PaySimple and Intuit: Is There Room for Both?

Eric Remer is the founder and CEO of PaySimple, a leading provider of small business merchant accounts, mobile and electronic payments, and ACH processing services. He also founded Conclave Group, a direct marketing services company, and cofounded I-Behavior, a leading behavioral targeting and database marketing organization. He began his career in the investment banking field, with Kidder, Peabody, & Company.

In this video segment, Remer offers an example of a typical customer, and why PaySimple is the right choice for him. He also discusses the payments space and why he's not afraid of being crushed by larger players such as Intuit (INTU -0.53%) or MasterCard (MA 0.15%). The full version of the interview can be seen here.

A full transcript follows the video.

Tom Gardner: Give an example of a PaySimple customer and why they're using it.

Eric Remer: It could be a landscaper. A landscaper has got 60, maybe 100 weekly mows he's doing. He does spring cleanings. He does other types of stuff. Instead of sending that invoice that he did historically and waiting two, three, four weeks -- but he's still got to pay his guys who are delivering the things -- he sets you up on recurrent billing.

On a weekly basis he's pulling money out of your account, gives you email invoices that have notes on other things that he can promote. It allows him not only to collect his payments effectively, in real time, but it allows him to manage his customers. He can send upsell, he can send promotions, and all of that sits under one environment.

Gardner: Got it. Is this, in any way, replicated by something Intuit's doing? Or is Intuit ultimately going to go "PaySimple, we love you guys. Here's our offer. We want to acquire you"?

Remer: That's ultimately up to them, but we know those guys very well -- when this ends I can tell you a bit ... no, I'm teasing. They are a great company, and I think culturally, value-based, there's a lot of overlap with what we're doing. There's also a lot of complementary activities with what we're doing.

We're actually in the process right now of doing some deep integrations with them. I would say there's probably a 20% to 30% functional overlap -- so basic invoicing, some other things they do is overlap -- but there's a lot of really complementary things that we provide that they don't provide.

Almost 70% of our customers actually use QuickBooks. So, in a good way, they are coming to us for products and services they can't get from them, and, in a good way, we believe their integrations into them are critical for our customers -- so a really good partner for PaySimple.

Gardner: Just a couple of questions about how the business started and what you think, working back from where we are right now.

Do you go to work and meet with Intuit and think, "These guys are potential competitors, too"? Or do you think, "You know what? This is a great relationship, and we know our slot is over here, and they've got this whole business over here"? How do you navigate that?

Remer: It's a great question, because we raised a lot of venture capital, and it was asked quite a bit -- "Well, Intuit's just going to crush you, right?" They're co-opetition, and I think the entire payments space is ...

Look, MasterCard's competing with Intuit somewhat. They're competing with PayPal (EBAY 0.88%). PayPal I think represents -- I'm making the number up now -- but a big portion of AmEx volume goes through PayPal customers. Are they a competitor, or are they a revenue generator and customer? They're kind of both.

I think in our general space that happens quite a bit. As a much smaller player in the ecosystem, I'm not necessarily concerned because I know that if our value prop -- and we do a really good job with that -- we have our niche of the world that we can provide.

Gardner: It's a huge market.

Remer: It's a huge marketplace.