Payment processing may not be the flashiest part of the wireless business, but according to Vesta CEO Todd Curry, it’s one of the most strategic. For over 30 years, Vesta has helped leading telcos — including AT&T, Vodafone, and Rogers — minimize fraud and maximize revenue. Now, the company is taking its expertise to support smaller operators and MVNOs looking to scale profitably.
In this conversation with StreamTV Insider’s Daniel Frankel, Curry explains how Vesta’s AI-driven tools identify fraudulent transactions before they hit, ensuring fewer chargebacks and higher approval rates. With its unique “payment guarantee,” Vesta takes on the risk, giving partners peace of mind and steady cash flow. Curry also details how the company’s multi-processor network helps operators avoid downtime while optimizing approval rates. From embracing crypto to offering partial payments and customer churn insights, Vesta is innovating to meet the evolving needs of wireless providers worldwide.
Daniel Frankel:
Good morning. I'm Daniel Frankel. I'm a regular contributor of StreamTV Insider and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Next TMT, and I'm pleased to have with me this morning, Todd Curry, who's the CEO of Vesta, a company that specializes in helping wireless companies around the world process their payments. Todd, you're headquartered out there in Atlanta. How are you this morning?
Todd Curry:
I'm doing great, Daniel, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Daniel Frankel:
I don't think a lot of folks think primarily about payment processing when they think about the wireless business, but it's actually a big component of it. Tell me about Vesta's clients and what do you do for them?
Todd Curry:
Absolutely. So Vesta has been around for about 30 years and we got into this business helping AT&T solve challenges with prepaid customers and fraud. Early days in the industry there was a ton of fraud and AT&T did not have available the tools to sort out who were good customers and bad customers and take the risk out of their payment processing. So Vesta evolved a set of tools early on. We used machine learning in its sort of infant form, but our tools have evolved into more complex machine learning and AI tools to get very, very good at pulling fraudulent transactions out of the payment flow, maximizing approval rates, and streamlining the entire payments process for some of the largest telco brands on the planet.
Daniel Frankel:
So maybe you could tell me how global you are at this point. How many countries are you in? How many operators? Who are the major operators besides AT&T you're working with?
Todd Curry:
Yeah, we're in nine countries right now. I think growing to 12 here by the end of this year. So we have a strong partnership with Vodafone across Europe. We have partners in the UK and Ireland with Eir and British Telecom/EE. And then we have a very, very strong and long-lasting partnership in Mexico with Telcel and in Canada with Rogers. So we've been helping those companies across all of their prepaid businesses for many, many years.
Daniel Frankel:
There's a perception that this is the last step in the process payment, but it's actually a strategic component that can help operators grow their business. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit.
Todd Curry:
As I try to imagine the challenges that a CEO or CFO of an MVNO faces as they're starting up, it's a challenging business. There's some great opportunities out there. I love some of the brands and the entrepreneurial spirit that is in the MVNO space, it's really fun to be around. But as they go through the process of trying to figure out how to operationalize their platform, I think that they choose payments as best they know how, but unfortunately they don't have the right types of experience that we would like to sort of share with them to help guide them through that process. I sort of look at it like buying car insurance. You know that there's a certain brand that makes sense to you, a few brands that could be in your consideration set. You look for a price, you see what the coverage is going to mean and what your deductible have to be, and then once you have it, off you go. It's not an experiential purchase. You don't get a warm fuzzy glow when State Farm is your insurance company that feels different from when Allstate is your company.
Daniel Frankel:
Email them when it's their birthday. You don't do that?
Todd Curry:
No, no. Although we should do that a little more with our customers. I think of that this payment processing is not an experiential purchase. You don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling necessarily. And so you go on about your business and you say, "Hey, I've chosen company X. They're a big processor. I feel pretty good with it." What you don't realize in doing that, and it's a bit with car insurance, if you ever have an accident, boy, you really better know their claims process is going to be efficient and effective and treat you well. Well, fraud is not that different, frankly. When charge backs hit and customers are telling you, "Hey, my card was stolen, this charge is not valid." It doesn't take many of those to have your processor very nervous and starting to ask questions and potentially hold back funds hit you up for all of the costs associated with those chargebacks and suddenly your non-experiential decision has left you with a very different experience.
You're feeling frustrated and powerless, and there are a few things that I think we try to help in that moment as we can come into the frame, we offer a different experience for people. One, we know how to handle fraud and we stop it cold before it hits, and if we get it wrong, we cover the cost so you don't have to worry about fraud anymore. And I don't like to sell on the basis of sort of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I like to talk about fraud because it's important for us to talk about fraud and fraud rings are rampant. We can talk more about that, Daniel. Some patterns that we see are just brutal, but you need to have peace of mind, given all of the challenges in starting your MVNO that the Vesta guys have been doing this for 30 years, we've got this, we've got you covered. I think that's number one.
The second thing that you don't realize when you make that purchase of a platform is that you just handed over all of the approval control to a generalist. If they don't know telco, and most of them really don't know telco, then they don't know what prepaid wireless customers really look like and they can say no to a lot of customers. You could ask, "All right, well what's the difference, 85, 86%, 90%? What are we talking about?" I have seen large carriers push so hard on the rate element that they've found themselves in situations where they're paying very little for processing and they're getting 40% approval rates. I don't know how you run a business with a 40% approval rate. In some countries that can be tolerated because a prepaid customer can walk down the road and go into a gas station and top up a wireless account.
But in the US, I mean, that would be a death knell. It's just not... It's incredible. So we tend to see much lower approval rates when we get behind the, we roll up our sleeves and start going through some of the details with our prospects. We see that there are typically five, 10% uplift possibilities for those telcos where we know what the transactions look like, we're going to say yes a lot more frequently and we're going to cover our mistakes by paying for them explicitly on the back end. So it's a no-lose proposition. The net result is we think we deliver a lot more revenue for our MVNO customers and we're willing to stand behind it.
Daniel Frankel:
So there's a lot of MVNOs out there that are losing money, they just don't know it?
Todd Curry:
That's right.
Daniel Frankel:
What are some of the signs that their current payment system isn't working? What could they look at to sort of see that there's a problem?
Todd Curry:
I'd say approval rates. We really want to talk about approval rates with as many companies as we can. We want to look at how many declines they're getting. First payment declines and recurring customer declines are worth delving into a little bit too. And then charge back experience. It doesn't take many for them to hit the warning track. It could be as we've heard, as few as three with some large processors out there. Three chargebacks is, that's not a large number that can happen from any kind of fraud attack and can leave you with quite a bit more than that. So it's kind of scary to think about being effectively deplatformed after just a few chargebacks.
We like to talk to them about that, make sure that we understand fully what kind of terms they have with their processor in terms of how soon they see their money, what types of reserves they're being asked to hold. Typically, we can offer more flexibility on those terms as well. So just more liquidity, more revenue, and you have a partner who understands the telecom business. Why would you pick a generalist when there's a specialist out there that legitimately cares?
Daniel Frankel:
Now Vesta offers something called the transaction guarantee. Maybe in plain terms, you can explain to me what means, how does it help a wireless company?
Todd Curry:
So we call it payment guarantee, and it's just the simple promise that if we say a transaction is legitimate and it ends up that it's fraudulent, that we will cover the cost of that transaction, plain and simple. So I think it's important for us from an integrity standpoint that we're the ones sitting here with sophisticated AI tools, sorting out the goods and the bads. If we get that wrong, we're accountable. And that means we're accountable for any of the challenges that could come in the form. When a big fraud attack hits, you want to know that your partner is going to stand behind you no matter what. There can be, and again, I don't like to do this big scary thing with fraud, but it's entirely possible for a fraud bloom to create a situation where you're facing pretty serious penalties if your processor doesn't stop the fraudulent transactions as they hit.
And that's true really in any industry that you're in. So we have, if ever one of our partners is asked to pay a penalty or a fine associated with fraudulent transactions, we cover that too. It's our brand. We'll stand behind our word on transactions. So one of the other things that's really important when you're, you're buying, when you're working with a payment processor is that you've made one choice. So you have a single point of failure. If your processor, you have any kind of dispute with your processor, who's going to take your payments? You are out of luck. So if you have a dispute, if you have any sort of problem, if they say, "Hey, we don't like the fraud that we're seeing, we're going to hold your funds." You're stuck. And we think that's, again, a challenge, that experience would change. We have 16 processors who sit underneath us, very, very big names, [inaudible 00:12:22], Stripe.
In every country we have multiple acquirers that we use and have phenomenal relationship with, and they understand we will send transactions to one. And if we think that there's a higher likelihood that another is going to say yes to each particular customer, we'll send the transaction to a different acquirer. We're able to optimize acceptance across those processors that we work with and ensure that we get the highest approval rates, but also make sure that there's no downtime. If there's a problem with any particular processor, we can work across the others to make sure that your transactions never stop. So I think we call that revenue orchestration. It's an advanced kind of nerdy part of the payments world. Most companies will know a bit about having a payment gateway. This is sort of the advanced version of a payments gateway where you're able to actually orchestrate across different payment companies. So a little bit nerdy, but the net benefit is you don't just have one processor standing behind you. You have many, which gives you lots of options.
Daniel Frankel:
Very good. Well, let's talk about what's next for Vesta. What new products and tools are you about to bring to the market?
Todd Curry:
We spent a lot of this year trying to make our tools accessible to MVNOs. After years of being an industrial grade company, making enterprise level tools, we said, "Hey, we have to make all of our products fit small companies, growing companies and make sure that they can engage with us in our portal, engage with us on transactions, understand how to plug into our platform, really make all of those pieces very accessible to them." So we've done a lot of work on that front.
We've also done a bit of innovation around accepting partial payments and helping in some cases, companies to work with customers, should they be a little bit short this month, work with them under different conditions. So we have some tools that we're rolling out with some of our larger telco partners. We'll be rolling them out to MVNOs later this year or early next year to help with that as well. So it's rare the companies in the payments industry work to innovate. You sort of think of payments as being ubiquitous and unchanging. There's so many different forms of currency out there, cryptocurrency, different payment methods, alternate payment methods, we try to...
Daniel Frankel:
I didn't think of crypto.
Todd Curry:
Yeah, crypto for prepaid is big. All of our customers, all of our big customers want us to be taking crypto. So that's going to be next on our list later this year for us. Also shedding light on who customers are, shedding light on how likely they are to churn. We have some very unique insights based on our history that we want to be able to share so that we can help the marketing side of MVNOs to identify the customers who fit the bill for their brand, and they're going to represent a good long-term fit.
Daniel Frankel:
On churn alone we could go deep, but you've given the MVNOs out there a lot to think about. What's the next thing they should do? How do they reach out to you and establish a relationship?
Todd Curry:
Well, we would love, we're going to be at a number of shows this year. We're going to be at the All Wireless show in Vegas in mid-August. We're also going to be at MVNO Nation in Spain later this year. So if you're at a show, please come by and see our booth. But by all means, drop us a note, [email protected], we would love to talk to you and help you. Our rates are lower than any rates you'll find out there for payment processing. We try to take price off the table and focus on the most important parts, which is how we can get approval rates up and comfort levels up for MVNO executives
Daniel Frankel:
Price delivery. You've covered a lot here, Todd. So a lot for MVNOs to think about. I appreciate the time this morning. You have a busy trade conference schedule ahead of you, so I'll let you get to that. Best of luck with everything. And again, thank you.
Todd Curry:
Thank you. Appreciate the time, Daniel.