An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Recognize your opportunities to grow, particularly in the most challenging situations.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Shniderman.
Brian Shniderman, US CEO & Global Chief Strategy Officer at Opy, is a 32-year veteran of the payments and fintech advisory industry. Brian is responsible for bringing the “BNPL 2.0” model to the US market with the mission of offering a smarter way to budget and pay for life-changing purchases.
He joined Opy from Deloitte, where he founded and grew the firm’s globally top-ranked payments practice. He successfully helped the C-suite of large global companies implement high-visibility, complex payments, fintech and banking strategies, mergers and acquisitions, operations, and technology initiatives. These include large credit card issuers, merchant acquirers, networks, payments processors, corporates, governments, and merchants.
Prior to Deloitte, Mr. Shniderman was an executive at several advisory firms, focusing on fintech and payments. In 2001, he was recognized as an innovator of the year by Fortune for introducing approaches for B2B equity-based payments, continuing to innovate and launch new fintech products since then.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Fifteen years ago, when my oldest son was five years old, he asked me to attend his kindergarten class for show and tell. I found myself in the middle of a pack of 20 of the cutest little inquisitive, bright, and surprisingly assertive little humans, being intensely interrogated. “Where are you from?” “Why are you so tall?” “How did you get your last name?” All manageable questions, albeit at a pace that one might expect from the CIA rather than a pack of adorable five-year-old children. I was having fun…until they laid the big one on me. The curveball question, which I wasn’t prepared to answer for this kindergarten class, landed on me hard, “What do you do for a job?”
To my son, I had failed to live up to the tractor driver, veterinarian, and airline pilot that day. “I am a doctor for banks and credit card companies,” I said, “and my doctor instruments are technology, hard work, creativity, and innovation”. The look around the room was a mixture of disgust, confusion and boredom. I tried to recover, “I’m a consultant kids, and I solve problems”. And that was the end of it. The teacher thanked me, and in a flash, I remember being ushered out of the classroom less than 15 minutes after I arrived so she could make way for the Boeing 777 pilot. I heard he was in there for an hour.
I cut my teeth in consulting by accident. In business school, I took a real estate course where I turned in a final project which enhanced the industry’s paper-based multiple listing system reports (MLS) data for agents. The tool I created (although archaic by today’s standards) enabled real estate agents to filter a huge list of homes in a local market using search criteria that saved time for them and their clients. Along with a decent grade, my instructor ended up introducing me to one of the largest real estate companies in Southern California at the time, Jon Douglas Co.
It turned out there was a huge demand for the tool I built for a class project. But I had no idea how to answer their big question “How much do you want for it?” I chose to tell the brokers and agents it was free, but with a slight catch. It was only available to them if they were actively using me to train and consult their teams. They stopped printing lists, reduced labor costs associated with the old searches, and paid me very well for a 20-year-old college student in the 80s. It was the easiest 30 bucks an hour I had ever earned, and it was fun.
For two years I grew this accidental business into a small consultancy. And for over 30 years I practiced the consulting trade as part of larger firms.
During those years, I was blessed to work directly with and learn from incredibly talented and passionate professionals, visionaries who shifted their companies to meet the changing needs of the consumers and companies they served. I learned a great deal from these incredible leaders, giving them 16 hours a day for over 34 years and dedicating myself to relentlessly solving their most important challenges.
I was a road warrior zig-zagging the US and several other countries as I hit three to five cities a week. My tools of choice were always technology, hard work, creativity, and innovation. I led some of the most disruptive projects to help launch and expand new products from mobile wallets to loyalty and rewards, and instant payment rails owned and used by every major bank in the United States. I helped lead the Faster Payments initiative that helped the U.S. Federal Reserve modernize its payments system. I helped payments processors and their merchant customers innovate, develop industry-specific solutions, and much more. I loved helping them achieve success, especially when those successes helped change regular people’s lives.
My last project as a consulting partner in 2020 was for a fintech company operating in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, Openpay. This company had something different that I knew could disrupt the US market for the better. After being their consultant for six months, I saw that the potential to change lives through this innovation was so great, I opted to retire my Deloitte partnership to sit on the other side of the table, as their US CEO.
Now after 34 years of helping others create great solutions, I am applying that experience to grow Opy, an extraordinary payments fintech company throughout the United States. We launched in under one year and are now operating a responsible lending model across almost every US state. I love what I do. And through this experience, I’ve realized that it’s not the work I do or analogies I make, but my passion and commitment to helping others that makes my son and my family proud.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Meaningful disruption is the cause that drives me and my team.
I am passionate about introducing Opy’s differentiated product to the US market, bringing transparency and fairness to consumers, corporations, and merchants who have told me the status quo is no longer acceptable. I’ve never been more optimistic that systemic innovation in payments can make life-changing purchases more affordable and change lives.
My leadership role is focused on broad-scale financial wellness, focusing on those unfortunate moments, like emergency procedures that cost thousands of dollars out of pocket, or a broken-down transmission that prevents someone from getting to work or making a living, or keeping a safe roof over their heads after a rainstorm.
At Opy, we address some of the most challenging pain points facing consumers and merchants in the payments industry. Buy Now, Pay Later popularity is rapidly accelerating in the United States, but something was missing until very recently. Using a digital app-based platform, we provide larger, longer-term, installment plans for life-changing purchases. We provide flexibility to consumers, often offering a choice of loan plan terms, repayment vehicles, and a day in which repayments are due each month. Opy’s value proposition is aimed at a two-pronged marketplace. Our platform provides benefits to both consumers (confidence, control, and the ability to spread out the cost of purchases) and merchants (a broader market of empowered consumers), and both consumers and merchants contribute to the cost of Opy services. Buy Now Pay Smarter is what we call it, and it’s essentially BNPL 2.0.
Disrupting and innovating in a regulated industry like lending and payments isn’t easy. So, we’ve brought together some of the brightest minds in the industry. Our brilliant, purpose-driven leaders and their teams are enabling us to succeed in this endeavor to disrupt the lending and payments industry for the better.
I don’t take this cause lightly, and I wouldn’t have left my previous role at Deloitte after over a decade if I was not genuinely committed to the potential we have to truly make an impact on our industry and the lives of millions of Americans.
We plan to transform the installment payments industry. We’re doing it the Opy way, prioritizing the pressing needs of consumers and merchants alike, united around the cause to relieve financial stress and provide peace of mind.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I was eager to show my client from another country that I respected his heritage, honored his culture, and knew (a bit) of his language. I proceeded to tell him something with (unintended) meaning but completely irrelevant because my pronunciation was off. He laughed, and gently corrected me. I could tell he greatly appreciated my effort, and it established a friendship between us. The lesson I learned was that you don’t have to get it right every time, you only have to sincerely try, be humble, and care.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Early in my career, in my mid 20’s, I was called into the office of my managing partner. He asked me to help lead a major project that was completely outside of my area of skills and experience. AARP, one of the largest membership companies in the world needed to completely replace its systems, and they wanted us to innovate, concurrently and dramatically, their entire business at the same time. I knew financial services, but nothing about memberships for retired persons.
I asked him why he chose me among the other consultants to help lead the project. He swiveled his chair around 180 degrees and pointed at the skyscraper next door. “Because it doesn’t matter what I ask you to work on, you’re the one person here that will figure it out. If I ask you to build that skyscraper, knowing very well you’ve never built one, you’d actually figure it out and get it done. That’s why”.
I was struck by his belief in me, but he was also challenging me to prove him right. I walked out of his office believing I had the ability, would give it the necessary effort, and had the desire to prove him right and get it done. It took three years, and we developed some very innovative solutions as part of that project.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I see positive disruption as intended and significant change, challenging the status quo for good reasons. That is not to say that the outcome ends up being positive nor necessarily even achievable. More often than not, intended positive disruption ends in failure, but can leave behind important lessons and traces of hope for future trials. This is both healthy and necessary to achieve an environment of innovation. At Opy we intend to disrupt positively by changing the way people pay for the better.
It is interesting to look back at hundreds of projects I have observed and judge them against the relative measure of positivity. I have seen some banks rationalize policies and build systems they stated were positive that inadvertently ended up resulting in consumer harm. For example, many banks stated their intention to ensure that consumers’ largest, presumably most important checks cleared before their smaller checks. Mortgages would thus be paid ahead of a pair of jeans, and who doesn’t want the mortgage to be paid before their jeans, right? Well, that resulted in massive increases in overdraft fees, harming consumers and profiting banks by tens of millions of dollars a year. The courts and regulators have helped to reign in these and other egregious practices with substantial fines on the banks that perpetrated them. Clearly, these were examples of negative disruption with intentions to make money and inadequate consideration of consumer interests.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Be passionate about what you choose to do, and continue to do.
- Recognize your opportunities to grow, particularly in the most challenging situations.
- Actively care for and maintain your relationships.
- Be kind, and treat others at all levels as important and valued.
- Don’t judge people based on their immediate value to you, and be accessible.
Choose to do something you’re truly passionate about. We’re on this spinning marble for such a short period of time. Follow your passion and true success and happiness will be much more likely to follow. I have a friend that strived to be an attorney. He later realized it was never something he was passionate about, but he did because it was a logical, good-paying, and respected profession. He confessed to being miserable, and worse, didn’t make the leap to get out, wouldn’t accept going backwards to go forwards again in something he was passionate about.
I firmly believe that none of us are ever fully formed leaders. I certainly am not done developing and improving. When the opportunity arises, use the most challenging interpersonal situations to learn and turbocharge your personal growth. As a disruptive innovator, my passion and creativity often drive my team a bit crazy as I frequently bring new ideas to them. People are wired differently, and this diversity is a great thing, but can come with challenges. Use those to grow, especially when it’s most difficult. The ROI is greatest at those times.
We are a unique collection of relationships and experiences. Of my thousands of LinkedIn connections, a very large percentage of them are former clients, colleagues and now friends whose relationships I have actively developed. No one else shares this exact same base of connections. Everyone is unique in this way, and each of us possesses much more potential than we ever internally realize.
Someone once told me to treat everyone, at every level like they’re going to be your boss or your spouse’s best friend one day. The best example I have seen was watching Lloyd Wirshba in action, then US CEO of Barclaycard (now known as Barclays US), a former client, and now a close friend. Lloyd took the time to say hello, treat every line-level employee, janitor, administrative assistant, analyst, and executive with equal respect and genuine care. Years later when he worked with me at Deloitte I would watch how those people who worked for him years earlier would see him in the hallway, run out of their office to go give him a hug and say hi, like an old friend. Lloyd’s garden of relationships is incredibly rich and healthy, with admirers and friends.
It’s not important to treat the people you need something from, but those you interact with who have no immediate ‘benefit’ to you. Always be real, kind, and accessible to those who reach out to you for help, like candidates and recruiters looking for candidates, or people on LinkedIn asking to connect who you don’t yet know.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Not even close to being done.
I’m continuing to collaborate with trusted colleagues and partners to bring our technology to the forefront, expand our reach, augment our existing arc into new industry verticals, and change more lives. My work in this capacity has truly just begun. I will shake things up by seeing this effort through.
This is my first stint as a CEO, and I’ve quickly learned that this role requires immense patience and trust in those by my side. In addition to growing this platform, I intend to train and inspire new leaders who can carry the torch and emulate our mission when they reach this pedestal of responsibility. It’s one thing to leverage a product to impact lives, but it’s an entirely different undertaking to do the same with your own expertise to guide an individual on their career journey, one in which I take great pride.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
A CEO Only Does Three Things, by Trey Taylor. I’m typically not a big reader of self-help books. But as I transitioned from being a Deloitte partner to a CEO, I wanted to read as much as I could to understand what made others successful. I was struck by the powerful, yet practical stories and suggestions Trey offers. I’ve read it twice, and I reference it frequently. And despite the title, this is a great book for anyone in or considering a management role.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have developed a great relationship with one of our founders and Board members, and he has shared with me the Hebrew term Hatdama. The translation is essentially, “That which does not destroy you, makes you stronger.”
Passion and resilience are everything if you’re going to disrupt and innovate. You will always be challenged and frequently told “NO”. You will frustrate those around you, and often you will fail by your own standards. I’ve learned to embrace these and grow rather than get discouraged. Oh, and three cups of coffee the next morning helps too 🙂
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I aim to inspire business leaders, particularly those in financial services and fintech, to build business concepts around a worthwhile, far-reaching cause. If the lives of your target audience aren’t improved substantially, why bother pursuing an idea? We live in the age of social responsibility, and more businesses are joining the fray in this respect. Money bears tremendous, incomparable power in our society; let’s make transactions and payments more purposeful and make the most of its power.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianshniderman/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/open-pay/
https://twitter.com/paymentsguru
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Brian Shniderman Of Opy On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
