In the article below, My Tech Mag interviewed Michael J. Sinnwell Jr., Hypur Chief Operating Officer, about the challenges of cannabis banking and compliance and what the future holds for Hypur.
Hypur’s unique combination of Compliance-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS) models is described as keeping financial institutions in a continuously proactive, rather than reactive, environment while conducting Marijuana Related Businesses (MRB) transactions.
Many highly regulated industries, for example, the cannabis industry, present unique challenges to financial institutions attempting to serve them. As a result, many of these industries have limited or no access to banking. Arizona-based Hypur provides a unique combination of a Compliance-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS) model.
The Hypur Comply CaaS model puts financial institutions in a continuously proactive, not reactive environment through access to the Marijuana Related Businesses (MRB) transactions. Hypur also offers electronic payments for the cannabis industry that otherwise would not have access to legitimate merchant processing. Hypur offers the convenience and security of mainstream payments without the frustrations, unreliability, and awkwardness of niche payment schemes.
Christopher Galvin, CEO of Hypur along with Michael J Sinnwell Jr, President / COO of Hypur architected a solution that provided the transparency and requisite tools for financial institutions to accurately and compliantly provide banking and payments solutions to the cannabis industry. They recognized that this was a banking problem, not a payment problem.
If operators were unable to get their capital into the banking system, there was no way to provide a sustainable solution to an industry desperately in need of one. Together the Hypur team is bringing transparency to these transactions and offering ease of monitoring transactions.
The compliance foundation of Hypur’s technology enables financial institutions to originate transactions on behalf of MRB where traditional payments are not permissible. Hypur payments allow for Business to Consumer (B2C) transactions and Business to Business (B2B) transactions. This offers MRB consumers the option to pay electronically in-store or online. Also, to help manage and provide transparency to the distribution side of the industry, Hypur payment solution is able to digitize the receivables and move the manual financial processes to the cloud as the first Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS) model in cannabis. The technology monitors and automates every aspect of a merchant’s lifecycle. From the onboarding of prospective accounts to the daily monitoring of existing accounts, the technology helps financial institutions eliminate “blind spots” and operate in a continually proactive environment.
Through Hypur Comply’s features of using point-of-interaction data, financial institutions are able to make better decisions and prevent suspicious transactions before they enter their institution while reducing expensive and error-prone manual processes. Hypur can monitor a myriad of inputs while enabling red flags, triggers, and alerts based on the policies and procedures of each financial institution in a real-time environment.
Hypur has clients who bank highly regulated industries that created programs heavy in manual processes and large compliance staffing. Some of these institutions had significant challenges sustaining a compliant program due to heavy workload and things “falling through the cracks”. Hypur has been able to help these institutions automate many of these processes and eliminate oversight, assisting them in their ability to continue to expand their programs and become increasingly profitable.
For the days to come, Hypur aims to have at least one Bank or Credit Union client in each market with a State legal cannabis program by the end of 2019. The company also aims to expand Hypur Commerce and Hypur B2B throughout the country this year. An equal focus will be on expanding the company’s footprint of financial institution clients banking money services businesses throughout the U.S. In close partnership with their Financial Institution clients, Hypur strives to help set the standard of how highly regulated industries can and should be banked.
This article originally appeared on My Tech Mag
