In this Episode
Episode 32 of Mighty Finsights features Frank T. Young, strategic advisor, angel investor, and former executive at Google and Global Payments. He joins Rory Holland to discuss what it’s liking building products at some of the biggest names in financial technology. This conversation tackles pivotal moments in payments modernization, including an insider look at why Google Wallet failed to secure a business model where Apple Pay succeeded. Young offers candid analysis on the fundamental culture clash between fast-moving tech and slow, regulated financial institutions, and explains how adaptive leadership is key to navigating that divide. He also shares personal stories—like a piano recital that helped him get hired at Google—and how Kobe Bryant’s Black Mamba ethos influences his approach to consulting.
Key Takeaways
- The role of Embedded Fintech: The highest standard of user experience in payments is one that is largely “invisible” (embedded fintech), allowing users to focus on commerce, not transactional complexity.
- Data vs. Privacy-First Business Models: The fundamental psychological problem for Google Wallet was that bankers did not trust Google with their data, an issue Apple circumvented by positioning itself as the “antithesis of Google” on data.
- Take the Time to Correctly Define Problems: A critical leadership lesson in consulting is to never misdiagnose an adaptive problem (like cultural readiness for change) as a technical problem.
- Market Dominance Does Not Equal Brand Recognition: Global Payments, despite massive growth, struggled to establish brand recognition as a “value-added service provider” due to insufficient investment in marketing.
- The Willingness to Become a Student Again: Young’s personal story of a piano recital at age 39—on the day his daughter was born—illustrated the humility and relentless improvement necessary for leadership.
- Banks Require Technological Consistency: Google’s internal “engineering cycle” often led to new teams re-architecting and re-engineering products soon after launch, sometimes hindering operational continuity.
Transcript
Introduction and Dunkin’ Donuts Discussion
Rory (00:00)
Hi, I’m Rory Holland, CEO of Customer and the host of Mighty Finsights. Every year I have the privilege of talking with hundreds of Fintech leaders and innovators. Today, I’ve invited one of these leaders to talk about the heart behind their work and the deep motivation they have to make a positive impact. In this episode, my guest is Frank Young, a consultant strategic advisor, and angel investor. Frank has worked with some of the biggest names in financial services, including Google, MasterCard, Accenture, JP Morgan Chase, and Global Payments. In addition to his professional intensity, he also has a rare zest for life. It makes for a fascinating combination, and I’m thrilled to have him on the show. In this conversation, we tackle why Google Wallet struggled to take off, how a piano recital with nine-year-olds got him hired at Google in the first place, and why fintechs and major financial institutions tend to behave like oil and water when they collaborate. Mighty Fintsights will help you look past the headlines and the sales pitches to the human side of fintech and financial services. We’re getting curious about the courageous choices and deeply human stories that shape how we engage with money. Join me as we dive beneath the brands to learn what’s really happening.
Interview – Start
Rory (01:17)
Awesome. Frank, so good to see you.
Frank Young (01:20)
Yeah, good to see you Rory. Thanks for having me.
Rory (01:22)
Gosh, my pleasure. So you had shared with me that Dunky’s was one of your favorite things. How did it arrive for you today?
Frank Young (01:33)
It did. I’ve been enjoying it all morning. I’m at about the time of my day where I need to rein it in and start making water choices. The coffee will keep me up if I drink much more.
Rory (01:47)
Did you dabble in any of the donuts?
Fran Young (01:48)
One. One hole. Yeah.
Rory (01:50)
Wow, discipline. I love it.
Frank Young (01:49)
Yeah. Well, I saved the rest for my wife.
Rory (01:55)
I gotta confess, I didn’t know what Dunkies meant. So I have a new term that I can use for Dunkin’ Donuts. I was reminded by my team that Starbucks can be Starbys too. So learning something new every day, Awesome, so I wanna talk about your history. You’ve had an amazing career in financial services, in fintech, done a lot of different things, and looking back on your career.
How Frank Young Ended Up at Google
Rory (02:23)
Starting at Chase Manhattan Bank and then Global Payments and JP Morgan. And I saw you did a little stint in Accenture. But I wanted to start around your experience working at Google and Google Wallet. That seemed like a really interesting engagement project, bringing Google Wallet to market. Take me back to that time and what was that experience like?
Frank Young (02:48)
Yeah, yeah, was a formative time in my life and my career. It was May 2011 and I was working at a division of Qualcomm. Qualcomm had acquired the company that I was working for in Atlanta called Firethorn. And we were working on mobile commerce, mobile payment solutions. We had a mobile banking app that was being distributed through AT&T and Verizon.
Everything was going great and we were trying to get ahead of the, you know, skating to where the puck was going with contactless. Qualcomm obviously had an interest in being a supplier of the chipsets, but at the end of the day there was something missing that was really going to unlock the adoption of contactless payments. MasterCard and Visa were running endless pilots. Nokia was the kind of the handset of choice, iPhone landed on the stage and everybody was wondering what they were going to do around payments. But at about that time in May of 2011, Google got up on stage and I remember watching the YouTube live stream and they had all of the ecosystem participants. They had the networks, the banks, the processors, the merchants. One after the next, getting up on stage and saying, we are gonna kind of tip this boulder from the top of the mountain and get it rolling. And I viewed that as, you know, that’s really gonna make this happen. And maybe instead of working for Qualcomm based in San Diego, maybe I moved to Northern California and go to the Bay Area. So I reached out to Google and through my network wwas able to get the attention of some folks and I landed at Google the week we launched. So they announced it in May, they worked their tails off through the summer. I landed there in August, literally the week it rolled out and my responsibility was to manage the network bank relationships, which was a passion project of mine for about four years from that time.
Unfolding the Google Wallet Experience
So yeah, it was great. You know, I’ve got a lot of learnings about my time at Google. One of the more interesting observations is the fact that they’re amazing at building businesses, building products and services. They’re not so great at operating them.
They innovate. The greatest indication of this was how awesome their launch parties were. So anytime they, you know, had a milestone and, you know, they launched a new product, everybody would show up and great, you know, blow it up, blow the roof off. But then the day after we launched, most of the engineers that were involved in building that thing would raise their hand and say, I now want to go work on self-driving automobiles or some.
Google X projects and I’m going to move on. And then a new engineering team would come on and say, you know, within a week or a month, what that previous team built is never going to scale. So we’re going to re-architect it and re-engineer it and we’re going to build again. And I saw that happen three or four times in my time at Google where an engineering team would build this great innovation. The team primarily would move on to the next fun, exciting thing. A new engineering team would come in.
And the challenge we had from a partnership perspective was I was dealing with the banks. They operate on a completely different cadence than Google, right? They don’t build and then tear down and rebuild and tear down and rebuild. They build and then they run. They operate. And so I had to be the guy to go to the banks and say, hey, listen, you remember that thing we had you hustle to build to support us in V1? Well, we’re onto V2, but it’s a completely different architecture.
And we need your dev team to do something different than what they’ve been working on. And it would be impossible for them to change their roadmap, to do something different. They would have to write off, take an accounting write off on the asset that they worked. And at Google, Google really didn’t care about write offs and development. They didn’t really manage their business that way. And so it was a really challenging environment. It was thrilling and exciting trying to pivot.
Right, everybody talks about finding product market fit and pivoting. Nobody pivots better than Google. They move on a dime. But when you’re in an ecosystem like financial technology, you got to understand you’re in an ecosystem that doesn’t move at the pace you move. So was, like I said, it was a formative time. You know, I relocated my family to the Bay Area for that period. Absolutely enjoyed the time. Everything they say about Google being a great place to work. It’s if you ever get an opportunity to work there, it’s just an amazing company with an amazing innovation agenda. yeah, so it was a great time.
Rory (07:49)
I can imagine. I had the privilege of working on the Google campus for about a year between my days at credit.com and helping build that brand and then starting CSTMR. So I know what you mean. I would describe it as, I don’t want to maybe be too overly dramatic about it, but it’s a bit like oil and water when I think about how financial institutions work compared to how Google works. And I could only imagine.
What the experience was for you and trying to roll out this new product with the Google name behind it, the Google Wallet, and then encouraging some of your friends in financial services to adopt it, only to find out that V1 is now V10, like skipping stages probably, or V1.1 to 2.0. Like you mentioned 1 to 2.0, and by the way, everything that you built doesn’t work anymore. What happened? What was your experience like?
Why Google Wallet Struggled to Gain Traction with Partners
In thinking about marketing, branding, business development, there’s a lot there with the Google brand and trying to, having financial institutions adopt a brand new technology and a new way of doing things for contactless payments. How did that go? any particular challenge, specific challenges you can share or particular successes, maybe. Because ultimately now Google Wallet is where it is. So I’m curious about what that experience was like in the early days.
Frank Young (09:08)
Yeah, well, hopefully, you know, your financial technology audience will appreciate some of this, but you know, the iterations we went through, which kind of went up through the launch of Apple Pay, which really is the standard upon which all contactless is happening today, is really instructive. And so that May 11th meeting, the big reveal of the fact that Google was gonna get the ball rolling.
Assumed that there were going to be multiple bank issuers provisioning the physical card you carry in your wallet down to the device. And in order to do it, they had to work through what was called a trusted service manager, TSM, which we had chosen to be at the time First Data. And so they became the choke point.
And what we realized was that it was going to be really, and the role that they played was the communication from the cloud, from their infrastructure down to the handset. The problem with that is that for every issuer to say, you got to go cut a deal with First Data and First Data is going to provision down to the phone, all of these solutions, it would have taken decades for every bank to kind of get in line and for First Data to figure out who’s going to go first and so literally the day we launched in September of 2011 we knew that that model was not going to work and we needed to look at an alternative model. And so a lot of what I had done at Firethorn where we had created this notion of a two-staged wallet where Google would own the single financial account on the handset and we would, every issuer that connected to Google, from a user’s perspective in the cloud, we would replace multiple cards with one single card that we would manage, we would issue, and push down to the device. And that was a much more scalable solution, but the challenge that that presented specifically with the banks were, well, who’s the issuer of that card? What network is that card that’s gonna be on the device working with? And we went through different iterations where we talked with MasterCard about MasterCard potentially issuing that card, know, using a bank. We didn’t want to put one bank at the center of it so we had to figure out, you know, how do we manage the expectations for the banks and then the banks were like, well, I’m not the face of that card. And that was really a tension point. I probably spent a good one of the four years I was there trying to set the expectations for the banks that if you want to get to digital, this is the way to do it in the current construct. And Google is going to take the lead in kind of taking the complexity of, you you don’t have to hire a TSM. We’ll be the TSM, we’ll manage that.
That was a problem and we spent a year working on that and we said, you know, that’s not gonna work. And then we tried to figure out a mechanism whereby, you know, there was, you know, I think at one point we were calling it one card to rule them all, right? One was a prepaid card and then we looked at a different debit construct and we were always at odds with the banks because the banks just fundamentally didn’t trust Google to be a good steward of the data that we were going to have access to. And so we probably spent a couple, we worked with Discover on one model, we worked with MasterCard on a different model. And at the end of the day, we couldn’t figure out a path to kind of getting all of this to work.
The Philosophy Behind Apple Pay’s Rise to Dominance
When Apple Pay arrived on the scene, they did what we thought was impossible. What they did was they got to work with primarily Visa and MasterCard on what’s called token standards and they were adopted by EMVCO, which is the body that manages all of the standards that the payment system operates on. And they were, they even got Apple, Visa and MasterCard to agree to assist Apple in getting some economics off of the interchange, which Google just didn’t think was going to be possible. We didn’t think anybody would ever willingly give up interchange. I think what Apple did was they successfully positioned themselves as the antithesis of Google. They said, we don’t want data. That’s not our business model. Our business model is hardware, security, experience. And I think that’s what the banks wanted.
Rory Holland Commentary
Rory (13:50)
I think it’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of this story. Today, Apple Pay is a seamless part of the retail ecosystem, but Google had a head start. They had the people and the resources. The problem they couldn’t solve was a psychological one. Bankers did not want to share their data with Google because the Google brand was built on data. Apple realized there was an opportunity to innovate, make a profit, and leave the data alone. Their brand was already built on that philosophy, so it wasn’t hard for bankers to take it seriously.
The Philosophy Behind Apple Pay’s Rise to Dominance – Continued
Frank Young (14:20)
And when they went to Visa and MasterCard and said, listen, we can bring this innovation to the market. We can kind of protect the issuers on the backside using this message of data security, but you need to help us monetize the innovation that we’re bringing. We can’t bring this innovation to market for free. And so they now have a business model where Apple, and they’ve had it since maybe the 2015 time period, so going on a decade now, where they’re getting compensated for the innovation that they’re bringing. Google ultimately needed to adopt a version of those standards for the way that Google goes to market. But unfortunately, Google was not able to negotiate the economic arrangement that Apple had. So while Apple is making billions off of their payment solution. Google’s not making anything even though Google enables payments on their handsets. So it’s a really interesting case study on how to innovate in financial technology.
Transitioning from Google to Global Payments
Rory (15:18)
Yeah, what was the response like in Google to that when you guys learned of Apple’s strategy? Because I thought it was brilliant that they said, we’re not going to use data. I was shocked the way that they talked about data, because that was how we had always understood, particularly in marketing, how you targeted people, how you helped build great campaigns. And to hear Apple say that was so shocking.
I thought it was brilliant. I’m curious what happened inside of Google when you were there. And you learned of this, and then what happened then? Like, what was the response and what happened then?
Frank Young (15:52)
Yeah, well there was a small, a short period of time where, and I was a partnership person, and so I was, it was never revealed to me by the banks we were working with what exactly Apple had going on. We knew something was going to be announced at that unveiling in the fall. I think it was the fall of maybe 2014, It must have been the fall of 2014. We knew something was coming and we knew that it was going to be network led, meaning it was going to be around the standards around which the networks were saying, this is how we’re going to support through tokenization, the propagation of contactless payments. And so myself and several of the other partnership team attempted to convince the product team at the time, we need to lean into these network standards. We need to come up with our own approach because we don’t have the hard security concept that Apple has, we need to figure out a different approach. And we had a different approach, not to get into the technicalities of it, but it’s called Host Card Emulation, which allows Google’s approach to security match that of Apple, but in a different approach that doesn’t involve the secure enclave, which is the chip security that Apple can bring to bear. And the product team at the time, claimed there’s no way that that is going to scale because there’s no way that the networks are going to be successful in getting all of the banks to adopt that standard. And so we chose to proceed under the model we were proceeding under, which really didn’t have a chance of scaling itself.
But the team, the product team refused. And so when Apple announced what they were planning to do, that was actually the point at which I departed Google because Google didn’t have a response. And if at the time that Apple announced that we then had to play catch up, we were probably a year or two away from having to develop the solution, which is about the time that it took Google to get into the game on the token standards. What Google did do was they looked at what they were doing in India behind a product called Tez, which is more of a kind of a P2P platform that worked very well in India. And after I departed Google, because the Google Wallet vision that I had joined in 2011 was for all practical purposes dead, they took the Tez product and they attempted to import it. And there was a period of time probably from 2015, maybe to 2018, 2019, where the concept of Google Wallet was for all practical purposes not viable. that was their response to it was try to take what we did in India, which did get some scale and import that to the U.S. But even since I left, they’re probably on the fourth or fifth iteration. They have a reasonable product in place today. The challenge is they’re just not monetizing it.
Rory (18:38)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah. What did you do after that? What happened? Because this you’re going back to that was 2011, you said?
Frank Young (19:04)
11 to 15 was when I was at Google and then I left Google from 2015 to 2023. That’s when I was a part of the leadership team at Global Payments back in Atlanta.
Rory (19:05)
Okay.
Frank’s Decision to Learn Piano at Age 39
Yeah, I would love to dig in on the Global Payments before we do that. So you had shared something I thought was super interesting. So you’re a piano player, but you came to become a piano player much later in life than most people might typically do. So you had shared a little bit, but I don’t know the whole story. So I’d love you to share some of the story about becoming a piano player, first of all, and then the recital. what inspired you to become a piano player and then?
Frank Young (19:37)
Yeah.
Rory (19:42)
Put me in the room, if you will. Put us in the room for that first recital. Like, what was that like? Who was around you? How did it go?
Frank Young (19:46)
Yeah, well, you know, calling me a piano player is being incredibly generous. I appreciate that, Rory. you know, when I was when I was 39, my wife and I, we didn’t have children at the time. So we had the we had the luxury of being able to buy things like baby grand pianos. And so we bought one beautiful piece of furniture was a Yamaha, you know, self-player piano. But also, you know, you could play it yourself.
We had this beautiful piece of furniture. said, know what we need to, you know, one of us needs to play, so why don’t we get some lessons? And so I had this lovely Russian piano teacher show up every Sunday morning at 10 a.m., week after week, to teach me to play piano. The other interesting thing that was going on in my life at that time was my wife and I chose to adopt our oldest child. And… Very late in the process while I was in the midst of taking my piano lessons and I was about four weeks away from a recital that my Russian piano teacher convinced me to participate in, we were chosen to adopt a beautiful baby girl right here in our hometown of Atlanta. So the weekend that my daughter came into our life, she was born, we were in the hospital the day she was born. My wife was in the delivery room. That same day I had a piano recital. And so we went from seeing the birth of our daughter to me driving 15 minutes north. And it was myself, a 39 year old, tall, you know, physically impressive man, if I could be so generous to describe it that way, and about 10 nine-year-old girls. And so you could imagine on stage it was me and nine girls. But I did two pieces that day, Rory. did Largo from Dvorak’s symphony, New World Symphony, and Suspicious Minds from Elvis Presley were the two pieces I did at my recital.
Creating the Googley Factor by Living Life Out Loud
So yeah, that’s one of the interesting things. I think that story may have gotten me the job at Google. Google hires people, there’s this thing in the interview process at Google where they try to find your, I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to call it the googly factor. Like is there something weird or quirky about your background that kind of set you apart. Some people talk about, you know, the mountains that they’ve climbed and some people have really strange hobbies. Mine was the fact that I was a student of the piano at 39.
Rory (22:34)
That’s wonderful. Wow, you had a lot happen in one day. So your daughter came into the world and you had your recital. What was the response in the audience? How did it go?
Frank Young (22:46)
yeah, well my wife was there. I it was, it’s a bit of a whirlwind and I find that maybe your audience does too that you feel most alive when you’re going through dramatic changes in your life. I tell this to people all the time, right? Like the memories you have in your mind are probably the most vivid when you were experiencing them through moments of dramatic change. So.
I remember I think I changed jobs the day I was moving into my new home. And so all that going on, I could still smell what the new house smelled like. And anytime I smell that smell, I’m like, that’s the day we moved into the house, the day I was changing jobs, right? The piano recital the day our daughter was born.
I think that’s when your brain is firing and things come to life. I’m sure that’s probably the same with you, like the moments in your life you remember the best are the ones you’re going through that have really big change going on.
Rory (23:45)
Yeah, for sure. Having children, and I think you have more than one, right? You have two.
Frank Young (23:50)
I have two, yeah. Yeah. Our son came to us through a non-traditional means as well. We used a surrogate for our son, so we adopted our daughter. Our son came to us through surrogacy. I should write a book someday about how to create a family in modern America. yeah, but he’s now 17 and she’s now 22, so it’s been a while. Yeah.
Rory (24:08)
Yeah. Oh, awesome. OK, we’re close.
21-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son also had kids later in life. So it wasn’t easy for us, my wife and I, to have them. So we are really grateful to have kids at all. But yeah, you’re definitely right. I think those transition times and when I look at your experience through the years in financial services, all the different types of things you did, I appreciate you sharing the story about Google Wallet. Super interesting.
Wisdom Earned While Working at Global Payments
You’d mentioned that you went on to Global Payments. what was that transition like? And I’d love to talk a little bit about your thoughts on all the work you did in marketing and business development, partnerships, and consulting. Because you’ve got your hands on a lot of other things that I hope we can have some time to get to. But I wanted to just get some of your experience working in Global Payments and thinking about marketing, business development, consulting, standing out in the market. There’s so many payment providers. There’s big ones, small ones in between. And now these days with just new emerging fintechs, the market is ever changing. So I’m kind of curious your experience at Global Payments and how you see marketing as playing a role, marketing and branding into the work that you did to help you be more successful, help the business grow and be more successful as well.
Frank Young (25:32)
Yeah, yeah. So I think what distinguishes me just generally in financial technology is the first part of, you know, a 30 plus year career in fintech. I consider myself an expert in both issuing and network payment network activity. I joined Global Payments in 2015 with very little acquiring experience.
And so today when I’m talking to people and I’m advising and consulting or I’m working with my colleagues at BCG as part of their senior advisor team, I’m often brought into the merchant acquiring discussions, which yes, I’ve done that for the past 10 years, but it crosses a wide spectrum of deep issuing experience, network experience as well as acquiring experience. I think that there are too many people that kind of understand the breadth of that. But when I joined Global Payments in 2015, at the time, were a legacy, what’s considered a legacy provider, you know, had been in the business for quite a while. They were, we began to see the emergence of some next generation providers entering the scene on the back of e-commerce. You know, the Stripes and the Brain Trees of the world were starting to show up on the scene. And Global, you know, the story that they had crafted at that time, wwas that they needed to change from their economic model of just being a transaction processor to being a provider of value added services. And so I think Global was very early in the curve of trying to find that next growth trajectory by changing who they were from a traditional payment processor to a provider of value added services. And so I was there for eight years and I think in the eight year period, Global executed 30 acquisitions, very heavy on the M&A front. At the time, for most of that period of time, we were led by Jeff Sloan, the former CEO who cut his teeth as a banker at Goldman, was very well known in the industry as a deal person. And…
Why Brand Recognition Matters So Much in Fintech
We created a lot of shareholder value for a big portion of that period of time where money was cheap, we were able to buy companies, extend the verticals in which we were present in.
I think when I joined Global, we were a $7 billion market cap company at its peak before the sell-off that you’ve seen across the fintech industry. We had grown it to north of a $60 billion, so a 10x in a short period of time. The entire industry has kind come off those and know Global’s got a different set of challenges ahead of them that they’re trying to manage their way through. But in terms of marketing and branding, you know I think there’s some really interesting lessons there because through that migration through that evolution where Global was attempting to be something that their legacy was not. I think we ran into some real challenges with marketing and branding. I used to point out to people living on the West Coast in the Bay Area, you you go out there now, you guarantee you’re going to see billboards for companies like Stripe and PayPal advertised openly. Nobody knows Global Payments. And we were attempting to be a value added service provider amongst software giants. And we were just never able to kind of make the investments in marketing that you would need to make in order to establish yourself credibly as that kind of an entity.
Rory Holland Commentary
Rory (29:13)
That’s a crazy scenario. Global payments grew 10 fold from 7 billion to 70 billion, but they still couldn’t establish the same level of brand recognition as the other players in the space. It’s hard to know what exactly was holding them back, but Frank is making an excellent point here. Your company can experience exponential growth.
But if you aren’t making purposeful investments to develop your brand and marketing, you’re leaving money on the table.
Why Brand Recognition Matters So Much in Fintech – Continued
Frank Young (29:39)
We didn’t spend a lot of money on marketing. I would venture to guess that a lot of the listeners, you know, unless you’re a fintech person, you really don’t know the name Global Payments. You may know some of the brands that sit below Global it’s not a publicly known entity. We know it here in Atlanta because we sponsor Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Truist Park where the Braves play and and State Farm Arena where the Hawks play. But outside of that, there’s a real challenge. I think there’s a lesson for people to kind of, you know, if you’re going through a transformational stage, you know, are you willing to make the investment and making sure your brand is recognized to the audience that you’re most interested in attracting? And some of the legacy players have a real challenge with that.
Rory (30:25)
Yeah, definitely want to come, come back to that, but I’m going to ask, ask a question. So you mentioned learning the acquiring space. Um, how did, how would you say that perhaps learning the piano, um, creating the new muscle, if you will, um, how did, how did that experience tie into perhaps your experience learning acquiring and how have you adapted the way that you work now that you’re a piano player at whatever level, right? That you are a piano player. can’t say I can play the piano cause I can’t.
Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of Financial Technology
Frank Young (30:49)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rory (30:54)
So how would you say that translates into your work today and perhaps the work that you did for Global Payments?
Frank Young (30:59)
Yeah, you know, this is sort of, you know, I think we talked about this previously. This is my origin story. And if I’ve learned anything about financial technology and if there’s anybody listening and watching that’s interested in financial technology, know this, nobody is born knowing financial technology or even wanting to be in financial technology, right? There’s, you could talk to people in high school and college. What profession do you want to be in? And there’s very few.
That are focused on fintech, right? I like to say I grew up wanting to be a shortstop for the New York Yankees But I couldn’t field or hit or run or pretty much do anything a professional ballplayer would do But at some point I fell into financial technology and what you find is you dip your toe in and then the current just kind of you know, washes you away. So when I was very knowledgeable on the issuing side and the network side, I remember part of the pitch to have me join Global Payments was, listen, we don’t need more experts in merchant acquiring. We’ve got plenty of them and we could teach you everything you need to know. just need somebody who can bring a product, a product strategy, a strategic perspective to bear. And that kind of led me into the acquiring side. Now I probably know I may have forgotten more about it, acquiring than some people are just now learning. But that’s how everybody gets into this. You kind of dip your toe in and then you get swept away and then 30 years later you’re a global subject matter expert on financial technology.
Rory (32:30)
Yeah, it’s amazing, right? All these decades, guys like you and I end up arriving at financial services. FinTech wasn’t a word, you know, until later, maybe a decade or so once I was into it, maybe a little bit after that. It was a Silicon Valley thing, I thought, perhaps a Northeast New York thing in the early days. But yeah, it’s quite a journey, right? I got in, I was fortunate to get introduced to basically card acquisition marketing in the late nineties in Atlanta, because that’s where I was too, not too far from where you live today. And yeah, just the evolution of this thing. And yeah, most people just don’t arrive in FinTech. some people choose it, but, what a, quite a journey.
A Family Passion for Music
So I wanted to shift gears a little bit because you and I share a passion and it’s, music festivals, family. I love that. I love that you shared a bit about that. So it sounds like you and your family go to concerts together, like any particular favorite venues in Atlanta perhaps or in the southeast that you love to go to?
Frank Young (33:35)
yeah, so well my daughter is in school in Nashville, just south of Nashville, and so she’s got me interested in Bonnaroo. Unfortunately, the last two Bonnaroo events got very muddy, so they were less enjoyable. But Atlantis got a great music scene. know, even going back, I hate to admit it, I’m going to date, I’ve already dated myself, but you there was a period of my life where I would follow the Grateful Dead.
Rory (33:50)
Mm-hmm.
Frank Young (34:03)
And then when they disbanded, I started following the Allman Brothers Band, and then they have kind of moved on. And so now I’m trying to find a new act to follow. There’s a few. You’ll see me at a Springsteen concert if he ever comes through. Atlanta. Big fan of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats is somebody good. I’ve attended my favorite venue of all is Red Rock outside of Denver. It was fantastic venuo to see a concert at.
Rory (34:30)
Remarkable, yeah.
Frank Young (34:31)
And in addition to my family, my college buddies and I years ago found ourselves at the Coachella music festival, but we went to the music event that people referred to as Old Chella. You know, we rented an Airbnb and hired a celebrity chef to come cook for us for the weekend. There were 20 of us all together, but we got to see six acts you would never see at a single event that included Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, The Who, you know, there were quite a few members of that weekend that really shined that weekend.
Rory (35:16)
That’s awesome. Yeah, I remember the Atlanta Music Festival when it was really small. I lived there from 94 to 2003. So in the mid 90s, it was awesome. Small, great bands. But I too have done a little bit of what you’ve done. I love to follow a band called Fish and widespread panic. my wife and I used to go to the New Year’s shows in Atlanta because panic always played a New Year’s show. And that carried over to me traveling to Austin for the first time in the mid 90s. So that was my first experience traveling, coming to a show in Austin and just experiencing this town that I live in now. It’s just awesome. yeah, there’s so much stuff we can talk about with music. I drag my kids to some shows from time to time. We’ve definitely done some really fun things.
I was a kind of heavy metal guy as a younger kid. Metallica was a fan. I was a fan and we lived in the Bay Area. We saw them a handful of times since they’re from the Bay Area. And my wife tolerated it, if I’m honest. But yeah, it was super fun. So one more thing on that topic because you had mentioned, I saw New Orleans on some of your experiences and the Pete Fountain half fast walking club.
Frank Young (36:24)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Half-Fast Walking Club
Rory (36:40)
What is a half-assed walking club, first of all? like, what is it about that? Like, what does that say about you? You’re part of that? And like the New Orleans thing? Tell us a little bit about that.
Frank Young (36:50)
Yeah, New Orleans is one of my, well, it’s probably my favorite city in America. think it’s got a level of soul you don’t find in other cities. And so I got connected through a friend of a friend. Pete Fountain was a famous jazz clarinet player. He would often make appearances on the Johnny Carson show. He’s in the New Orleans Jazz Hall of Fame.
And so he’s a very well-known figure in New Orleans jazz circles. And he was, when he was alive, the head of the crew that walked down Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras. Nobody else walks down Bourbon Street. They all go down Canal Street, which isn’t Bourbon Street, but Pete Fountain.
We would start at five o’clock in the morning on Mardi Gras Day, Tuesday morning, and we would walk through the early afternoon. John Goodman, the actor, for a period of time, was also a member of the half. It’s half fast, meaning you walk slowly, but it’s also a play on words in that, you know, half fast because we’re kind of a bunch of knuckleheads that you know, like to have a good time on Mardi Gras. I can admit that you would get fully dressed in costume. You know, I walked as a toy soldier. I walked as a, you now they wear colorful tuxedos. They’ve kind of clasped it up a little bit. But it was a wonderful day. And, you know, it was great that I was a part of it for the period of time that I was a part of it and, you know, participate in New Orleans. Katrina was like kind of in the middle of my time that I was actively involved and so it was a way to kind of give back to the city and help them rebuild after Katrina. But at some point the physical toll walking in a crew on Mardi Gras takes on a man’s body needs to slow down. But I thoroughly enjoyed that period of time in my life participating in it. I’m still a dues paying member so anytime I want to get back involved I can but it’s a…
Rory (38:55)
So if anybody wants to join, they know where to look up for you to.
Frank Young (38:57)
Yeah, give me a call. Absolutely.
Rory (38:59)
So staying a little bit on some of your personal experiences and I wanted to get your thoughts on your pick for a fantasy headhunting game that you shared with us that we’re both sports fans too. So we’ve got music, we’ve got family, we’ve got sports. We love the work that we do too. You mentioned Kobe Bryant.
Mamba Mentality and Personal Growth
Rory (39:25)
And like, if you could headhunt anyone to work with and perhaps maybe run your companies or work inside some of the companies that you consult to, it would be Kobe. I think it’s a great choice. Why Kobe Bryant and Mamba maybe is part of it. Love to hear more about that.
Frank Young (39:45)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s to the degree you can put your finger on the pulse of this as you’re interviewing people or finding teams to work with. I think the essence of Kobe’s Mamba mentality is, and I try to apply this to my own life, is that notion of 1 % better. I’m going to try to be, tomorrow I’m going to be 1 % better than I am today, and today I’m 1 % better than I was yesterday and having that constant desire to want to kind of push yourself and improve on very small dimensions, right? What’s the math? If you could find yourself to be 1 % better day after day, you’re 38 times better at the end of a year on whatever dimension you chose to be 1 % better on. So little improvements, marginal improvements day after day consistently really set you apart. But you kind of have to bring that mentality of what can I do better? Can I set goals? Can I write things down and try to execute against them? When I look to recruit people or work with people trying to get a sense of their story around, know, tell me something that you set your mind to that you had to work against that you had to get better at and how did you set yourself on a course to kind of make an improvement on that dimension is I think the X factor in what makes what makes people great professionals. But I even go so far as to say what it’s what sets you apart in your personal life. Also, I you could you I could become one percent better in my relationship with my wife day after day or my relationship with my kids day after day. I those are just as important as applying that mindset to your professional life is trying to figure out how to apply it to your personal life, any dimension of your life. But that’s why I shared with you I think you know my fantasy sports team bringing that mamba mentality to life is so critical. I think it’s a great goal or objective for anybody to set their mind to.
Bringing Adaptive Leadership into His Consulting Practice
Rory (41:48)
You when you think about the work that you do now consulting and I think you’re an investor in some companies, how do you draw that in? Like, because there’s a playful side to this, right? Like you love music, you love concerts. We talked about the half fast walking. Like there’s a playfulness to that and a fun and enjoyment factor. And then you’ve got the intensity of this 1 % better. Like the mama mentality, I think is brilliant. And it is something that my son and I talked about in his career in sports too.
trying to apply that every day just provides a, it’s a higher level of intensity than a lot of people can handle. So how are you seeing tying all this together into your consulting work and kind of framing it around as a consultant? My experience has been at least mine, this might not be true to all of the engagements that you have or the work that you’re doing today. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to project that out, but my experience in some of the challenges was bringing that level of intensity sometimes into client work and consulting work can be a bit much depending on how you temper it inside the culture of each client. But then the follow-on to that I’m curious about is executional. So as a consultant, it’s one thing to talk about what they should do. It’s a whole other thing to get them to adopt something like bringing the mama mentality in and actually executing on the strategies you help them create. Does that make sense?
Frank Young (43:08)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there’s there’s a lesson I learned in my time at Google and it was a topic that they were very they were very interested in ensuring that their rising leaders adopted and it was a concept called adaptive leadership. And in that training, they would kind of the key lesson I took away was that every problem in life comes down to, could either be a technical problem or an adaptive problem. A technical problem is one that if you throw enough time and money at it, you can go from here to here and it might take some time. You throw more money at it, you can get there faster. But it’s the standard time, money, and scope. I can get you wherever you want to go. But more often than not, we diagnose things as technical problems which are actually adaptive problems, meaning it’s not so easy to just go from point A to point B in a straight line. It’s one of these things where you’ve got to go. What Google was trying to do in Google Wallet was viewed as a technical problem.
The engineers thought, I can create a tap and pay experience on a mobile handset and then it’ll just take off. What they misdiagnosed was that it was an adaptive problem. They had to get the culture of the ecosystem to follow what they were espousing and they misdiagnosed it. And that’s, know, the training on adaptive leadership is never misdiagnose an adaptive problem as a technical problem because you’re going to misallocate resources and you’re going to, and I find that in consulting all the people hire consultants to solve problems, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t get implemented or it doesn’t succeed because the culture of the organization you’re working with wasn’t ready for it,
Rory Holland Commentary
Rory (44:58)
The American philosopher John Dewey once said, a problem well stated is half solved, which is great advice, but difficult to follow and practice. Business leaders spend their time solving hard problems and that can lead to overconfidence or a deep seated confirmation bias. That’s why it can be so powerful to bring in a trusted partner with a fresh perspective and creative solutions.
Bringing Adaptive Leadership into His Consulting Practice – Continued
Frank Young (45:20)
or they weren’t skilled, they didn’t have, you took your eye off the ball of upskilling the people in the organization that needed to actually implement the change that you had in front of you. And so that, you know, how does the consulting work? Even the things that I do in investing, I’ve made a half dozen kind of angel investments in the time since I’ve left Global Payments. And interestingly enough, you know, there’s a couple that I looked at because their engineering team had developed this great prototype and I felt good about what they were attempting to do. And then they ran into the wall of, they couldn’t get to the decision maker to make a decision. didn’t position the product or the service in the appropriate way. And then there’s three of the investments that I’ve made where I can tell you in hindsight, I made them off of my judgment of the team and the team’s ability to be flexible and adaptive. And I just felt good about the people. Those seem to be the ones that have a future, right? Because I invested not just in the business and the fundamentals and does the projection, does the cap table look like something I could be interested in? And it really came down to the fact that the people are actually making that those businesses work. so that’s just, you know, listen, I’d love to say that that’s the easy answer, just bet on people. But in my experience, I’m finding much more success betting on people than I am on technical solutions.
Rory (46:55)
Yeah, that’s been my experience too, Frank. You know, there’s been business fundamentals I think we look at as professionals and before we make investments or before we partner with someone or take on consulting engagement. But it is about people. It sounds over, I don’t want to oversimplify it, but chemistry, value alignment, I break it down into really three things. And I share this too with, I have the privilege of talking to hundreds of leaders of financial and fintech companies every year who are reaching out about help, about their business, their branding, their marketing, helping them grow. And three things I share is one, number one, do you feel like you can trust them when you’re hiring an agency? Number two, are they competent so they know, actually know your business and understand the, and willing to step in and understand the challenges and have that context? And then three, do they care? And that it’s hard to find all three. And whether you’re hiring a contractor, like a plumber or electrician at your house, or you’re choosing to try to hire a consultant or to invest in a company. Those have been just kind of three simple things that I look at, both as a business person, but also personally speaking.
Frank Young (48:13)
Yeah, how do you measure the care dimension? That’s an interesting one I hadn’t heard, but it makes sense.
Rory (48:18)
Yeah, I would just say it’s a bit of an intuition instincts. If you feel like you can trust someone, that’s number one. If they’re competent and they understand and they’ve taken the time to ask really good questions, to understand your challenges and you can kind of gauge that by the types of questions they’re asking or they just trying to get to the sale, for example. And the care part, I think is it’s almost like, it’s hard to describe, but I would almost say it’s like a heart posture. Like you can, you can tell when someone’s genuinely interested in you and genuinely interested in the problems that you’re trying to have them help you solve. Not everybody has that kind of tuning for that. I’ve had to work at it quite a bit, but a lot of it is just how people carry themselves, I would say.
Frank Young (49:07)
You know, I had a, back in the dot com days, I had a really close personal and professional contact who was starting a business. was a platform targeting small businesses and it had all set of services around it, but they were pretty well funded and they were looking for a web marketing agency to help them market it. And I thought I had the inside track because I knew the founder. several of his partners and we did our agency pitch for why we should be their agency of record for what they were about to spend on the launch of their program and we were up against an alternative and he came back to share with me that they didn’t choose us and I was like wow I really thought we had this in the bag like what what happened he says well you did a great job on the presentation but we went to visit the alternative.
We arrived at their offices and we stepped out of the elevator on their floor to go meet them. Every employee was in the hall cheering for us as we walked into the conference room to hear the pitch. And he said, you know, Frank, I couldn’t say no to them. You know, they clearly put the energy like it was an all of company effort. I think that’s a great example of how you, they cared, right? And we unfortunately didn’t show that element. But it was a great lesson for Never Take for granted. And there are ways you can you can demonstrate your care for your customers that go above and beyond.
Rory (50:35)
Yeah, I think these days everything feels so transactional. We’re all under the gun to respond to things with those emails or text messages or slacks or whatever it may be. And so task driven. think even this conversation today, Frank, that we’re having behind the scenes, we have lots of things that we’re to do when we’re done recording. But being intentional about being present to folks and actually caring about them.
And whether you can help them or not. I think that’s the other piece of it is the trust, the competence, and the care is being willing to say, don’t think we’re a fit. I hear leaders of companies and people that reach out to me every day, it’s shocked when I say no. Like, are you saying no? I’m saying no right now based on what you told me, unless I’m missing something. So I think that’s something that I think is really important to think about in the work that we do, whether it’s fintech or financial service, whatever industry. And I really appreciate you sharing some of that perspective too.
Frank’s Angel Investments and Work with Fintech Startups
So I wanted to ask a couple more questions as we wrap up and tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing now, like some interesting things you’re invested in or some consulting engagements. Tell us a little bit about that.
Frank Young (51:54)
Yeah, perfect time to talk about it on this topic of care. One of my favorite investments, and I’m probably spending maybe a third to a half of my time on this is a company out of Buffalo, New York called Favor Drop. It’s a father-son team, salt of the earth. I made that investment based on a dinner I had in New York with the father and son where I just felt really good about them as people.
Obviously their business fundamentals and their unit economics pencil out pretty well. But back to this concept of care, they’re perfectly aligned with it. So I’ll give you the use case. There’s a whole category of what I call considered purchases, what they call considered purchases, where a consumer has to invest a lot to make this purchase. So think about buying a car. You go and test drive it.
Think about sitting down with a financial planner and discussing, you know, estate planning. You’ve got to have a consultation. You go to a jewelry store. You got to kind of try the jewelry on. You go to a furniture store. You got to bounce on the bed. Right? Those are considered purchases. And oftentimes the marketing on the back end of that initial intent goes wasted. Right? You go and test drive a car, but you leave without buying. You’re going to get a whole bunch of emails and phone calls until you tell them to stop calling you. Very ineffective. What Favordrop has landed on is a solution, a fintech solution, where at the conclusion of one of those considered purchases, a showroom visit, a test drive, a consultation, a whole bunch of different verticals, the sponsor, think the auto dealer, will send you a time-expiring incentive. It says, thanks for coming in. Sorry we didn’t close the deal. Here’s 50 bucks for you to have at dinner with the family across the street when you’re ready to buy, come back in and see us. That demonstrates care. That demonstrates, and we haven’t really gotten to the science behind it, but I think it creates a level of reciprocity in the customer that they feel somewhat obligated to at least give that dealer a second look. And so because it’s time expiring, it’s usually spend this in the next two weeks and then we can actually give the dealership a signal that the favor drop was redeemed.
We run it on the Discover Network. It’s a prepaid incentive. We can lock it down to a two week expiry. We can lock it down to a certain merchant. So we can be very targeted. The sponsor can support local businesses. And what we found in the pilot customer that we have running this is that the auto dealer that is sending these out today has sold in the past two years more than 2000 automobiles off the back end of this. And they’ve run test and control where they said, let’s run this against the population that get the incentive and let’s track the population that doesn’t get the incentive. The population that gets the incentive is four times more likely to buy their car from that dealer. And so this notion of demonstrating care, demonstrating commitment, building some reciprocity with your consumer seems to have some legs to it. So we’re in production.
Rory (55:10)
Thanks.
Frank Young (55:15)
We just launched literally last week with Discover. In 2026, we’re going to be really doubling down on the automotive vertical. And then by the mid part of next year, we’ll be expanding to think about medical devices, hearing aids, think about financial planners, real estate agents, furniture stores, jewelry stores. There’s a whole segment of sponsors we can take this out to. That business is really exciting to me. I’m an advisor and an investor in that, but I think there’s a really cool way that FinTech can enable these really rich interactions. So that’s something I’m really bullish about and excited about.
Rory (55:59)
Yeah, that’s a wonderful story. I spent about good eight or nine years in the automotive space. So we can sidebar on that if I can be any help at least. Grew up in Detroit, Michigan. So lots of folks in that industry that I know and had the privilege of building a couple of brands in financial marketing, financial services and digital marketing for automotive dealers. So that’s great. Thank you for sharing that. Favordrop. Is it favordrop.com?
Frank Young (56:24)
Interesting.
That’s correct. Yeah, you can see, you can learn more about them and it’s, yeah, we’ll be out in the market. We’re in the market now, but we’ll be full-born 2026.
Rory (56:30)
Awesome. Okay.
Insights Into Frank’s Current Season of Life
Yeah, well definitely, we’ll put the link in the show notes so folks can find it. Two more questions. First one is, in your season of life right now, you and I are in similar seasons with the age of our children and kind of starting to get out of the house and in our careers too. For folks to know you right now with where you are, what would you want us to know about you?
Frank Young (57:05)
Yeah. Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I’ve got a Substack profile. I’ve started publishing quite a lot. You can follow me on Substack. There is no subscription, so it’s free. My content on Substack at itssubstack.com slash Frank T. Young. I try to publish at least once a week something of interest, and so you’ll see content out there on topics like tokenization, orchestration, stable coins, B2B payments, embedded payments, embedded fintech. I’ve also put in there some of my past writings that I used to publish out on LinkedIn. I’ve now ported over to Substack, so you can see that. But yeah, that’s a lot of the perspective that I have on the topics that are of most interest to me. I like to think that they’re compelling and kind of big thinking topics that seem to be relevant.
The one thing I’m watching, we’re at that point in the year where everybody’s going to start publishing their top fintech trends for 2026. I think there’s really only one that matters. it’s generally, I call it multi-layer money, but it’s the concept of interoperability between all the different ways that you pay your credit cards, your digital wallets, your presence online, the agents that you’re about to hire to enable agentic commerce. All of that is going to start complicating our lives before it simplifies our lives. so somebody is going to need to help you make sense of it all. And so that concept of bringing it all together into a seamless experience, both for consumers and businesses, should be the focus for a lot of investment in 2026.
Closing Remarks
Rory (58:53)
Yeah, we’ll put your LinkedIn and your Substack links in the show notes too. Well, Frank, I think it’s a great place to wrap up. Been awesome chatting with you, Frank Young. I’m gonna be in Atlanta soon, so can’t wait to see you in person. Hopefully we can make time. Whether we drink Dunkies go see a show, half-fast walk, you have to show me how to half-fast walk, but.
Frank Young (59:09)
Yeah, nothing easier than that. But this has been a pleasure, Rory. I appreciate you taking time and hopefully your audience has learned a few things.
Rory (59:24)
Yeah, thank you, Frank.
Rory (59:25)
You can see that Frank Young is a man of deep intensity, genuine concern for others and trustworthiness. These are, in my experience, the hallmarks of a great partner or collaborator. Especially when you combine that with the unstoppable momentum that comes from striving to be 1 % better every day. This is the quality that made Kobe Bryant such a force of nature on the basketball court and it remains an enduring part of his legacy today.
In FinTech and financial services, we’re facing some really tough problems. Some of them we can solve with time and technology. Some of them we can only solve by studying deeply and devoting ourselves to relentless improvement. and we also need to be willing to look with fresh eyes and if necessary, the mind of a child. Frank’s story about the piano recital is a beautiful example of this. He could have let his ego get in the way of learning a new skill or performing it beside nine-year-olds.
Instead, he was humble, relentless, and refused to take himself too seriously. May we all learn from his example, embracing the Mamba mentality as we half-fast walk down Bourbon Street.
