Larissa Padden 0:06

Hello, and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast, where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host and a former journalist turned PR professional. For today’s episode, we are joined by Geoffrey Barraclough, the founder of the Business of Payments, which is his monthly newsletter examining how Paytech makes money.

 

Geoff is, excitingly, also our first Substack guest, the platform he uses to publish and host his newsletter. Geoff gives us his insight into how companies are working with creators on Substack, how PR can pitch to Substack writers, and how this platform fits into the broader media landscape. Please enjoy.

 

Hi, Geoff. Thanks for being with us today.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 0:52

Oh, thanks for inviting me.

 

Larissa Padden 0:53

So I wanted to start off, as always, by asking you to give us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you found your way to writing your newsletter, the Business of Payments.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 1:03

Okay. Well, it’s a slightly long story, but the abbreviated version is I worked for two large American merchant acquirers. I’ve worked in the payment business the last 10 years or so. And then in 2022, I got elected to a part-time political position in London that meant I could no longer really do a full-time management job at a European level.

 

So casting around for what else to do, I thought I could set up a newsletter and a blog to write about my industry and see whether I could become an influencer in the payment industry and make a part-time living at that, bearing in mind that political careers can be short and unpredictable.

 

Larissa Padden 1:42

Well, I took a look at your newsletter. I read through some of the more recent newsletters, and it’s published on Substack. And that’s a platform that we’re hearing a lot more about recently, especially in conversations with clients. They have questions for us, other media professionals here in the US, reporters are setting up their own newsletters. So can you tell us a little bit about what it is, what Substack is, how it works, and why you chose this platform to start your newsletter on?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 2:08

So Substack is an email distribution platform. It makes it really easy for people like myself to send out content-rich multimedia newsletters. I just write my text in a Word document, add in images, add in links to YouTube videos or whatever is relevant to the subject I’m writing about. I just cut and paste that into the Substack browser. And that’s it, really. A few years ago, I did something similar using MailChimp, and I would spend an entire afternoon trying to format it. But this is just plug and play, really easy.

 

The advantage of Substack is that they don’t—well, it’s free. It’s free to me. They try and get you to charge for your newsletters, and then they take a cut of the charging. But that’s something that you can decide to do or not as you go along. And for reasons we may get into, I’m not charging for mine, but it’s an option that people can use.

 

Larissa Padden 3:01

Interesting. And I’ve heard of MailChimp, but I haven’t used it before. But it sounds like it is set up to be pretty seamless, but also to be direct email access to subscribers, so you don’t have to do much work.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 3:14

Absolutely. And it keeps a tag of the subscriber count. The emerging information is not particularly good. So I don’t know that much about who’s subscribing. I don’t know who’s clicking on what link. All the kind of features that you would expect in a commercial email marketing service are not there. It’s much more focused on beautiful content, making it easy for content creators, and also making it easy to charge for content as well.

 

One of the advantages is that you own your subscriber base, so you can download an Excel spreadsheet with all your subscribers in. So if you decide a better platform is what you want to go with, you can take your subscribers with you.

 

Larissa Padden 3:49

That’s interesting. There’s no way to see who’s clicking it through, opening it, reading it, how long they’re spending time with it. There’s no kind of feedback like that.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 3:57

There’s a bit, but it’s very manual. You have to go into individual subscribers and then click down and down and down. So it’s not like I recall some other—when I used to work in marketing before I became a part-time politician, part-time payment person, yes, there were better tools to use. But then if you’re a content creator rather than a marketing person, I don’t really care who’s clicking on what link.

 

Larissa Padden 4:21

Sure.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 4:21

I mean, all I care is how many subscribers am I getting and are they telling their friends they’re getting good content? Are they inviting me to speak at conferences or asking me to do other bits of work from time to time?

 

Larissa Padden 4:33

Yeah. Well, you’ve led right into my next question, which is from a marketing perspective though, can you give us a little peek behind the curtain of how brands and companies are interacting with creators on Substack? Are people, even if not yourself, making money with brand partnerships or is it mainly through subscriptions?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 4:53

Well, there’s a little club of payment-focused Substack writers. In fact, we all met up at a conference in Amsterdam last month, four or five of us sat down and had a chat about what we were doing. And everyone’s approaching the industry from a slightly different perspective. I’m very focused on business, on who’s making money, how to make money in the industry that I’m in. Others focus on regulatory or product questions. Everyone’s got a slightly different angle.

 

Yes, brand partnerships. So the large providers in this industry will sponsor content and they will take advertising. I don’t do that, but some of my colleagues do. I think the commercial upside for me personally is about becoming a better known figure in the industry and therefore being paid to give advice based on a reputation I established by providing a very comprehensive monthly update with some commentary on what’s going on in the industry.

 

So it’s much more about, well, for me, am I going to get invited to speak at conferences? Am I going to get invited to do due diligence work when a private equity company looks to do an acquisition and so on? So it’s a slightly different model, but others, absolutely.

 

Charging, yes, people are charging, and people will pay. People have told me they’ll pay for my newsletter. I think so far, up to about 4,000 subscribers, I think that they say on average, maybe you can convert 10%. If you do the math, it doesn’t really amount to a huge amount of money. And certainly if that diminishes my abilities to get my name and brand out in other channels, then probably not worth it at this point. But under review, I’d say.

 

Larissa Padden 6:36

So you talk about speaking at events. Has this opened up that avenue for you? Have you been contacted to speak at events or at least be in contact as a consultation?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 6:47

Absolutely. Yes, I’ve got some business directly through this. I’ve got a couple of clients have me on retainer to give me advice. One of the big card networks has paid me to speak at one of their customer events.

 

So bearing in mind, I don’t have my foot to the gas on this one because I have at least half of my time is spent on my local political role. So if you like, I’m spending my time producing content and the other things in my life. I think if my political career were to be cut short, which is always a risk, that I could put the foot to the pedal on the commercialization of Business of Payment.

 

So I had in my head a model a bit like I don’t know if you come across the Business of Fashion, which is a blog that’s made a huge impact in that industry. And that was where I was thinking in terms of the media property. You could take this into podcasts, into conferences, into recruitment, into brokering, buy and sell of companies. There’s a whole stack of ways you could take this that aren’t ultimately around selling content.

 

Larissa Padden 7:49

Interesting. I have a personal question because I used to be a reporter and when people ask me what I miss most about being a reporter, I say the press pass because you no longer get free entry into conferences and events. Through Substack, do you see people accepting that as a form of not traditional media, but media to attend events?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 8:08

Absolutely. So at Money20/20, which is the big fintech conference, it’s in Vegas, it’s in Amsterdam, it’s in Bangkok. I went to the Amsterdam one last month. And yes, I’m invited as a press, a member of the press. I go to the press conferences, the Substackers are there alongside the traditional publications.

 

I think we do lack in the newer industries an established business press that is able to provide some commentary rather than just reprint a press release. And I think that’s where the Substackers come in.

 

Larissa Padden 8:47

Interesting. Yeah, I’ve noticed that maybe not Substack so much just because it’s newer to me, but you look at LinkedIn influencers and they’re kind of viewed as these more insider people than traditional media because it’s often people that have worked in that industry. And so they can kind of give a little more commentary that you’re not able to give at more traditional media. And we’ve seen that kind of be the benefit. And of course, there are also downsides to not being traditional media. But that’s kind of what we’ve heard from these non-traditional, we call them micro media, influencers’ sphere that’s kind of growing.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 9:21

I think that’s a good observation. And I think the traditional media, because they tend to be generalists, are looking for a story. And also because they’re trained journalists. At some extent, maybe what we’re looking for a slightly different angle on what to write about. Might not be traditional journalism story. And I think possibly that means the space for both. There’s also a bit of validation. I mean, you know, we still feel if Bloomberg writes about something, it must be true, right?

 

Larissa Padden 9:52

Right. Yeah. If a reporter, yeah, I guess that’s the traditional thinking, that if the media is paying attention to it, we must have gotten it right if we were also talking about it.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 10:00

Absolutely. Must be important. But one thing I have learned is there are some very big companies that are not covered. Well, a major American payment company flew me to Las Vegas to their investor day. And it’s a $10 billion capitalized company, but no one’s writing about them. So I’m the only person that has published, as far as I know, any commentary on this business and what it’s doing with it with any depth, which is I think it’s worth their while—

 

Larissa Padden 10:52

Of course, yeah.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 10:26

—having me out there. But there’s a gap. There’s certainly a big gap in the market, I suspect.

 

Larissa Padden 10:31

That’s interesting. Because from our perspective on the PR side, trying to get publicity for clients, it’s almost like, especially in payments, you’re fighting for some attention. So it is interesting. There’s still big companies that are flying under the radar that don’t want to fly under the radar.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 10:43

No. So this company is not unknown. And if it puts out a press release, it’ll get some coverage. What I’m saying is in terms of a serious bit of commentary about its strategy, relating it to other companies.

 

Larissa Padden 10:57

I see.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 10:57

And what might or might not be the outcome of various moves that it’s making, which is the very big companies do get. But even in America, because the stock market has taken off so much, there’s this huge mid-market of quite large organizations that are just not getting any third party considered coverage, if I might say.

 

But if we go back to how—I think one of the questions your listeners might want to know is, well, how do you get my attention?

 

Larissa Padden 11:24

Yes.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 11:24

And a lot of it is personal relationships. So I’m fortunate. I live in London, so people can take me out for coffee. And some large companies, their press office or investor relations people have taken the time to come and see me build a relationship. And so others haven’t. And invite me to your events, invite me to your customer events and your conferences, because that’s helpful for me to meet other people, to meet your customers, to meet other people in my industry.

 

What is less successful is just mailing me a press release. Not least because I write a monthly digest and newsletter and commentary about the industry. So your press release will be covered by every other outlet. So it’s not for me. It’s not news.

 

Larissa Padden 12:09

That was one of my questions I had a little later on is if people are pitching to you, whether it’s companies or individuals like me, PR professionals that are pitching not just press releases, but do you want to talk to this company? And so what you’re saying is we should be doing that more with Substackers and influencers.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 12:25

Yes. And build that personal relationship. I’ll give you an example. Another private, a large privately held company which has built a relationship with me. And I know that I know the team. They launched a set of accounts in London for one of their subsidiaries, which was taken out of context by the mainstream media, I would say, and turned into a story of like a negative story about the company, which wasn’t warranted by the facts, because I knew that I understood how they worked in their organization.

 

I was able to post on LinkedIn. Don’t believe what you’re reading here. This company may be doing badly or might be doing well. We don’t know this information. Won’t help us. And I think that was an example of where building the relationship really helped in terms of delivering value for this company, but also for me, because it makes me look like I know what I’m talking about.

 

Larissa Padden 13:15

Yeah, I mean, your newsletter is very focused on, I believe the tagline is how Paytech makes money. But it is also a very thorough, deep dive into these major payment players. So it’s anything from their recent news, whether that’s earnings or industry news.

 

Most recently, I saw that you were following Global Payments and the launch of Genius and the acquisition of Worldpay. But you also put it in perspective of how this is going to impact their company and the payment space in general. So how do you decide what you’re going to write and how you kind of build your stories from month to month?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 13:49

Well, so ultimately, I would write what I was interested in. And if I was bored, I wouldn’t write about it. I can’t be bothered by it. So you are getting a particular flavor of what interests me. Also, given my background working, I’m a commercial marketer strategy person. I’m not a technologist and I can do finance, but I’m not a finance guy.

 

So every morning I have some news feeds that I’ve set up. I spend about an hour every morning going through those and clipping stories into another document, which builds the content for the newsletter. If anything particularly interesting comes up, maybe twice a week, I do a little LinkedIn piece about that. But otherwise, I store up the stories for my newsletter. For about one week a month, it’s quite maybe a bit more intensive where I start turning things into long form. And I used to get my wife to proofread it for me, but now I get ChatGPT to do that.

 

Larissa Padden 14:49

Okay. Yes, that has made a lot of things easier.

 

So I did want to switch gears. You mentioned politics in your other career. It’s a very interesting mix and it’s a kind of a dual life. You’re also a Westminster City Council member, if I have that correctly. So can you tell us a little bit about kind of how you reconcile these two halves of your careers?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 15:11

Well, the two halves are completely separate, and they have to be to avoid any conflict of interest.

 

But so my political role, I’m responsible for town planning and economic development for the city of Westminster, which is the middle bit of London, including a lot of the ceremonial areas, most of the central business district. But also 200,000 people living in fairly normal Londonish kind of houses and flats. So it’s a mixture of like normal local government and also the kind of special bit.

 

And the economic development part of it is fascinating because we’ve been seeing central London rebound after the pandemic and the reinvention of retail and hospitality in the West End, where it was absolutely on its knees in 2021, 2022. But now investment is pouring back. People want to meet face to face. They want to go shopping. They shop in different ways. They may be less interested in seeing lots of stock, more interested in experience, more interested in working on which brands they like. Maybe they’ll buy the goods at home. But they do want to come out into town and meet each other.

 

And I mean, there’s relevance for payments here, which is that this blend of channels, and even in a physical outlet, you have a coffee shop, you have an experience bit, you have subscriptions, you have a whole stack of different ways of buying things. And the need for modern payment technology comes in there, too. But not something I would talk about in my political role.

 

Larissa Padden 16:47

Right. Sure. Of course. Yeah, it is interesting. I was in Amsterdam last summer and you could not give away physical money in that city. They just want electronic payments for everything, which I appreciate. I’m not a cash person.

 

But you do have here in the US, I feel like we have, of course, payment networks, Apple Pay, contactless pay. And it is coming a long way. But I do feel like maybe—and maybe I’ll get roasted for this a little bit. But Europe is a little farther ahead in that regard.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 17:15

Well, I wouldn’t say Europe’s further ahead. I would say America is a long way behind the rest of the world. I mean, you guys still write checks.

 

Larissa Padden 17:23

Right. I still have a checkbook, yeah.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 17:24

Yeah. And literally nobody else anywhere in the world writes a check. So there are some old fashioned elements to this.

 

The terribly fragmented nature of the payment system and the fact that your regulatory regime always favors banks rather than retailers means that electronic payments are much more expensive in America than they are other parts of the world. Generally, other parts of the world regulators favor retailers over banks. So they drive down the cost of payments. That’s not happened yet in the US. So I think that’s definitely one thing.

 

And the whole tipping thing, that makes things really difficult in terms of a payment workflow. I mean, I was in Las Vegas in February, and I tipped. And because of the way it worked, they had to give me a refund. And the only way they give me a refund is—I pay with Apple Pay—I had to get my card out and do a magnetic stripe for the refund. Meanwhile, there’s like 15 people behind me in the queue. So these problems have all been resolved in the rest of the world.

 

Larissa Padden 18:28

Yeah. We could probably go on for another 30 minutes about tipping. I used to be a bartender and a waitress in another life. So I have a fondness for it. And then now not working in that industry, I really don’t enjoy it. So it’s a double-edged sword.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 18:41

The rest of the world tips, but the rest of the world gets the bill, decides to tip, and then they pay. Only in America do you pay twice. You pay and then you pay the tip. And that is what causes all the complexity.

 

Larissa Padden 18:54

I see. I never thought about it as paying twice because it’s just normal here. But you’re right. It is after the card is run, yeah, and then you have to adjust it. Wow. Interesting.

 

So this has all been fascinating. I do have a final, hopefully fun question. When you think about the companies that you’ve been in contact with and the stories that you’ve written recently, which payment company, if you could name one or two, do you think are doing something really cool right now and being really innovative?

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 19:19

Oh, blimey, who’s been? In the payment industry, the new players, so that’s Stripe, Adyen, and as you said, Checkout, are the three that are streets ahead of everybody else in terms of customer experience and merchant experience and a positive flywheel of more customers, more money for product investment and better features. So they’re absolutely streets ahead.

 

Larissa Padden 19:45

Interesting. Great. Well, this has been great. Hopefully, we’ll see you again soon, maybe at some events if you’re in the US. We’re very in the payment space ourselves, so hopefully we’ll run into each other. But definitely come back and talk to us if there’s some big news in the payment space again.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 19:59

It’ll be a pleasure.

 

Larissa Padden 20:00

Thank you so much.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough 20:01

Bye.

 

Larissa Padden 20:02

Bye.