Balancing globalization and compliance with Episode Six

Episode Six, an Austin, Texas-based payments technology provider, offers global, scalable payment tech to clients and the financial institutions they work with. To solve for global reach and to create a sustainable business model, Episode Six’s founding team—CEO John Mitchell, CFO Chermaine Hu, and CTO Futeh Kao—built payments infrastructure that can adapt quickly to regulatory developments, but that lies ultimately in the client’s control.

After interviewing the founding team in 2020, The Financial Revolutionist sat down with CEO John Mitchell, revisiting Episode Six’s strategies and predictions for the future. Mitchell outlines the company’s steady course, shares the vision behind their business model, and hints at the future of hybridized, digital payments ecosystems. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: To what extent has Episode Six’s pitch to investors changed in the years since founding?

John Mitchell: What we set out to do and the course we set sail on is the same course that we're on today. And sure: We’ve experienced things we could not have predicted, and we have clients that have put forth use cases that were beyond what we were considering. But more or less, we set out to create a payment technology that was hyper-configurable, hyperextensible, and available wherever our customers may be. That's what we have, and that's why we've been successful.

What are those use cases that have crept up over the years?

Early on, we began working with HSBC on their digital experiences in Hong Kong. When we started this, we hadn't thought about the growth of mobile wallets—that was just the beginning of their use for payments. So AliPay and WePay have changed how consumers can pay and how merchants can accept, and our system fits within that ecosystem very nicely.

Staying on the topic of merchant acceptance, have you seen  the pandemic accelerate SMB payments digitization?

It’s accelerated acceptance for digital payments through mobile, POS, and QR code schemes. In restaurants in the US, for example, there being a QR code on the table to pull up a menu and potentially another one on the receipt to pay was all accelerated during COVID when distance became more important. So that's one example of that acceleration. Several large financial institutions had started with transformation projects, and that spread out across a wider swath of financial institutions. So things did absolutely accelerate during the pandemic bringing us to the point where we're at today. 

Obviously, we're in a different place today than we were one year ago. And the need to transform the growth of Generation Z in terms of their buying power—not to mention millennials—creates a market where these types of new ways of paying with new forms of payment are in demand. So companies that haven't accelerated their transformation projects are going to lose share. But I think everybody realizes that things are pushing forward.

What makes for a particularly futuristic payments tech process?

When looking at our system, we offer a globally distributed payments tech. In the processing world, we're the only company that does that. Many of our competitors are still trying to figure out how to get into the cloud, much less what we're doing. Essentially, wherever our prospects are, we are too. So, to me, it is an important step to have access to the right technology, but then the right technology should be configurable and extensible so that it can adapt to a changing world and adopt new ways to pay with new forms of payment. And that changing world is accelerating—so if your tech stack, your payment tech, is rigid, even if it's new, it's not going to protect you for the midterm or the long term, because you're not going to be able to keep up with changes.

And the medium term seems particularly volatile at the moment. With that in mind, how does Episode Six navigate geopolitical instability? The war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia must have reconfigured a lot of compliance questions for you.

We're offering technology; you can subscribe and have access to our technology or you can license, and so the compliance falls upon our clients and the financial institutions that they're working with. We provide toolkits so that our clients can maintain their compliance—and, because our system is adaptable and easily changed as compliance requirements change, and as regulations change, products and programs can be changed very quickly. The only constant is change; we’re preparing our clients to be able to navigate those waters. 

What was the thought process like to arrive at this slice of the pie that has that compliance-related Goldilocks effect to it? That is, it’s scalable and global, but the onus of compliance isn’t on you directly.

We recognize that for us to be able to work successfully across multiple continents, we need to have tech that is easily adopted in different regions. So, we built all of this around the principle that it has to be easy to be modified. Our system architecture has taken configurability to the extreme. We also recognize that certain concepts exist everywhere. Our clients have to know their customers, they have to be able to control velocity in and out of an account, and we built around these concepts. Via settings, the programs can be created to adopt local requirements. We meet these standards in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the United States because the concepts are the same everywhere, but they're applied differently. There's not a consistent universal standard. 

So building this around these concepts, and provisioning an extensible platform, allows us to satisfy clients around the world. That was part of our plan when we set out to make sure that we didn't have to customize everywhere we went, because customization implies overhead. It implies time, money, and cost. We defeated all that with what we built.

Where do you see Episode Six—and, in general, the payments space—headed in the next few years?

The payment space is headed in the direction of that shift we saw in 2020: There are a lot of questions that need to be answered around digitization and around the companies that are providing the mechanisms for digitization. And there are new arenas to work in: the Metaverse, for example, and cryptocurrencies, NFTs. How's this all going to come together, and what will the technology look like that can transcend these different worlds and provide a system for the transfer of value across multiple value units? That's what we bring to the table. 

Any final advice for The FR’s readers?

For us, staying on course has helped us get to this point. We anticipate obstacles and do our best to be prepared to handle them. Maybe it’s clichéd, but perseverance and staying the course have been very important to us. Everybody talks about failing fast. I guess it depends on what stage you're at and what you're trying to accomplish, but to be able to achieve our goals is important, too. These are tough times for a lot of companies but tough times come and go, good times come and go, and staying the course is keeping us ahead of the curve.