EP 38: The future of getting paid and how it will impact talent acquisition w/ Brian Brinkley

Brian Brinkley, CEO at QRails, joins host James Mackey to discuss earned wage access, how earned wage access is impacting talent acquisition, the future of getting paid and a lot more!

Episode Chapters

00:28 Who is Brian Brinkley?

00:56 What is earned-wage access?

04:10 Bringing earned-wage access to non-gig employees

11:10 Integrating with the PEO community

12:45 Scaling from series a to series b

15:01 How can HR teams implement earned-wage access

16:40 How earned-wage access can help talent attraction and retention

21:35 Does earned-wage access impact financial operations?

26:03 What is the future of employment when it comes to getting paid?

31:52 Wrap up

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Hello and welcome to Town Acquisition Trends and Strategy. Today we are joined by Brian Brinkley. Brian, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Hey, I'm glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Well, yeah, thank you prior to the show to give me a little bit of a background on what the company is doing so I could actually ask good questions today. So I'm excited to learn more about uh your company and how y'all are disrupting the space that you're in. But before we jump into all the fun topics or discussion today, I was hoping you could just provide everybody with a bit of insight into what you do, what you're up to up to, your background. Just I want to make sure our audience knows like the perspective you're coming from for today's conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Sure, sure. So I'm uh currently the CEO of a company called QRELLS. Uh we actually have a product uh called Anyday. Uh we focus on building what I'll call financial wellness platform. And that financial wellness platform's key uh offering is earned wage access. And uh earned wage access, uh, as the name states is the ability to give people access to wages that they've already earned. Unlike predatory lending, we don't lend people any money. What we do is we integrate into HR payroll or time and attendance systems. And let's say you uh were doing uh something in the gig economy or piecemeal work or working as a waiter and you wanted access digitally, you know, to like tips or mileage or some sort of work that you've done, you can just click a button and we can either ACH it to your existing banking account or we could actually issue you a payroll card and within 20 milliseconds, you could have it on a debit card and you could use it while you're standing in line trying to make a purchase.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah, that's really cool. So, so just like one way to just like super simplify it would be like hypothetically, if you're working for like Uber, right, you could get access to your wages same day once the service is completed. So you work from you know in the morning from nine to nine a.m. to one p.m. later that day, you'd be able to collect on on those wages same day. Is that is that like a very simplified kind of the concept? Is it does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Or yeah, that's perfect. Matter of fact, I think Uber is the one that are credited for kicking off this earned wage access platform, you know. They um started off by issuing their drivers in some countries just a payroll card. So, you know, like they're driving all day, they're burning up their gas, right? Not the company's gas. And on the way home, you know, they'd have to stop and fill up and get more gas and stuff to reset for the next day. So it was an incentive to get them to come back to work the next day, as opposed to wait a week or two weeks or a month for pay, they could get paid at the end of the day. And then I think that's just ballooned up into the gig economy in itself.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

For sure, for sure. Do you know how they rolled that out initially? Because I'm assuming at that point in time, like there weren't cool services like what your team is doing. I wonder how they actually like were able to pull that off from an operational perspective.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Yeah, funny. Um, it's interesting. I think the guy that was doing it was a guy named Peter Hazelhurst, and Helm and I had worked at uh Google together, and uh he had just gone over there from a company called Postmates, and he said, What should we do to set us apart from everybody else? And I was like, Well, why don't you all guys issue cards, you know, uh so that you could actually do this for people to get uh retention and employees, you know, because they're all contracting employers. And they did that, but they actually expanded it to what we would call financial wellness. By they said, Well, we can do credit scoring and lending people money for cars, our leasing cars and doing insurance. So that's really how we got started is I took that concept that Uber had built and said, why don't we do this for everybody else? You know, everybody else in the industry, we could never pick who's going to be the next Uber or Lyft or Alibaba or WeChat. What we could do is build a financial services platform and embed it into other HR payroll systems and time and attendance systems so that the average small, medium-sized business could do the same thing as Uber and provide the same kind of benefits to their workers that Uber did.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, I got a lot of lot of questions. Um, I guess I guess my first one just high level. Why, why is the focus on the gig economy? Why not for services firms, SaaS companies, right? Enterprise. Like what is the what is the reasoning for honing in on the gig uh uh services industry?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Well, I I think when I started, that's where we headed into. But uh, like I was telling you earlier, we had gone down that path to the gig economy uh because we were trying to integrate into these time and attendance systems, but then SAP came to us and said, Hey, can you integrate this into SAP's platform? Because they were trying to do the same thing also. And um we did, and we also integrated into I think I was Sonny Prism HR, which they provide software to a bunch of PEOs, and we did it for a company called Alight, which actually handles the majority of the top 100 Fortune 100 companies. And we found that a lot of people are doing it uh for a lot of different reasons other than the gig economy. And if you don't mind, I'll give you a little anecdotal information. You know, when I was younger, I would tell people there was a point in time where my parents, they would say they would go somewhere to buy a car or buy a park uh house or something. And the people would go, when do you want your bill to be handed to you? Because they were getting paid on the you know, the 15th and the 31st of every month. And they could line their bill pay up with their income. But now you you don't have that opportunity, right? I mean, let's say you work every and you get paid every two weeks on a Friday, but your rent is due like Wednesday. That doesn't mean that you're poor. It just means that you don't have access to rent today or your car payment today because you're out of step or your cycle payroll is out of step. So we find that this really helps people that either have an interim emergency that they don't have access to cash to, or they're just out of step with an existing payroll cycle. So they can move money that they've already earned from their from their employer directly to their payer or to their bank account, or actually make a pay in in line. Does that make sense? So a lot more people are doing it now than just gig economy workers.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Well, you know what's really cool about this, and I feel like this is a trend in financial services specifically to consumers too, or that the consumer is kind of like the end beneficiary of it, um, is that we're seeing a lot more management and flexibility when it comes to like cash flow management, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:24

I wrote that. That's exactly what I would say. It's more cash flow for the employee management. That's what it is, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Right, right. Like I know it's like a B2B solution that you're providing, but like when I'm talking about like on an individual level, the benefit is to the uh maybe I don't know if you consider like consumer, right? It's like it's interesting. Like the these tools, it sounds like this industry is is expanding, and then you also have companies like a firm, um, or what's the other one? Uh, there's an there's no, but like these late payment companies where when you check out, it's like you can pay over four months, right? So it's interesting. It's like it's it's like this is how like a CFO would manage a business, right? Like, let's get the money in as soon as possible, right? Let's extend the payments as long as possible, right? So it's giving people a lot more, you know, financial wellness, flexibility, freedom, whatever you want to call it. Um, I definitely see the value in these types of solutions.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

It's funny, is because we, and I'll read this to you, we actually built our mission statement. And our mission statement says empowering employees and working families with innovative financial wellness. And I tell people, it it sounds uh weird to have a vision statement, but we had honed that down to say we're just what you were pointing at. We're talking about employees, you know, and their financial wellness. And how do we build a set of tools around them so that they can have education on financial wellness, credit scoring, you know, lending if they need it. But it's not about being predatory lending, it's about giving them access to the money that they've already made when they need it, not when somebody wants to give it to them, right? That's exactly what it is. And then being able to take those kind of uh uh things and roll them up. I'll give you another anecdotal information. So let's say you're working in a restaurant and you're picking up shifts, and then we look and we say that you're out of sync, but we're innovated, we're integrated into the time and attendance system and your bill pay system, and we go, oh my gosh, you know what? If you pick up two more shifts between now and next Friday, then you can pay your rent without being overdue, collecting a late fee or something like that. So we can say, hey, schedule another eight hours in here or another 16 hours, two shifts, and then that'll prevent you from getting into this long-term debt cycle, right? So we can look at time and attendance systems at restaurants or in um uh companies. I mean, we're working with a trucking company now that we're doing that with. It's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, that is that is really cool. So I one of my questions, just in terms of operationally how this works, is is some of this about like floating cash? Like, is there that type of element of banking? Or because I mean obviously, right in businesses that collect from the customer later than when they pay people, like how does how does that work?

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Well, most employers now they're either uh well, big, big, big companies have enough money to do payroll, right? So we can move money from them directly to the employee if we want to. Uh, some companies float their debt through a revolving credit line. You know, you always hear about Black Friday, most of the time they're in debt. We can move it from there, or we can float it. How we do it is we inject a payroll deduction line item into the payroll platform so we know we're getting paid back because we know that person's gotten paid. And then what happens is we move that money to the employee themselves. And this is the cool part about it. When I built this company, we decided we weren't going to charge the employer and we were going to provide a free option for the employee. So, how we make our money back is when we put it on a payroll card, because we're a card issuer processor, we make money off the interchange that MasterCard gives us for processing MasterCard or Discover does. So we like to tell everybody we're not adding any more weight into the system, we're not putting any more expense in the system, we're just actually moving money onto cards and through the existing system so we can offer it free and we know we're gonna get paid back because it's a payroll deduction.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

So it's free to the client.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, that sounds really like really cool stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Right. Like we always say, how is it that you can give people money when they need it, when they want it? It's free to the employer, it's free to the employee. What else is there? I I don't really know, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Yeah, I hear you. So so one of the things you talked about was like integrations with time and attendance. Uh, you also mentioned PEOs. Do you partner directly with PEOs so that PEOs can then offer this to their customers? Or what does that integration look like within the PEO community?

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Yeah, so um I think we integrated with a company called Prism HR, and they're the software provider, much like SAP and Oracle and Workday R, is they provide HR payroll software. And so we integrated with the software company, they provide it to the PEOs. So now any PEO and an employer that uses Prism HR software, for example, can just turn our system on. They can call their PEO and say, we want to activate that, and then we can turn that system on for them, and they can start providing this to their employees immediately. Uh, we also are fully integrated. You can anybody can Google this, go out to SAP, and we're the first and only certified earned wage access provider on SAP software, and we're also integrated to work day software through a light and a couple other um integrators that I can't mention their name yet because it's not publicly released, but we're covering everybody except for Oracle right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

So oh, that's really cool. Nice. So you're knocking down some really big uh partnerships, which is incredible.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Well, we're trying. I mean, hopefully we'll get to a point where everybody looks at us and sees us as a big software provider and we'll be an overnight success after four years of hard work, you know.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

That that's how it goes, right? You work work hard 10 years and then overnight success. Yeah. Um, so so hey, look, so your team, like I saw online, I wasn't 100% certain. It looks like you're you're possibly venture capital back series A. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 13:43

That's correct. We're series A venture capital back. That's correct.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Okay. So does it look like from like an internal perspective? Um, what what is like what are next steps, right? Like in terms of partnership scale, like where what do you see the business doing over the next couple of years in terms of like key initiatives?

SPEAKER_01 13:59

That's a great question. I mean, um, what we're going to do, uh, somebody's chimed in. What we're going to do is we're starting to raise a B round now. So after we did all the integration that we were talking about and all the deployments, and we're starting to get out on these pilot projects and what I'll call these first round projects that we have, then what we're looking for is growth capital to expand in this space. I mean, if you just took the total addressable market for SAP and workday and Prism, it's huge. So we're going to go find some growth capital to expand our penetration into this total addressable market that we have.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it just sounds like such a I'm it sounds like it's probably scaling quite rapidly, particularly when there's really no, it doesn't sound like there's any kind of cost burden to the client. It's really just more of like the the implementation, right? Like they just have to budget the time to get it implemented within their systems, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Well, we're actually already integrated into the software. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

So it's yeah, we're integrated. So that's why we went that route, and it took us a year to go that route. I mean, right didn't give us a certification without running us through the ringer. And a light did the same thing, and so did Prism HR. So that's why it's built into their software now, so you can literally turn it on. We're talking uh through SAP to some big companies, it's very impressive. I mean, we can literally turn it on in days as opposed to spending months going through an integration cycle. We we did this, it cost us a lot of time, energy, and money up front to build out the infrastructure to do that so that we can offer it quickly.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

For sure. So, so like for companies that you know, HR teams, pupil ops, whatever you want to call it, that want to take the first step towards making this happen, like what is what does that process look like to get this implemented, right? Step by step?

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Well, right now they can either contact us at Q Rails or they can contract their uh if again, if they're if a light is their provider or integrator, uh, they can contact their light sales rep, they can contact their SAP sales rep, uh their Prism PEO sales rep, just about anybody. So we're selling through these channels, they can connect us directly, but if they already have somebody who's doing their payroll and benefits uh through these companies, they can connect them and they'll connect to us.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

So that's interesting. Is like so is a lot of the growth you're experiencing through the partners that you're integrated with, or is it direct sales? Like what's I'm kind of just curious at how that's how that works for you for y'all.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yeah, right now um most of it is through our partners, but we'll always do direct sales, right? I mean, you know, small startup company, we don't turn down money, you know.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Right, who would want to do that? No, that's great though, because it's like then it's also just more cost effective as you scale to maintain like really, really solid margins, which obviously helps with fundraising uh as for feature growth and scale.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

See now, you sound like you ought to help us fundraise. I like that it's true, but we tell people that we're trying to work with our partners so that they can use their existing infrastructure, right? I mean, if you really look at a light and their digital wallet, they have their own Salesforce, they have their own account management team. We provide tier two support and technology. That's what we are. We try and tell people we're a fin tech company, really, that's what we are a fin tech company.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, for sure. So, what's the like so when you're positioning, right? Like let's say in a direct sales or what the way that you have your partners sell the solution, terms of value proposition, is it like the business outcomes that you're driving for the end client, right? Obviously, there's the the the the employee side of it, but the in terms of business objectives, right, and outcomes, is is it talent acquisition, retention as are the primary value add, or how do you approach that value proposition? Or maybe maybe it's segmented, right? Like maybe it's a little different depending on the industry or or whatnot, but curious to get your thoughts there.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. Talent acquisition. If you uh it's amazing to me when we travel around, we uh listen to the radio, talk to professional employment organizations or companies, and they're saying part of their talent acquisition is offering people same-day pay, right? Uh, they and and I'll go back to this anecdotal one about this uh trucking company. This this uh national trucking company had said to us, you know, we have people that want to work and they want to work overtime and they want to work double shifts. But like I was telling you earlier, they don't want to get paid 14 days or a month from now. They want to get paid today. And and where it's really turning into is markets that are very, I don't want to call them, it's easy to see vertical markets. So we have health care and long-term care is a market, right? Uh, retail grocery is a market, uh, petrol or gas stations is a market, and then um uh I thought I forgot what the quick service rep. There's a market. Heck, a lot of the restaurants and QSRs are saying we'll pay you on the same day. They're actually advertising that. So it's turned into a benefit in order to attract people and retain them, right? And as you know, during COVID, a lot of restaurants, restaurants, right, and delivery, like let's say like a pizza delivery pace. When's the last time you tip somebody in cash that delivered you food through like, you know, a pizza delivery or or Grubhub or whatever it is that delivers you food? You don't. They just leave it on the door, go away. Well, that guy is driving his car again, and they're wanting to tip that person out because you're doing it digitally. They want to move that to them so they'll come back to work tomorrow because they won't come back to work unless they can buy gas, right? So there's a lot of people that are using this today, is though, in order to attract talent and retain talent. And it's funny, I see articles, people send them to me all the time where they take a snapshot of a picture of somebody saying, We're now hiring, and a matter of fact, I want to say it was United Airlines. I shouldn't say that, but there was a big poster one of my guys took a picture of that says, We're hiring people, you know, inside of the uh the airport to push people around on the wheelchair, but we'll pay you today this way. And it's just a big poster. It's like you're seeing it everywhere. All the airlines are advertising.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

That's really smart because I feel like I don't know if this is the right phrase, it's fancy, I don't know how to say this simply, but like that concept of like capacity utilization, right? So you have X amount of contractors or employees, and you're essentially trying to increase you know capacity where you're you're getting uh you know the employee or the contractor group to put in more hours, right? Right. Um, so it it's like if if I you know if they know that, okay, I I can receive payment later today, right? They might be more incentivized to right, like it's an incentive, right? It's it's like, hey, let me let me double down, or hey, I feel good today. I feel like I can I can do some more, you know, I can I can work, you know, that's I I could see that being a huge value add.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

It is here's another weird thing with that trucking company. So we're in there and we're talking to the trucking company general manager, and he says, you know, I wish my people would fill out their, I wish my supervisors would would sign off on the timesheets on a daily basis, Brian. This is never going to work. They never sign off on the timesheets. So I never know what my cash flow is or what my operating expenses are gonna be week to week. We're talking to these guys for 10 minutes, and the managers were saying, wow, if my people can get paid today, I'll stay late and sign all the timesheets and post the timesheets so that they can get paid today. So an hour into this meeting, this GM says, Well, I've been trying to get them the guys to do this for three years so that I can manage my cash flow. And he goes, You've been here 30 minutes, and they're all volunteering to stay late and fill out the timesheets for their employees that worked overtime just so they can get paid today because they would. So it really helps the whole business cycle, but I don't think anybody sees it until they see, you know, it happen in practice. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. So I guess my next question is like, okay, so if I'm if I'm buyer persona CFO, right? Like we talked about implementation from like an HR software, you know, flipping a switch, pretty easy to get in uh integrated. Are there any obstacles or or you know, um hesitations from CFOs that are like, well, we have this current current process system built out to do things this way? Is there any kind of like shifts that need to occur from a finance and accounting perspective? I'm just curious if there's Anything you've seen consistently on that side of the house.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

It's funny, is because they instinctively think so. But what happens is because we're integrated into the payroll processing cycle. Uh, and because we check the time in attendance in real time and put a payroll deduction inside the payroll software that we already know that we can get, they just normally run payroll like they're normally running it every two weeks, and it doesn't change anything for them. And we went to a PEO in Kansas and they said, we turn this on, and we've got people sitting here waiting to figure out what's going to go wrong. And they go, We've done 800 integrations, and this is the first one we've ever done that nobody's called and asked us a question. No financial officer in one of our small businesses called and asked us a question. We literally are sitting here waiting for the phone to ring for somebody to ask us a question. And so on the other side, in Europe, because we're global, in Europe, in uh Spain and in France, they've made it a mandatory that the employees get paid on a daily pay if they want. And we asked them, well, how are you doing it today? And they said, Oh, we're we're doing everything on a spreadsheet. We're writing down what everybody wants today, that we're handing them in cash, and then we have to do it. And when they found out that we're just immediately posting something into a payroll deduction, we have to show them. We literally show them a demo of it where we're posting the transaction that they can see it, and they're like, nothing changes. So they think most CFOs or HR payroll providers think this is gonna take months, it's gonna be laborious, and we're like, nope, just works. Again, James, it took us years to get here. Okay. I don't want people to think we didn't work our butts off to get here. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

I gotcha. I gotcha. Uh well, what about like uh like approvals, right? Because we're just like the approval process of going through like payroll as well, right? Like that's I'm assuming so I mean that you there there has to be somebody who's available same day to go through approvals, and they have to be willing to go through approvals every day.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Yeah, that's what I was saying about the trucking company, but some topic attendance systems for salaried employees are done auto-magically, like saying yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Like um, yeah, I guess if it's like a salary position, that's really simple. But like for the gig economy, like there has to be there has to be somebody available every single day for approvals, which um I I guess that's like the one part of the process that remains kind of manual, right? That has to be accounted for.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

It does, but sometimes they're automated, right? So there's a lot of automated time and attendance systems that are built into point of sale systems for like at restaurants, and they can see that they're working and they end their shift and they begin their shift, and people now clock in and clock out electronically, whether it's on a mobile application. So look at Uber, they're clocked in and clocked out on Uber when they're picking up a job for the gig economy, right? So you'll go to a restaurant now and you'll see point of sale systems like I guess toast, and you can see that the that the waiter is actually clocking in and out and taking your order and picking up your receipt, and then you're tipping them there. So a lot of that information is actually accumulated in real time digitally through these payroll systems or there's time and attendance systems or these point of sell systems. So you can integrate into those and you can collect a lot. So tipping wages is really easy because even if I don't pay you, James, hourly for being a waiter, I can see that you made that tip, right? And I can see that if you're a food delivery person that you've spent that mileage delivering that food. So some companies are coming back to us and saying, just pay out tips and mileage for us. And then if we get somebody to do, you know, approval of time and attendance on a work shift, then you can do that also. So there's always these components that people can get paid.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

For sure, for sure. So I know we're we're coming up on time here. I just wanted to kind of zoom out and get your perspective on future of employment, um, you know, future of your industry. Like, where do you see things heading over the next five to 10 years when it comes to employment, um, financial options uh for companies, employees? Just, I mean, you can't obviously this is kind of a vague question, right? You can answer it however you want, but uh what's what's your version of the future um for employment and these types of solutions?

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Well, I think uh, and I don't want to just focus on uh earned wage access. Earn wage access is a portion of what I'll call financial wellness. And we look at people and say, it's all about the two-week pay cycle or the month pay cycle is dead. People are going to get paid out on a daily basis for one, and then they want access to digital banking, cross-border remittance, you know, um uh credit scoring, all these things that you can do in what I'll call a neo-bank environment. I mean, James, when's the last time you went to the physical bank that you were banking on, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:56

Branches keep closing. So that's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

What and then uh when I was at Google, the funny thing is I was at Google and um they were talking about the Google wallet. And they said, Well, why would this be any better than a debit card or a credit card? And I said, Well, how many people in here have a child from the age of 10 to 17? And of course, you know, there's a bunch of hands that go up. And I go, Well, how many of them have a credit card or a debit card? Well, nearly none. And I say, Well, how many people have a mobile phone? And they're like, everybody's hand goes up because we're at Google, right? And then I tell people today, those are the people, can you imagine? And I got employees that work for me that have like 17-year-old kids out on their first job, and they go there, and the employer says, Okay, you can have the job, and you want to go, okay, now you got to go to a bank and you got to open up a banking account, you got to give me a routing number and bring me a cancel check, and I can send you ACH, or click button here, and I'll issue you a bank account. Let's that basically was a neo banking account with a uh a digital card, and then we'll send you a plastic debit card, and you have all the same services that you would if you were opened up a banking account immediately and you have all the same access to money in real time and all your payment history and tracking. We can do that, and and we can do that because we are an end-to-end financial service, right? Once we onboard an employer, we can actually issue accounts to their employees because we can already track everything and we can already certify everything and we can go through compliance with them.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

So you can essentially operate as a bank, it sounds like because you can you can basically own these bank accounts for the should they choose to. It sounds like that's probably optional, right? Like they could they could have a shit to theirs or or use yours, right? It's that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

In the US, what happens is we partner with banks to offer these services, so we're providing banking services on behalf of a bank.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Oh, okay. So, like on the back end would be like PNC or Bank of America. So you're not actually like owning the bank account process, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:04

It's just like it's funnies because the analogy I like to use is if you ever got like a Southwest Airline card or uh a card that you got at uh Home Depot or something, the credit card or debit card, you don't even know what bank it operates on, do you?

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

You go so we operate these services for banks that do stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

So is like a potential future just doing the banking side in-house? That sounds like a really interesting. I don't know if that's something y'all would consider, but I'm I'm curious if that's ever come up.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Well, let's say we'll do banking services. We don't have any intention of being a bank, a regulated bank. We don't want to be a regulated bank, but we'll provide banking services.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

If I had enough money, I'd probably start a bank, but it's probably I'd probably at least 20 years out from that. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes.

SPEAKER_01 30:55

Anyways, this is these services is going to be part of just like offering insurance for employers. I think offering these services is going to be a requirement.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

I think so. I think I think we're moving towards flexibility on demand. Um, it just wellness, as you put it. I mean, there's just going to be so many options out there. And I think it just it the the the higher, you know, just trend of like just general flexibility within the workforce, like it's it's becoming way more and more acceptable year over year to not just have this one job and stay there for years. But you know, even for you know, senior level skilled labor types of positions, we're seeing people go the contracting route, the solopreneur route, where they have several contracts working at once. And you know, people like that flexibility, right? They charge more per hour, but then you know, they they go on more vacations, right? Or they they have more time with their family. I mean, we're just starting to see that become more commonly acceptable. And we're also seeing companies feel comfortable outsourcing more stuff that isn't their core competency, right? Like there used to be this obsession with keeping like all of these different functions in-house, and now it's I feel like companies more and more just keeping strategic stuff in-house, right? So, like, you know, product, for instance, right? Um, or sometimes revenue functions like marketing, it makes sense. But you know, for a lot of the other functions within a company, companies are starting to say, like, let's just outsource this. Like, we don't need to, you know, own these, you know, uh firm uh ongoing costs. We don't need to own, you know, the the the energy taken to stand these up to optimize this. So we're just seeing a lot more flexibility there in general, too.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Well, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Now now that we've solved world hunger, we should let everybody go.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

Yeah, I think so. Uh yeah, but this is this has been a ton of fun. Uh Brian, I I appreciate you coming on the show. And yeah, if you if you had fun, feel free to come back. We can do a round two.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Oh, that'd be nice. I'd appreciate that. I'll let you know where we are in a uh couple six months after our B round and bringing on some more uh employers. All right.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Yes, I'm looking forward to hearing all about that. And hey, real quick though, um, if people want to engage with you online or your company, like what's the best way to get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_01 33:03

Yeah, they can reach me. I think it's bbrinkly at qrails.com. And then if I don't answer directly, I'll try and get to you as fast as I can. But I have an a perfect admin who cuts through everything and says, answer this, answer that. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Love it, love it. And um, for everybody else tuning in, thank you for joining us. And and we'll see you next time. Take care.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

All right. Bye.