AI is no longer a chatbot. It is an agent that can move data and make decisions.

In this in-studio conversation, Leo Arzumanyan, Matthew Luciani, and Jeremy Stock cut through the hype and get practical about using AI in payments. We start where risk lives: privacy, closed versus open loops, and how to keep sensitive underwriting logic and merchant data inside your walls. Then we map the real use cases operators are deploying now: CRM ingestion, sales intelligence, document checks, and dispute workflows that turn noisy inputs into usable signals.

You will hear a clear-eyed view of model choice and control. Free models are fine for quick searches. Paid models and tuned agents belong in underwriting, portfolio analytics, and customer operations. The team explains how to set boundaries, why hallucinations happen, and how to keep an agent from freelancing outside your rules. We also tackle the organizational impact: which entry-level tasks will change, why experts must stay in the loop, and how to write ethical and operational guidelines that keep you compliant while you scale.

What you will take back to your team
•A simple governance plan: closed data loop, role-based access, red-team tests, and an incident path when an agent is wrong
•A deployment map: CRM ingestion, underwriting triage, post-payment risk checks, and dispute assembly with human review
•A safety checklist: consent and privacy prompts, model provenance, logging and evidence retention for audits and insurers
•A portfolio lens: use AI to raise approval rates, shorten dispute cycles, and find at-risk MIDs before attrition hits
Bottom line: adopt with intent. Train models on your domain, keep experts in the loop, and instrument every step so AI reduces risk instead of adding it.

Wondering where AI truly helps—and where it quietly raises the stakes? We dig into the real-world shift from chatbots to agentic AI and map the line between useful automation and unacceptable risk across payments, legal, and healthcare. From CRM workflows and underwriting logic to privileged communications and HIPAA concerns, we share practical guardrails to protect client data, trade secrets, and your competitive edge without slowing down innovation.

We compare leading models—GPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok—through the lens of enterprise needs: reasoning quality, context windows, customization, and the difference between free tiers and paid, closed-loop deployments. We unpack why “paid is safer” isn’t just about accuracy; it’s about governance, logging, and the ability to constrain learning on sensitive inputs. You’ll hear concrete examples of how poorly scoped prompts and thin domain knowledge can produce confident, wrong outputs, including a contract that looked fine until expert review revealed major gaps.

The conversation also tackles a hard question: who should set the limits? We weigh user-driven controls against platform-imposed restrictions on legal and medical advice, arguing for transparent refusal reasons and identity-based access where appropriate. Ethics are lagging the tech, so we outline a practical playbook: define your AI usage policy, set role-based permissions, preflight prompts with boundaries, label unverified outputs, and route high-impact decisions to human experts. The near-term future of work will favor professionals who pair deep subject knowledge with strong model orchestration skills.


**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

Banks don’t close accounts for sport; they close accounts when risk stories don’t add up.

James Huber, managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm, sits down with Adam Carlson from SOAR Payments (https://na2.hubs.ly/H033tL00) to unpack what “high risk” really means in 2026, why peptides became the latest MATCH magnet, and how card‑brand programs like VAMP are changing sponsor bank behavior. If you’ve ever dealt with a surprise PayFac shutdown, frozen funds, or a sudden document request, this conversation gives you the playbook to steady the ship and scale with confidence.

We examine how high-risk really works today, from peptide crackdowns and MATCH removals to VAMP’s tighter bank thresholds. Adam shares SOAR’s white‑glove approach, stronger underwriting, and the role of relationships and transparency in keeping merchants processing.

• redefining high risk and why more online merchants qualify
• peptide merchants as current MATCH targets and why
• pitfalls of instant approvals and PayFac shutdowns
• how white‑glove underwriting prevents fires
• using tech to spot altered bank statements
• VAMP thresholds, fines and stricter diligence
• portfolio balance, consolidation and agent economics
• mapping flow of funds and who holds fraud risk
• practical steps to keep accounts open long term
• book preview: High Risk Merchant Accounts 101
• relationships, knowledge and transparency as core edges
• how to contact SOAR Payments

We trace Adam’s path from online lead generation to building a boutique ISO that thrives on white‑glove underwriting and clear communication. He explains how SOAR vets applications, uses tech to catch altered bank statements, and positions complex merchants with acquiring banks that actually understand their model. We get candid about agent games, portfolio balancing, and the uncomfortable truth that acquiring is effectively an unsecured line of credit—so when chargebacks spike, scrutiny follows. You’ll learn why low‑risk volume is gold, how consolidation may accelerate, and which signals risk teams watch when they decide to ask questions or pull the plug.

Most importantly, we lay out practical steps to keep your account open: align your website and product catalog with your application, document fulfillment and refunds, clean up descriptors and customer service lines, and call your partner before adding sensitive SKUs. For peptide sellers and other regulated‑ish niches, context and transparency can be the difference between a compliant path and a permanent shutdown. Adam also previews his upcoming book, High Risk Merchant Accounts 101, aimed at helping founders navigate approvals, enhanced underwriting, and long‑term stability.

If payments feel like a black box, consider this your field guide. Subscribe for more expert conversations, share this episode with a founder who needs a steadier setup, and leave a review to tell us which risk topic you want us to tackle next.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

Visit our guests DealHub 360 here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H030plB0

Tired of chasing documents and updates across spreadsheets, inboxes, and shared drives? We bring together the creators of DealHub 360, Deepika Shahani and Paul Manley, to show how a centralized loan origination portal helps ISOs, lenders, and equipment vendors move faster, stay compliant, and reduce risk without adding headcount. Paul Manley shares two decades of payments and architecture experience—from ACH roots to international builds—while Topeka Shahani connects the dots from equipment finance to a platform purpose-built for modern lending.

We introduce DealHub 360, an AI-powered loan origination portal built to replace spreadsheets and scattered emails with a single workflow for ISOs, lenders, and equipment suppliers. We talk risk, compliance, and how a pilot client helped cut processing time by 50% while setting the roadmap for CRM, servicing, and payments.

• origins in payments, ACH, and equipment finance
• why spreadsheets break at scale for lenders and ISOs
• pilot-driven design with Brad and measurable time savings
• financing beyond equipment: rentals, subscriptions, MCA, SBA
• risk tiers, automation for small tickets, human review for larger
• state-level compliance controls and configurable notices
• AI screening, data gathering, and future RAG agents
• out-of-the-box features, no lock-in, easy onboarding
• security model with roles, encryption, and audit readiness
• roadmap to CRM, collections, and payments under one roof

We dig into the real bottlenecks: fragmented data, slow underwriting handoffs, and state-by-state rules that derail momentum. You’ll hear how a meticulous pilot client helped shape features that matter in the field, from eSign and credit pulls to notifications that keep agents and merchants on track. The result is a measurable impact: application processing time cut by half and a cleaner path to scale. We also unpack the shift from traditional leasing to rentals, subscriptions, SBA, and MCA, and why small-ticket automation paired with human review for mid-range deals strikes the right balance between speed and safety.

AI plays a targeted role here. Today, the platform screens businesses and personal guarantors, pulling from public sources and surfacing insights an underwriter can act on. Tomorrow, retrieval-augmented search and action-oriented agents will help teams find similar cases, summarize financials, and propose next steps—always with a human in the loop. Security and governance stay front and center: role-based access, field-level permissions, encryption, audit readiness, and a roadmap that adds CRM, collections, ACH, and payments for a true one-stop shop.

If you’re ready to replace manual chaos with a system that adapts to your programs and compliance rules, this conversation shows what’s working now and what’s next. Subscribe, share with a teammate who lives in spreadsheets, and leave a review with the one feature you wish your lending workflow had.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

Payments leaders love to say risk is everywhere, but most teams still chase it with spreadsheets, screenshots, and crossed fingers. Our conversation with Noah Fitzgerald of Qredible (visit Qredible: https://na2.hubs.ly/H02-3Md0) cuts through the haze. Our guest traces a path from pre-internet POS software to big-processor leadership and into startups that zero in on the same unsolved pain: compliance takes too long, costs too much, and fails too often at scale.

The core idea is simple but often ignored—high-risk is usually operational risk, not product risk. When merchants change products weekly and rules shift daily, human checks can’t keep pace. That’s why continuous audits, product-level validation, and transparent data sharing between merchants, processors, and banks now matter as much as good underwriting.

The CBD and hemp space highlights the problem. Onboarding a merchant with dozens of SKUs and lab reports used to mean manual COA review, endless back-and-forth, and slow time to revenue. With OCR and structured data extraction, those COAs become searchable fields. Processors can instantly locate banned cannabinoids, confirm potency claims, and flag mismatches against rule sets dictated by their bank or card brands. The win is not just catching risk; it’s enabling compliant businesses to stay live without disruption. Instead of black-box decisions that punish merchants after the fact, a shared layer of visibility gives them alerts before they trip wires. That turns compliance from a source of fear into a daily habit.

This shift extends far beyond cannabis. Any enhanced due diligence sector—gaming, adult, firearms, online alcohol and tobacco, nutraceuticals, functional mushrooms, cosmetics, and online lending—faces similar pressures. Municipal rules stack on state and federal mandates. Card brands push VAMP and portfolio scrutiny. Without a living map of requirements tied to real merchant behavior, providers rely on hope. Worse, merchants bear the brunt: reserves, MATCH listings, and sudden shutdowns. When a platform continually crawls product pages, pulls certificates, and matches claims to approved lists and rule sets, it empowers both sides. Banks get traceable evidence. Merchants get early warnings and clear steps to fix issues. Portfolio risk drops while revenue stays predictable.

Pricing opacity is the other quiet drain. Interchange shifts, processor markups, and “notice” of price changes buried inside statements leave busy operators flying blind. Two restaurants using the same processor can pay wildly different rates simply because one negotiated and the other didn’t. Statement analysis as a service fills that gap, translating six-hundred-line statements into actionable decisions. The takeaway is blunt: every company needs a payments brain—whether a chief payments officer or a trusted advisor. The goal isn’t to chase rock-bottom rates; it’s to align pricing with risk, ensure rules are followed in real time, and stop leaks before they become losses.

AI is not a courtroom litigator or a replacement for paralegals. Here, it’s a quiet, relentless assistant that reads faster than teams can and never gets tired of forms. Use it to extract, normalize, and monitor. Keep humans for judgment. Marry those strengths and you change the game: faster onboarding, fewer fines, fewer surprises, and a portfolio that grows because risk is managed in daylight. When compliance becomes a product feature—not a punishment—good actors thrive, bad actors stand out, and the entire ecosystem gets stronger.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

The CPayO Mindset: Turning Payments From Cost Center Into Competitive Edge.

Three percent can quietly devour fifteen percent of your profit. In this episode, we strip payments down to the levers that actually move margin: rails, contracts, tokens, data rights, and operational control. With Viktoria Soltesz of the Soltesz Institute (https://na2.hubs.ly/H02Y1Cv0), author of The CPayO: Chief Payment Officer — the role that doesn’t exist (but should), we reframe “processing fees” as an executive function and show how a CPayO-style approach protects revenue when card-brand caps, state rules, or platform shutdowns collide.

Why this matters to operators

• Profit, not percentages. Measure cost to collect against unit economics, not top-line. Small fee drifts compound into lost margin.
• Rules collide in the wild. Brand surcharge caps, state price controls, and regulated markets squeeze merchants while costs float.
• Platform risk is real. Provider offboarding and token lock-in can turn recurring revenue into an existential crisis.
• Control beats hope. Own tokens, build routing optionality, and negotiate portability so you don’t beg for access when risk appetites change.
What we dig into
• The Soltesz 8-step framework for mapping fund flows, quantifying fees/FX, aligning treasury timing, and building redundancy that actually fails over.
• Pricing programs and optics: how surcharge/dual-pricing rules intersect with consumer expectations and brand enforcement.
• Open banking, wallets, stable-value rails: where they lower cost or latency, and where compliance/UX friction slows adoption.
• Contract gravity: data portability, token migration, termination assistance, audit rights, and change-control clauses that separate resilient operators from the rest.
• Middleware and orchestration: route for approvals and cost, keep PCI/fraud scope sane, and maintain leverage across providers.

A practical playbook you can use this quarter

1. Instrument the money map: Merchant-level reporting, approval rates by BIN/region, cost to collect by rail, dispute cycle time, and days-cash-held.
2. Contract to control: Add token-portability SLAs, termination assistance, data export formats, and service credits tied to approval-rate deltas.
3. Build a second rail: At least one production-ready alternative for subscription retries, fails, and geographic outliers. Test it monthly.
4. Protect recurring revenue: Standardize token escrow/migration rights; document refund runways before any offboarding event.
5. Monitor and iterate: Quarter-by-quarter audits of fees, FX, routing outcomes, and policy drift; adjust playbooks as products, SKUs, or rules change.

The heart of the conversation centers on control. Stripe and Shopify offer easy starts but can shut merchants down or lock tokenized credentials in ways that endanger recurring revenue. We share a real case where token migration became an existential crisis—and how to avoid it. The strategy: use payment orchestration to own your data, route transactions for cost and approval rates, fail over across providers, and keep leverage when risk appetites shift. We also dive into contract trends pushing fraud, PCI, and liability to merchants and POS providers, plus practical middleware options to meet those obligations without becoming a bank.



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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

The conversation opens on a blunt question: can a solo agent or a small team still build something meaningful in payments, or is the market a race to zero? Frank Pagano of VizyPay (https://www.vizypay.com/) doesn’t flinch. He argues it’s still doable, but only if you control the customer journey and make hard, long-term decisions that trade fast cash for durable value. His path into payments began with curiosity and proximity—meeting a neighbor, seeing success up close, and challenging the assumption that a great career must follow a safe W-2 route. That spark evolved into a bootstrapped company that chose transparent service over shortcuts, took real financial pain early, and doubled down on operations to protect merchants and attrition. The thesis is simple yet tough: own the experience, earn trust, and let the reputation compound.

One of the biggest wedges in the story is leasing. When cash was tight, the “easy fix” of equipment leasing promised fast acquisition and upfront money. The team did the homework and walked away. Reviews were brutal, terms were draconian, and the long-term damage to merchant trust felt inevitable. Instead, VizyPay engineered alternatives: placements that require time commitments, subscription-style equipment models that mimic smartphones, and in-house programs that maintain service quality. These options address a real cash challenge for small businesses—POS and terminals aren’t cheap—without trapping merchants in predatory structures. It’s a case study in customer-centric payments strategy, where sustainable residuals beat quick hits, and attrition control becomes a competitive moat.

Another pillar is partner selection. Early on, VizyPay went direct to a processor to keep control of support and risk, even if the deal terms were tougher. Owning customer service meant they could shape the merchant journey, react to issues fast, and align incentives internally. That required building strong operations—service, risk, underwriting—alongside a sales engine. Culture became the leverage point. Hiring for buy-in, asking unconventional questions, and rewarding loyalty created a team willing to sacrifice in the early days. This approach isn’t glamorous; it’s a grind that reduces churn, exposes bad actors faster, and compounds merchant satisfaction into reviews, referrals, and local credibility.

Risk management shows up repeatedly: bad leases, flipping agents, and toxic behaviors that can sabotage a young ISO. The conversation digs into practical defenses—vetting agents, monitoring spikes in MIDs, and refusing to be dazzled by sudden volume. There’s an industry-wide warning too: aggressive splits, upfront contests, and vague promises attract the wrong talent and the wrong merchants. Instead, align economics with the lifecycle of an agent. A year-one rep may need training, tools, and equipment help. A year-ten producer needs strong splits, back-end protection, and minimal friction. Matching terms to career stage isn’t just fair; it’s a retention strategy that keeps portfolios stable and brand equity intact.

The bigger question—should a hustling agent build an ISO today or plug into a large shop—gets a pragmatic answer. You can build, but you’ll trade simplicity for overhead: payroll, leases, risk systems, and the constant pressure to maintain compliance and service. Many high-split agents are better off leveraging a well-run ISO’s rails, protecting their residuals contractually, and focusing on what they do best: selling and servicing local merchants.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

The CPayO: Making Payments a First-Class Function (with Viktoria Soltesz)

Payments isn’t a line item. It’s the circulatory system of your business. In this episode, we sit down with Viktoria Soltesz (https://www.solteszinstitute.com/), author of The CPayO: Chief Payment Officer — the role that doesn’t exist (but should), to map why every serious merchant, ISO, PayFac, or ISV needs an executive who owns payments end-to-end: banking, risk, data, UX, contracts, and compliance. We move from first principles to field practice: how to negotiate bank and processor relationships, design checkout that doesn’t kill conversion, and plan for scale before your success trips a risk wire.

Why this conversation matters

Payments as strategy, not plumbing. Treat acceptance, disbursements, and data flows like an operating system, not a vendor invoice. That shift reduces cost, raises approval rates, and gives you leverage when something breaks.

The CPayO mandate. One executive accountable across finance, legal, product, risk, and engineering to set policy, pick vendors, and own KPIs (auth rates, cost to collect, dispute cycle time, days-cash-held).

Scale without surprises. When volume or business model changes outgrow your original merchant profile, renegotiate and re-paper before a processor “discovers” it for you.

UX meets settlement. Beautiful storefronts die at clunky checkouts; payment UX and processor choices must be designed together or you pay in declines and abandonment.

Global is different. Cross-border means new providers, fees, licensing expectations, and regulators. Education and governance beat gut feel every time.

What we get into

Money doesn’t just support your business—it shapes it. We sit down with Viktoria Soltez, author and payments strategist, to argue that payments deserve a seat at the executive table and outline why a Chief Payment Officer can be the difference between smooth scaling and daily firefighting. From clunky gateways that crush a luxury checkout to contracts that quietly handcuff your margins, we unpack where revenue really leaks and how to build systems that make payments feel invisible to customers and unbreakable for teams.

We dive into the literacy gap that plagues even sophisticated companies: finance understands banking but not acquiring, UX ships beautiful flows that fall apart at the pay wall, and legal treats merchant agreements like phone plans. Viktoria explains how to plan your payment flows before you launch new products or markets, how to renegotiate when your profile changes, and why measuring fees against profit—not revenue—reveals the true cost of “just 3 percent.” We also tackle cross-border expansion, scheme monitoring programs, and the rising importance of dispute management and data ownership.

If this conversation helped you see your money movement in a new way, follow the show, share it with a teammate who owns checkout, and leave a quick review—what’s the one payments question you want us to tackle next?

Renegotiation is a skill. You’re not the business you were 3–5 years ago; neither are your vendors. Go back to market for price, terms, data rights, and true support.

AI and “agentic” checkouts. Tomorrow’s buyer may be a bot acting for the customer. That demands machine-readable product, pricing, and payment flows your systems can actually satisfy.

Education gap = risk. Most teams don’t know what to ask. Build internal playbooks for boarding, changes in scope, chargeback ops, and incident response so success doesn’t trigger shutdowns.

The real cost of “3%.” Cost to collect must be measured against profit, not revenue; a “small” fee can erase margins if you aren’t optimizing routing and terms.

A usable CPayO playbook

Own the metrics. Track approval rates by BIN/region, cost to collect by rail, refund/chargeback ratios, dispute cycle time,

A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

Banking Meets Payments: Capital, AI Reality Checks, and the Tokenized-Deposit Shakeup

Hosted by Leo Arzumanyan and Jeremy Stock. Special guest: Adam T. Hark, Managing Member, Wellesley Hills Financial (https://www.wellesleyhillsfinancial.com/).

Payments isn’t just rails and rates anymore; it’s capital, contracts, and data that decide who scales and who stalls. In this candid, operator-level conversation, Adam Hark maps the real terrain for ISOs, PayFacs, acquirers, and ISVs: how residual streams get valued, why lenders still struggle to underwrite payments businesses, where AI helps (and where it absolutely doesn’t), and why tokenized deposits from major banks could upend stablecoin economics and B2B money movement.

What we dig into

From portfolio trades to full-stack banking: How residual purchases, portability, and ISO/agent structures shaped a niche investment-banking playbook for payments—and what buyers actually pay for when they value a book.

Capital that understands payments: Why traditional lenders misread variable merchant cash flows, the collateral that really counts, and the deal structures that align risk with revenue.

AI without the fairy dust: The practical use case is heavy-lift data processing (merchant-level files that set portfolio value), not judgment or strategy. Generative tools draft; experts decide. Hallucinations are a legal and financial risk without human oversight.

Operating in the tokenized era: How bank-issued tokenized deposits (with yield) could challenge private stablecoins, change treasury workflows, and accelerate corporate adoption of blockchain rails—while cores, processors, and gateways scramble to keep up.

Founder focus: Don’t bolt AI or crypto onto the roadmap just to keep up with the buzz. Start from the problem: auth rates, cost to collect, dispute cycle time, portfolio attrition. Solve that, then layer tech.

Field notes for teams

Valuation is in the data exhaust: Clean merchant-level reporting and cohort analysis beat pitch decks. If you want a premium, instrument your book.

Contracts drive financeability: Data portability, token migration, termination assistance, and audit rights are the difference between “bankable” and “hard pass.”

AI guardrails: Use models to wrangle processor files and KPIs; never ship output without expert review. Treat models as interns—fast, not authoritative.

Tokenized deposits over press releases: Expect treasury to demand speed and yield. If you touch payouts or cross-border, start planning wallet addresses, policy, and controls now.

Talent and trust: Niche expertise compounds. Clients will pay for people who actually understand payments math, not just “fintech.”

Why this episode matters

If you raise capital, buy portfolios, or operate on the sharp end of merchant acquiring, this is your playbook for 2025: get your data house in order, negotiate bankable contracts, deploy AI where it’s measurable, and prepare for tokenized deposits to change how funds move and settle.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

Visit us today: https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/podcasts/

A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm