the other quiet drain. Interchange shifts, processor markups, and “notice” of price changes buried inside statements leave busy operators flying blind. Two restaurants using the same processor can pay wildly different rates simply because one negotiated and the other didn’t. Statement analysis as a service fills that gap, translating six-hundred-line statements into actionable decisions. The takeaway is blunt: every company needs a payments brain—whether a chief payments officer or a trusted advisor. The goal isn’t to chase rock-bottom rates; it’s to align pricing with risk, ensure rules are followed in real time, and stop leaks before they become losses.

AI is not a courtroom litigator or a replacement for paralegals. Here, it’s a quiet, relentless assistant that reads faster than teams can and never gets tired of forms. Use it to extract, normalize, and monitor. Keep humans for judgment. Marry those strengths and you change the game: faster onboarding, fewer fines, fewer surprises, and a portfolio that grows because risk is managed in daylight. When compliance becomes a product feature—not a punishment—good actors thrive, bad actors stand out, and the entire ecosystem gets stronger.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

PEP Links:
https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/podcasts/
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2176695

A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

The CPayO Mindset: Turning Payments From Cost Center Into Competitive Edge.

Three percent can quietly devour fifteen percent of your profit. In this episode, we strip payments down to the levers that actually move margin: rails, contracts, tokens, data rights, and operational control. With Viktoria Soltesz of the Soltesz Institute (https://na2.hubs.ly/H02Y1Cv0), author of The CPayO: Chief Payment Officer — the role that doesn’t exist (but should), we reframe “processing fees” as an executive function and show how a CPayO-style approach protects revenue when card-brand caps, state rules, or platform shutdowns collide.

Why this matters to operators

• Profit, not percentages. Measure cost to collect against unit economics, not top-line. Small fee drifts compound into lost margin.
• Rules collide in the wild. Brand surcharge caps, state price controls, and regulated markets squeeze merchants while costs float.
• Platform risk is real. Provider offboarding and token lock-in can turn recurring revenue into an existential crisis.
• Control beats hope. Own tokens, build routing optionality, and negotiate portability so you don’t beg for access when risk appetites change.
What we dig into
• The Soltesz 8-step framework for mapping fund flows, quantifying fees/FX, aligning treasury timing, and building redundancy that actually fails over.
• Pricing programs and optics: how surcharge/dual-pricing rules intersect with consumer expectations and brand enforcement.
• Open banking, wallets, stable-value rails: where they lower cost or latency, and where compliance/UX friction slows adoption.
• Contract gravity: data portability, token migration, termination assistance, audit rights, and change-control clauses that separate resilient operators from the rest.
• Middleware and orchestration: route for approvals and cost, keep PCI/fraud scope sane, and maintain leverage across providers.

A practical playbook you can use this quarter

1. Instrument the money map: Merchant-level reporting, approval rates by BIN/region, cost to collect by rail, dispute cycle time, and days-cash-held.
2. Contract to control: Add token-portability SLAs, termination assistance, data export formats, and service credits tied to approval-rate deltas.
3. Build a second rail: At least one production-ready alternative for subscription retries, fails, and geographic outliers. Test it monthly.
4. Protect recurring revenue: Standardize token escrow/migration rights; document refund runways before any offboarding event.
5. Monitor and iterate: Quarter-by-quarter audits of fees, FX, routing outcomes, and policy drift; adjust playbooks as products, SKUs, or rules change.

The heart of the conversation centers on control. Stripe and Shopify offer easy starts but can shut merchants down or lock tokenized credentials in ways that endanger recurring revenue. We share a real case where token migration became an existential crisis—and how to avoid it. The strategy: use payment orchestration to own your data, route transactions for cost and approval rates, fail over across providers, and keep leverage when risk appetites shift. We also dive into contract trends pushing fraud, PCI, and liability to merchants and POS providers, plus practical middleware options to meet those obligations without becoming a bank.



PEP Links:
https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/podcasts/
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2176695

A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm