Hello Fintech Friends,

This week, we're thrilled to host ⁠Drew Edwards⁠, the CEO of ⁠Ingo Payments⁠, on ⁠The TWIF Podcast⁠.

In this episode, we dive into Drew's 25+ year history of founding and running fintech companies, how payments has evolved since the PayPal era, the most interesting challenges to tackle in American payments today, where Ingo sits in the fintech landscape, and whether Drew will ever run a public company again.

Drew has a long history as a fintech leader, and offers some thoughtful personal reflections on his journey, lessons learned, and where he sees the future of fintech heading. Listen here on Apple Podcasts, or below on Spotify.

See what Ingo is building at https://payments.ingomoney.com/

Don't forget to follow, like, and share the podcast!

The TWIF Podcast: Drew Edwards⁠ of Ingo Payments

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

payments, bank, check, fintech, account, banking, today, public, company, ngo, risk management, atlanta, market, big, clients, platform, money, call, consumers, experience

SPEAKERS

Drew Edwards, Nik Milanovic

Nik Milanovic  00:00

Welcome back, everyone to our monthly fintech podcast for This Week in Fintech. I'm really excited to be sitting here today with Drew Edwards of Ingo Payments. Drew is the CEO of Ingo Money, a company that he founded in 2001. Under the Ingo Payments and Ingo Money brands, the company's become a leading provider of embedded payment and check solutions for fintechs, banks, and businesses. Before starting Ingo, Drew established a Towne Services, a publicly traded e-commerce company, providing solutions to over 1,000 financial institutions, and served as the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. His earlier career before starting fintech companies was management positions at the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bankers Bank of Atlanta. He additionally serves on the board of directors of Scarlet Financial, one of the nation's first payroll card companies. Drew, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Drew Edwards  03:00

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Nik.

Nik Milanovic  03:00

It's great to talk with somebody who's really seen so much of the FinTech journey since before FinTech was even really a word. For most people. It used to be just fin without the tech, but I feel like you've had a front row seat and a building seat for a lot of the introduction of tech and in the financial services world.

And so there's a lot that we'll dive into and learning more about how Ingo works, and what you offer to your customers today. But I'm curious, just even before we go into the company, in your background, was there a point where you realize that you're going to be FinTech or financial services person? Was this always the goal? Was this always the dream? Or how did you really kind of start in your FinTech journey? By accident?

Drew Edwards  04:00

So no, I went to college just to get a degree, so I could go in the Navy and become a fighter pilot. That was my focus and mission and dream, right. And this was before Top Gun sort of messed everything up. But making everybody in their world want to be a fighter pilot, I guess, when that didn't work out for physical reasons. I landed at the Federal Reserve Bank and a management training program in Atlanta, which is a great place to start and a terrible place for an entrepreneur to be, inside the Federal Reserve Bank. But it was those three years that got me associated with banks.