When Bill Clerico was in college, he wanted an easy way to collect money from friends for ski trips and clients for a tutoring service. He tried using merchant accounts, and he tried PayPal, but he was unsatisfied with the results.
“I really couldn’t find a solution that was quick to set up that made me look professional and that had good support,” Clerico says.
Five years later, Clerico is looking to offer just such a service to small businesses everywhere with online payments startup WePay, the company he co-founded in 2008 and now runs as chief executive officer.
Clerico spoke with Market Platform Dynamics’ Karen Webster to discuss how WePay has progressed since it’s launch a year ago, why its business plan is attractive to small businesses and how he plans to thrive in such a competitive industry.
According to Clerico, WePay prides itself on getting businesses up and running “in less than two minutes,” and on providing a “professional looking” invoicing tool that he believes many of his competitors ““ specifically PayPal — fail to offer.
“Our button takes less than two minutes to set up, and the entire checkout happens on the merchant’s site. It’s fully branded under the merchants brand, with no redirect elsewhere,” Clerico says. “We find that makes the merchant look far more professional than they would using PayPal products.”
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While it’s unsurprising that Clerico would characterize the WePay platform as superior to PayPal’s, he also emphasized WePay’s unique risk management system as a distinctive feature that appeals to small businesses.
“We are set up as payments service provider, which allows us to the onboard merchant quickly and simple, and yet still gives them access to Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover systems,” Clerico says. “We definitely underwrite the risk associated with every merchant, which I think is really important, since we control risk. By not handing off to third party, we fully control every customer experience.”
“At our core, we’re really a risk management company.”
To hear more about WePay’s risk management system, it’s appeals to small businesses and how it views the small business market, listen to the full interview below.
