October 7, 2025 • 35 mins
Ruston Miles, Founder and Chief Strategy and Development Officer at Bluefin and I start with the origin story: telecom roots, fiber‑rich Tulsa, and the overlooked reality of call centers that needed real‑time authorizations long before shopping carts ruled the web. Ruston explains why Bluefin moved into security early - serving higher ed, nonprofits, and faith‑based media where brand trust is everything and how that path led to P2PE. Then comes the turning point: a decision to decouple encryption from acquiring, offer P2PE as a service, and even power competitors. That platform approach now supports around 150 devices across 17 manufacturers and underpins airlines, transport systems, fuel networks, and more, often quietly and often by requirement.
From there, we look ahead. Network tokens are rising, wallets are changing, and AI is pushing commerce from clicks to intent. Ruston separates hype from reality, showing how today’s “agentic” automation schedules deliveries and completes checkouts, while tomorrow’s agents will present payment credentials securely without platforms ever seeing raw card data. That shift demands virtual P2PE, inter‑agent boundary mediation, and standards that let authentication and encryption travel with the transaction. We also get practical: how Bluefin’s P2PE‑as‑Proxy reduces integration pain, why security must keep pace with innovation, and what skills newcomers need as software continues to digest payments.
If you care about payments security, PCI, P2PE, tokenization, gateways, ISVs, and the future of agentic commerce, you’ll find plenty to take back to your roadmap.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast,
where we talk to sea levelleaders from across the payments
landscape.
We'll be discussing the productsand services that impact the
payments space today, as well astrends and predictions for the
future of payments.
We will also hear stories fromour guests about their journeys
to the top.
SPEAKER_01 (00:18):
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in
Payments Podcast.
I'm your host, Greg Myers.
And today's special guest isRustin Miles, the founder and
chief strategy and developmentofficer at Bluefin.
So, Rustin, thank you so muchfor being here and welcome to
the show.
SPEAKER_02 (00:31):
Great to be here, Greg.
Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_01 (00:33):
All right.
Well, let's dive in.
If you don't mind, tell ouraudience a little bit about
yourself, maybe where you grewup, where you went to school,
where you currently live, a fewthings like that.
SPEAKER_02 (00:40):
My parents were originally Upers, Upper
Peninsula, Michiganders, right?
But they had me in New Orleans.
So these are two different,completely different uh
experiences.
So I was raised, et cetera,outside of, well, actually
between New Orleans and BatonRouge, sort of a swamp area.
That's where I grew up, and thenmoved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which
is uh, you know, the second NewOrleans.
So just kidding.
I like to say downsized fromhurricanes to tornadoes.
(01:03):
So definitely loving it out herein Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Went to college out here, andeventually moved a good bit of
my extended family out here andand do like it.
Turns out that uh Tulsa was asort of a mecha, if you will, or
a base for telecommunications,right?
Because of Will Tel, WilliamsCommunications, uh MCI, all
these things that are nowVerizon, but lots of other
brands because of the fact thatthey used a lot of the
(01:25):
pipelines, host sort of oildelivery, energy delivery to put
fiber optics and run thesethings around the country.
So it turned out to be a greatplace when the World Wide Web
came out in 94 to be here, rightsort of at the epicenter of
telecom.
And then what do we do withpayments in telecom?
Well, that was the next thing.
And so that took my 25-yearcareer for the last quarter
century out here in workingpayments through
(01:47):
telecommunications.
SPEAKER_01 (01:48):
Well, let's dive in and discuss Bluefin.
So tell the audience whatBluefin does.
SPEAKER_02 (01:54):
Sure.
Uh when I started Bluefin uh 25years ago, started it as a
payment gateway.
So it was a pure play paymentgateway developed by a
frustrated user, you know, thethe old story, was working with
some brands that we probably allknow that weren't quite
satisfying the needs of what Ineeded at the time, which was to
bring payments to contactcenters, call centers, things
like this, where you've gothundreds, in cases thousands of
(02:16):
people sitting in rooms uhtaking direct response from
television or or these differentthings, campaigns.
And so being in the middle ofAmerica out here, that is where
a lot of contact centers kind ofwere from time zone, from the
way people uh sound on thephone, and also to the good uh
interconnectivity.
All of the payment gateways atthe time were focused on
e-commerce, shopping carts,these kinds of things,
(02:38):
subscriptions, and it's like,well, we need something that
actually can serve business whenit comes to doing phone payments
and real-time authorizations.
So from there, the naturalprogression happened.
You know, of course we got intoe-commerce and card not present
kinds of things, Moto, uh, whichis what we were already doing.
But then eventually you becomean ISO for payments.
And our brand Bluefin, my brandBluefin that I came up with, we
(02:59):
were focused on larger kinds oforganizations.
So less like, you know, all theother local credit card
companies, dot com, you know,were all selling terminals from
the boot of their car, going tothe retail and restaurant things
in the front row.
And all of my businesses that Iserve were second-story
businesses, back and boilerrooms and contact centers and
these kinds of places where youdon't really even know that
(03:21):
those businesses are there.
It might be a group that sellssign shop equipment to 60,000
sign shops across America, andthey're working it all from you
know, this two-story building inTulsa that you don't even know
what's going on inside of there.
Well, they need payments, right?
And so that got us into ISO andpayment processing.
But because of those kinds ofbrands, we started getting into
security pretty early on becausewe're doing lots of um higher
(03:44):
education institutionsinstitutions, nonprofits, of
course, being out here in theMidwest, a lot of faith-based
kinds of ministries andtelevision things like this.
So a lot of these folks thatreally minded their brand more
than maybe you know someoneselling shoes if they have a
breach or they have a problem.
Well, let's start a newbusiness.
Change from Steve's shoes toJane's shoes and move on with
life.
Can't do that if you've got aloyal following, et cetera.
(04:05):
So that got us into securitywell before, I mean, before PCI
was a thing.
This is like it was CISP, itwasn't even called PCI at this
time.
So we had to get in on that veryearlier because of the folks
that we were serving.
And it was complicated becausewe were we were securing, you
know, not just websites andshopping carts, but physical
things, virtual attendants,people working from home, people
(04:26):
working from physical things,you know, wires going, keep key
loggers, all these kinds ofdifferent things that needed to
be protected.
Well, that got us intoend-to-end encryption pretty
early on, right?
And then come along in 2012,merged the company with capital
payments and kind of cametogether.
They brought sort of the ISO,the payment processing piece,
and I brought the technology andthe security.
And they asked me, like, okay,what's the next thing?
(04:48):
What does the crystal ball say,Rustin?
And I said, Well, the crystalball says P2PE.
You know, they're like, What?
But point-to-point encryption,you know, PCI has a standard, no
one has followed the standard.
Standard might even be at riskof going away, but it is the
answer to because I was atelecom uh kind of person from
my background with MCI WorldComand all that.
(05:09):
And so I knew kind of how riskyall this stuff was.
You could see stuff going overthe wires, you know, and if it
didn't take that much to be ahacker, if you can get in on the
wire and pull the data off, evenif it's encrypted, you might be
able to get at it and decryptit.
It was it was sort of the WildWest, literally, at that point.
And so I was kind of concerned.
I could see, you know, the twofreight trains coming together
100 degrees, 100 miles an hourat each other.
(05:29):
And I said, we we ought to dothis P2PE thing, guys.
So we invested into that.
And a year later, as soon as wehad our product out, the target
breach happened, which thenturned into a thousand credit
card breaches a year, literally.
I'm not exaggerating.
Some of those years it was overa thousand credit card breaches.
We might have only heard of 20or 30 in the news, but there was
lots of them going on uh, youknow, in down the stack.
(05:50):
And all of a sudden, our companyjust started to 10x because we
had the solution.
Then we took that and said,gosh, we can't just use this for
our own payment processing.
Well, that's going to limit it,and it's really hard to do.
We were the first to do it inNorth America to be validated
for this and audited.
And so we said, let's go aheadand pull that apart and sell it
to our competitors and make ourcompetitors our partners.
(06:11):
And now we have 130, you know,gateways and processors, and you
know, you can go look at ourlist, all the big names out
there, you know, the cybersources and these kinds of
folks, you know, all thesepayment gateways and processors,
they're out there and they'repartners of ours using uh
point-to-point encryption as aservice, but not using us for
the payments.
So we kind of started in gatewaythe acquiring and processing,
(06:32):
and then said, let's actuallyfocus down, double down on
security solutions and doingthat.
And so that's really really tookthe company into its third act,
which was focusing on that.
I think most folks know of usnow as the P2PE company, P2PE as
a service, and more recently uhP2PE as a proxy, which is sort
of the thing that we've beendoing for the last year or so,
which is a way to implement thisvery hard to thing do with zero
(06:55):
very hard thing to do with zerointegration, zero lift, kind of
like uh just send it through thetunnel and it's secured, right?
It's it we can get into thedetails at some other point.
But it is that new, elegant wayto deliver what we do to make it
easier and maybe faster toimplement in the system.
And that's that's what uh uh youknow is generating a lot of the
buzz and interest right now.
(07:16):
But we we started in thegateway, went on to the
acquiring, picked up paymentsecurity, and then the company
10xed, and like that's what wedo now.
We're we're a payment securitysolutions company, and having to
do that, extend that beyondpayments, because these
companies have way more tosecure than just payments.
And so our platform doeshealthcare, PHI, PII, you know,
all this other kind of uhprivacy data as well.
(07:37):
So anything that's involved withpayments and non-payment data.
SPEAKER_01 (07:41):
Okay.
So your main customers are otherpayment companies, and then
maybe some healthcare, is thatabout right?
SPEAKER_02 (07:46):
Yeah, I mean our partners are payment gateways,
payment processors, and softwareplatforms.
So you can think of all the ISVsand SaaS and practice management
systems out there.
Um, some of them go direct tothe processors.
We don't go through a gateway,right?
And so they'll use us.
Some of them go through agateway that doesn't have P2PE
until they'll say you need toget P2PE, you know, integrate
(08:08):
with Bluefin for this, you know.
We have lots of the bigenterprises out there in logos,
obviously because we're part oftheir security posture.
Don't like to talk about them ona public platform unless they're
present or or give specificspecific permission.
But you can think of like, youknow, 25% of the large airlines
in the world, you know, sort oflike the largest car rentals in
(08:30):
the world, probably the largestpetroleum gas station networks
and state and stations in thecountry, all of the tubes and
and tolls and everything inLondon, you know, and and in
Boston, et cetera, et cetera.
Point being, the largest brandsthat you can think in the world,
and retailers and malls andthings like this, very, very,
very super prominent brands areflowing over our networks either
(08:52):
directly to us or by by drivingtheir vendors to be required
because they won't they won'ttake it without point-to-point
encryption, or by going direct.
But I have to say, we are not ago-to-direct company.
Usually these enterprises andthese organizations are working
with us because they alreadyhave so many things solved
through other gateways andsoftware, but they just really
need that point-to-pointencryption piece to be fully
(09:12):
secure.
SPEAKER_01 (09:13):
So you mentioned London.
Is that mean you're a globalcompany all over the world?
SPEAKER_02 (09:18):
Yes.
So obviously started the companyhere in Tulsa, our headquarters
are in Atlanta.
Got folks around the country,huge center of excellence in NOC
and development in Waterford,Ireland.
We've got you know offices inAustralia, Bratislava, you know,
data centers in Germany, and youknow, we're we're definitely a
global company with with bothemployees and and infrastructure
(09:40):
across uh North America andEurope.
And we, of course, serve otherareas of the world, but
predominantly in those marketsis where we would have our
employees and infrastructure.
SPEAKER_01 (09:50):
Aaron Powell Well, it sounds like you were the
first, but it's uh you're you'renot the only one these days.
So what would you saydifferentiates Bluefin from your
competitors out there?
SPEAKER_02 (10:00):
Yeah, I mean, so we were we were the first and very
much didn't want to be the onlybecause when a standard only
serves one player, then it's nota standard.
It's you know what I'm saying, astandard is there so that you
can create an ecosystem.
And we wanted adoption, right?
And in fact, part of the reasonuh we decoupled or componentized
or worked with the PCI Councilwith our P2PE 2.0 standard to
(10:24):
create a standard that wouldbreak apart the point-to-point
encryption to like key injectionfacilities and you know HSM uh
decryption entities, terminalentities, people creating
devices, all these differentkinds of entities.
That's in the beginning withpoint-to-point encryption, it
was all or nothing.
You had to do the wholesolution, get it all validated,
or you couldn't just do onepart.
(10:45):
You're like if you were a keyinjection facility or a KIF, you
couldn't just do your part.
You had to be part of a largersolution that was all audited.
So we wanted that to be, inorder for this thing to grow, it
needed to be sort of federatedand componentized.
And so we very much pushed forthat, which, you know, scratch
your head in the beginning.
Didn't you want to rule theworld, Rustin?
You know, well, yeah, everybusiness wants to be build a
(11:06):
monopoly, right?
But uh, but that's just not theway my brain works.
I'm like, if this thing reallyneeds to grow, we need to have
an ecosystem of participants,everybody doing their part.
So we drove that and then wecreated a platform called P2PE
Manager, which allows them allto interface and do their
various parts in it.
So I'd have to say, when you askwhat differentiates, every other
solution out there is asolution.
(11:27):
Every other solution in the PCIlisting is of which I would say
20% of the listings in the PCIlisting for P2PE, of all those
hundreds of listings, 20% ormore are actually sublistings of
ours for other brands, likeWhite Label, right?
And then there are hundreds, asI said, of folks out there using
this, but who are who are justusing our solution and hadn't
taken the extra step to gettheir name with us sort of being
(11:50):
the Intel inside kind ofsituation, right?
But the point is that we are aplatform, we are a network, we
are the sort of the back-endprovider of services to this
industry, which many of them areusing.
And all of the other guys outthere are like, hey, I've got a
POS and we built our own P2PE.
Or I've got a gateway out here,my payment gateway, and my
(12:12):
payment gateway, we built P2PEfor it.
We decided not to do it as aservice with Bluefin, and we
decided to do it ourselves.
Those are great, those are pointsolutions because that one
gateway may focus on retail.
That one may gateway may focuson hospitality, and they might
be the best hospitality-focusedpayment gateway with their own
P2PE, you know, in America.
Okay, great, great, great.
(12:33):
But that's one small vertical,not vertical, large, one
vertical and one usage point,and our system is across all
verticals and basically aplatform that serves that
market.
So there's nobody else, believeme, when you do these analysis
and you try to do the quadrantand see who's where.
There's nobody in our quadrant.
I know if that's like, oh, it'salways nice to see the Venn
diagram or you just kind of ownthe world.
(12:54):
But but it is true that it isvery difficult to do this.
It's very difficult to keep upwith it.
You know, for example, we've got150 different devices or so
across 17 manufacturers.
Like when you look at all theother solutions, they'll have
like, oh, we're just an Ingenicoshop, you know, just one
manufacturer, and these are thetwo devices, right, that we
support.
And so I think that's what wehave is sort of that decade lead
(13:16):
of that.
And I don't see anybody elsehaving a direct competitor as a
as a service or as a platformoffering, but certainly within
verticals, hospitality andretail, there are there are some
great players.
And I'm glorious great to havethe competition because that
that kind of drives it allforward.
SPEAKER_01 (13:31):
Sure.
Absolutely.
Well, let's talk a little bitabout the future.
Where do you see payments in inthe fintech space headed in
maybe the next three to fiveyears?
SPEAKER_02 (13:40):
Well, uh, you know, we're we're seeing this march to
sort of eradicate, I would sayeradicate primary account
numbers or pan or credit cardnumbers moving towards network
tokens, for example, maybe lessdependence on cards.
The idea was there to be moredigital wallets.
Now, if you're if you're readingsome of these things are like,
well, gosh, with AI agenticcommerce and these things, well,
isn't that just gonna leapfrogthe wallet?
(14:00):
You know, why do you even needto have a wallet, right?
This is things need to besecured.
So I I think we're going to seea lot of this, this, this uh
agentic thing really, reallytransforming.
I'm a I'm a big AI user and it'sit's it's almost frustrating to
me when I'm dealing with vendorsthat don't allow me to use it,
you know, for my Instacart orDoorDash or Uber Eats or all of
my different things.
Like, you know, um, so it's a Ithink if that's where the stuff
(14:22):
is going.
Does that mean that paymentswill go away?
No.
We always need payments.
Does that mean payment securitywill go away?
No, it becomes that much moreimportant as we get closer to
AI, as we get closer to quantum,as we get closer to these
things.
Payment security.
Because I always like to say,payments, you know, innovation
should never outpace too faranyway, payment security
innovation.
They should always be, you can'tget to security before the
(14:44):
innovation too much because itstifles the innovation.
So you gotta have that kind ofgoing forward.
But it has to be right there,nipping on the heels, not
dragging it down so much, butbut making sure it doesn't just
go off the tracks.
And so that's really our missionis to secure point-to-points,
payments between two points.
Point-to-point encryption islargely thought of as two
hardware points.
(15:05):
A credit card machine, it'sencrypted, it goes through over
here, it's cryptid over there.
But really, we're about securingeven virtual points-to-points.
If that goes from inter-agenticcommerce or if that's between
two token providers, et cetera,we are that not just the
physical, but also the virtualpoint-to-point security
platform.
And so that's where I think it'sgoing and why I think Bluefin
(15:27):
has a bright future in thatfuture.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01 (15:28):
So that agentic commerce, I mean, we've seen
some announcements by someplayers, and you know, we were
talking a little bit earlieroffline about this.
You know, there's a lot ofannouncements.
A lot of people say they'redoing things, but no one's
really committing, in myopinion, to do a whole lot.
But I think everyone knows it'scoming.
And I know you're reallyinvolved in a lot of different
organizations around AI.
(15:50):
So kind of where do you think weare in that?
Like is, you know, are are wegoing to have agents buying
things for us in the next yearor two, or do you think that's
pretty far out?
SPEAKER_02 (15:59):
Oh, I already do that like daily on a daily
basis, man.
So for example, in and the thedifferent GPTs and and and
platforms have differentdifferent uses, I would say, you
know.
For example, the perplexity, youknow, the comet product, the
agentic browser.
So, you know, I'll go in therefor my birthday.
My sister sent over a Worddocument list that she had
(16:19):
copied and pasted people's textsof what they wanted from a
restaurant that I like, right?
And so I just put that in to theAI and said, and I logged into
my um to DoorDash and said, youknow, go do all this.
And it did it.
And then it gets to the end,it's like, would you like me to
click by?
Uh yes, click by, right?
So that's just all so that'shappening today.
I mean, you know, I I do all myweekly ordering on Instacart.
(16:43):
Anything that takes more thanlike five or six minutes to do
when it comes to that stuff, I'malready doing that, right?
JAT GPT has a little bit whatdifferent way that they deliver.
It's not an agentic browser,it's sort of a virtual PC
desktop that it has that ituses.
Um, but I think they're going tobe coming along pretty quick
with their own agentic browser.
So I this is already being usedlargely, a sort of, I would call
(17:04):
like commerce automation.
But that next leap is when younot only just do commerce
automation, you know, where it'sbasically automating and being
my agent to go out and make allthe orders, but my credentials,
my card number, my informationstill exists inside of Instacart
or DoorDash, and all it's doingis calling up that credential
and saying, yes, use that one,but it's not actually handling
(17:26):
the payment outside of outsideof that platform.
That next step is where it says,oh no, I've got the payments.
I'm not going to trust Instacartor DoorDash or Uber Eats with
this stuff.
And when it comes time to pay,I'm going to hit, you know, an
MCP or an API or whatever, andthat's tokenized, and I'm going
to deliver payment because now Itrust perhaps my agent with my
(17:48):
payment security more than I dothat software or that platform.
Right.
So now that platform can'tbreach my credit card
information either because theydon't have it.
So now I grow I grow even moretrust.
So I think that's it's going toget closer to that kind of
thing.
That's not here yet becauseright now it's more automation
in the way that it'sinteracting.
And we have to have those sortof uh protocol pipe tunnels
(18:09):
where both sides can agree andthat there's a standard to say,
okay, here's I'm going tocommunicate to you outside of a
web browser to communicatepayment or that payment has
occurred and authentication hashappened.
So I think that is that nextstep, and we're not quite there
yet, but right now it's moreautomation uh-based.
That's what I believe.
And I think the place whereP2PE, I think where P2PE will
(18:29):
exist in that in that world iswhat I kind of call
interagentic.
So these are two agents, right?
My agent and your agent, tryingto, I'm trying to send you some
money, or you're trying to sendme money, or we're trying to
send something, and our agentsare talking, or maybe we're two
businesses.
So it's interagentic boundarymediation, right?
So in other words, there's aboundary, my boundary is here,
(18:51):
your boundary's there, and we'retrying to authenticate each
other.
Make sure Gary's getting Greg'sCraig and Rusty's Rusty, you
know, we're communicating overhere.
So we're authenticated, and nowwe're passing data securely.
And that encryption or thatpoint-to-point encryption comes
in virtually, I think, there andnow is becomes is able to
mediate boundaries and pass datasecurely.
And so I think that is thefuture, and I don't think that's
(19:13):
far off.
You know, last point there, whenI built Bluefin, I started it in
around 2002 timeframe.
I was uh working on the WorldWide Web in '94.
Like I was in an intern group in1994 when the web came out.
That was my job, was to figureout if this web thing could
drive telecom traffic.
Because they wanted to figureout how to drive more traffic,
and they're like emails and texton a web page, it's just never
(19:36):
gonna drive a lot of traffic.
You know, that was true, thatwas the truth.
That's what they thought then.
And you can imagine, what'sthat, eight years later in 2002?
That's almost a decade later.
I was still the first realpayment gateway provider to do
real-time authorizations in acontact center with the web.
So like it took that long forthat huge disruptive innovation
(19:58):
to like make it to a contactcenter.
The world is different now andit operates much faster.
So I think the cycles with thisAI thing are not going to be
judged in in decades andprobably not even years.
I do believe that between now,call it you know, 26 already, in
the next four years will be amassive change uh in the way
(20:19):
that we pay each other and getpaid.
SPEAKER_01 (20:20):
Yeah, I guess for you the beauty is those payments
have to be secured.
And so you're you're sitting ina in a great spot.
We hope so.
All right.
Well, let's switch gears alittle bit and talk about you.
And I know you've talked aboutyour background a little bit,
but maybe tell us aboutprepayments and you know, kind
of what you were doing, and thenwhat really you know exactly
(20:42):
happened that led you intostarting Bluefin.
Gosh.
SPEAKER_02 (20:46):
Figure out where to start.
So the very first business Istarted was selling music
equipment because the at thattime, you know, if you were I
was a musician, so I'm from fromthe New Orleans area.
So you gotta imagine, like, youknow, took 10 years of jazz drum
lessons, you know, played guitaron the side.
When I went to college, starteda band with guitar, won battle
(21:07):
the bands, because it was okay,it was cool to suck at guitar
for a little while there withthe grunge era.
You had to have good rhythm andno music, but you didn't have to
be a shredder on the guitar.
Well, then eventually you becomegood at guitar because you're
playing live enough with it.
And then also, people, somefolks only know me as a
keyboardist or a piano player.
So it's very much of a musician.
And in buying music, you canonly buy it locally, and so you
(21:29):
had tax, and you also had, youknow, they'd double up the
price.
And you could buy this stuff,you know, mail order for half
the price and no sales tax.
And so I started a businessdoing that, and it actually took
off.
I got some fairly big contractsat when I was only, wasn't even
18 yet.
I was like 16, 17.
And it took me to spend timeabroad in Russia and in Mexico,
(21:49):
spent probably almost a yearabroad before I graduated
because I was on the fast planwhen it came to school.
I kind of, I don't know how yousay that, but didn't do houser
it quite, but you know, finishedearly and had some time between
that before going off tocollege.
And so built that business,which got me, got me in the bug
of business, you know, I'mbeing, oh man, this is great.
And also using, you know, mailorder, which, you know, that's
(22:10):
old school now, but it wasn't inthe 1990s so um, you know, so
that was pretty rad.
And then, and then I went tocollege and you know, I had a
choice to choose where I wasgonna go, and I made that choice
based on, well, it was eithergonna be UIUC, University of
Illinois or Ban of Champaign,which is where ARPANET or
DARPANET invented the internet.
So I was like, I'm going there,you know, because I knew the web
(22:32):
was gonna change.
I just didn't know how it wasgonna change or when it was
gonna change the world.
But they had that was all insideof the engineering program, and
it was, and they also had reallythey still had modems in the
dorm rooms, you know.
And so I found a universitywhere it was like they had a
program, MIS, that was inside ofthe business program, and you st
and you did computer science,but it was it was business first
(22:52):
with computer science, and theyhad a T1 on every floor.
They had just invested, whichwas, if you remember back then,
a T1 was like hugely fast.
Of course, that's silly slownow.
But that was that was the wholethat was that was a several
thousand dollars a month youpay, maybe even thirteen
thousand dollars a month you'dpay at that time for a T1.
Only businesses could affordthis, but education had it.
So I had to go to thatuniversity, right?
(23:14):
That kind of just really put meon a fast track.
I think gave me an unfairadvantage of other folks at the
same time working on the web onthings like this in other
universities.
They didn't have access to thespeed and they were in
engineering and not coming fromwith the business and
engineering um perspective.
So that just gave me a hugeboost.
Started interning at MCIWorldCom, entered a program
(23:37):
there called STARS SelectionTraining and Rotation was
supposed to come out of manager,and then Y2K hit.
And I was the only young man,only person that, because I was
in the rotation program thatknew what email administration,
network administration, systemsadministration, calling, rating,
all the different departments,you know, across this vast
telecommunications network, andthey were also buying others,
(23:57):
knew what was going on becauseeverybody was so siloed.
So they put me in charge, and Ilook back, I'm like, Rustin, you
weren't even, I wasn't even 21.
And I was the Y2K, you know,project manager for all of the
WorldCom side of MCI WorldCom,which is now Verizon, which
means I got to miss Y2K andspend my night there running a
command center, you know, andand all that stuff.
But uh, and as soon as that wasdone, they said, okay, that all
(24:22):
went well, and we're gonna selloff this entire group to to EDS,
I think it was at the time.
And so EDS, you know, had thisnon-compete.
I I now I realize as an olderman that it probably wasn't
enforceable, but as a young man,it just seemed like I'm never
gonna get to work again toanywhere else.
I had to make a decision.
Am I gonna branch out, startthat business I always wanted to
start, or am I going to take thecorporate route?
(24:44):
And it was a tough decision,Greg.
But I took the, I took the thelet's go ahead and let's do
this.
And so went out, um, started thebusiness.
Wasn't Bluefin.
A couple businesses later, andlots of learning.
And I'm glad I had the learningabout learning how to work with
other partners or not, and alsohow to build a business that
works for you that you don'twork in it, then started
(25:06):
Bluefin.
The time was Blue Financial, anduh and it really kind of went up
from there.
But really, uh, you know, intomusic, into scuba diving from
New Orleans, like to cook mysaucier, like to try either a
new sauce every week that I makeor take sauces and I have made
and tweak them.
So very much uh more of acreative mind, but still uh do
(25:26):
love to nerd out in theengineering details.
So uh like to play on both sidesthere.
SPEAKER_01 (25:31):
Okay.
Okay.
So the next question was whatwere your or what are your
passions?
So I think you mentioned allyour personal passions,
work-related, it sounds likevery technology driven.
So just curious, any otherpassions within uh the work
environment?
SPEAKER_02 (25:45):
Yeah, I uh you know I was passionate about payment
gateway, built that.
You get to a point whereeverything was going great, and
then what started happening wasyou kind of hit a hit a wall
with payment gateways where allthey could do then was lower
their price and add morefeatures, which is sort of like
your 10 cents.
Now you've got to be subpenny.
(26:06):
Oh, by the way, we need to haveall these new features because
there's so much more happeningwith digital payments.
So it was kind of a runawaytrain in the other way.
So that it just didn't seem tobe, it was the first 10 or 15
years of my work of the Bluefincareer, but it just didn't seem
to be a sustainable offering,right?
And also with the advent ofsoftware, ISVs and SaaS, a lot
of what a lot of paymentgateways did was just
(26:28):
pre-packaging and pre-sellingcomponents or logic that was
software anyway, so that thesoftware companies didn't have
to build recurrents or theydidn't have to build their own
reporting from raw data, justmaking life easier for
programmers and developers,right?
But eventually they figured thatout, and all they need are
interfaces to talk to thepayments, right?
And they don't need a lot of thebells and whistles, at least if
(26:49):
they're past that startup phase.
So the passion kind of startedto move to payment security,
right?
So payment security was you knowdefinitely a decade where I was
the wild man in the wildernessabout this P2PE stuff, right?
I'm on the PCR board of advisorsnow and have been for some time,
and you know, so I very muchwill always be payment security
evangelist.
And I have to say, going back tothe AI thing, I have been very
(27:13):
much into that for the lastyear, which turns out to be a
long time in AI time.
And so that is where you see alot of my writing, a lot of my
interactions.
I'm four different AI committeesfor various industry
associations across our world,ETA, RSPA, PCI, these kinds of
groups.
(27:33):
You know, so uh very much aproponent of that, not just
because it's the cool thing, butI feel it's my mission to secure
it for payments so that it allmakes sense.
Because I saw how being on theside of security in uh for the
last 10 or 12 years, I've seenhow many organizations have
limited their internalinnovation and the things that
(27:53):
they would go out and adopt forlike, you know, mobile payments
or bringing the payments out tothe customers rather than the
customer coming to them.
And all these large enterprises,because of security, how they
kind of hold it held upinnovation and making life
easier for the experience foreveryone involved.
And then once if they finallygot, oh wow, it doesn't matter
what software you use as long asit's encrypted and tokenized,
(28:17):
then all of a sudden it's backopen.
Well, we can use all we can doall these things, and then all
of a sudden you see this huge,big innovation.
And I'm like, my goodness, Ihave to pat myself on the back,
but I'm glad I did that becauseyou wonder to a certain degree,
all those hard times, wild manin the wilderness trying to tell
everybody, you know, prophesiesabout, hey, there's a thing,
there's an easier way to dothis, you know, running myself
ragged 200,000 miles a year onplanes, and then all of a sudden
(28:40):
you see, okay, there's liftoff.
I feel like I don't want AI tohave to go through that same
thing where everyone's like, wecan't use AI until it's secure.
Yes, agenda commerce, yeah, butwhat happens over here?
What's over there?
It's like, no, let's have realclear platforms, products,
protocols, lanes.
Let's have things that everybodyalready trusts, like
point-to-point encryption.
How do we implement that overhere?
(29:01):
Things that are already knownand credible, and how do we put
them in the right places so thatthere's not this big half a
decade hiccup with this movetowards AI?
Because I truly believe that AIis as much or more of a change
than the World Wide Web is.
And I'm just so lucky to have myfirst year in college be 1994,
(29:22):
which was the first year the webcame out.
And I'm kind of seeing this aslike, okay, this is that second
chance in life where you'relike, this is that next big
thing that's gonna maybe evenhave that much more relevance
uh, you know, 10 or 20 yearsfrom now, or five or now, or
even now.
And so I feel that is my missionand my passion to bring payment
security into that.
SPEAKER_01 (29:39):
Aaron Powell Great.
Thanks for sharing that.
So obviously, you've been inpayments for a long time.
So if someone came to you andthey're maybe wanting to start a
career in payments, maybethey're moving over from another
industry, what kind of advicewould you give them to help them
have a successful career inpayments?
SPEAKER_02 (29:56):
Aaron Powell, that that advice would have changed
four or five times over the Last25 years, yeah.
Now it's okay to be a nerd.
It's okay to be a payments nerd.
You know, there was a time whenpayments was very, very
specific, right?
And it was a certain kind ofperson, and maybe I don't know,
it was it was different, I haveto say.
You know, folks like you and mewere probably unique 10 or 20
(30:17):
years ago, maybe 20 years ago,15, 20 years ago in the payment
space that are havingconversations like this.
You know, it was either uhselling devices or getting lower
rates or trying to figure outhow to bring down fraud and risk
or something like this, which isimportant, but it was a little
more e-commerce-centric orwhatever, or or retail centric
in these these boundaries.
(30:38):
I think that all that stuff'skind of going away.
We're starting to see more openbanking concepts coming, you
know, from the from the East andfrom our European side.
We're starting to see moreprivacy things happening.
We're starting to see more opento new kinds of payments,
stablecoin, you know, networktokens.
Uh, we're we're seeing a lot ofthings happening in a faster
timeline.
I would say that for for someonenew coming in, A, you know, be
(31:01):
curious, B, be prepared.
Used to be like, that's thebusiness guy, and he's gonna run
the business thing, and that'sthe tech gal, and she's gonna
run the tech lane.
And it's like, man, you reallydo need to understand maybe more
than the basics about how thingswork, because sometimes that is
the angle, that's the lever,that's gonna drive the business
thing, that's gonna make thingshappen.
(31:23):
And that and the ingenuity andthe innovation that you're gonna
provide may have a technicaltwist.
And so you're, you know, you'reas a founder really need to,
really need to understand thisstuff.
Doesn't mean you have to be anengineer, but it does mean that
you need to have a goodunderstanding of payments.
So I'd say be prepared, becurious, don't be afraid to be a
nerd, and don't be afraid to uhto get in a little bit over your
head, maybe even a lot over yourhead.
(31:44):
You know, when I got intopayments, you know, it's that
onion thing, and I'm sure youyou've been in payments for a
while too.
It's like as soon as you figureout what a gateway is, oh,
there's acquiring, there'sissuing, there's security,
there's how things happeninternationally, there's there's
optimization, and you just keeplearning and learning and
learning, and I'm still learningafter a quarter of a century,
you know, about the things.
You know, you can still find theback-end settlement and clearing
(32:06):
and all the different thingsthat go on.
And then you add in the bankingside, which is getting all mixed
up in that as well, you know,and to learn.
So be curious, be alwayslearning.
Be okay to just to be in asituation where you don't know
everything.
Because I think some folks needto know everything before they
take that step, and you willnever know anything in payment,
everything in payments.
And as soon as you knoweverything, boy, it's gonna
(32:28):
change next year anyway.
So it's so you so in some cases,it's easier for the newer folks
to to to surpass the older folksbecause they're not dragged
behind by what they know.
So they can just come in and belike, hit the ground running.
Here's the new, here's the newparadigm.
Let's go make this happen.
So I I think it's it's a reallygreat time to be in payments,
(32:48):
far more accessible than it waswhen I got into it.
And it's getting so much moresoftware.
We say software is eatingpayments, it's an interesting
one.
But you know, I I would saythey're past eating it, they're
digesting it now.
We'll see what happens on theother side of things.
It's so much now becomingcombined with where does
software start and payments stopand all of that.
That if you're just a softwareperson that's interested in
(33:10):
payments, go for it, get intoit.
You can figure this stuff out.
And before you know it, they'llhave you speaking on a panel,
you know.
So uh it's it's like when GarageBand came around, like, oh, I
can I can make some music thatactually sounds great at home.
When I was making music back inthe 80s, you know, you better
get ready to drop 20, 30 grandon a home studio if you really
(33:30):
want to make music.
Now you get a garage band and anapple, you know, and boom.
So that's payments is gettingmore like that.
SPEAKER_01 (33:37):
Great.
I think that's great advice.
So, Rustin, it's been a greatconversation so far.
So, is there anything else you'dlike to add before we wrap up
the show?
SPEAKER_02 (33:44):
At Bluefin, we're we're passionate about payment
security.
We're passionate about wherepayments is are going through
this whole agentic AI piece ofit.
And we're not just um we'retrying to rethink how we deliver
things as well.
I oftentimes will talk to folksabout Bluefin and they're like,
oh, you're that gateway, orit'll be like, oh, you're that,
you're that this.
It's like, yes, if any companythat's been around for a quarter
(34:05):
of a century, it's gonna havedone a lot of things, right?
And so you've got a lot goingon.
But we are rethinking what we doall the time and and actually
oftentimes finding areas in thespace that we're um that we're
still pioneering even in andhelping drive what the standards
should be.
But yeah, um excited to be here,definitely excited to be in this
business and still excited aboutit after all this time, which
(34:28):
not a lot of folks can say aboutthe businesses that they're in.
So I think we're lucky.
You know, I my dad's a civilengineer, you know, he kind of
did the wires and the plumbingand the walls, you know, and
that was a very exciting thingfor his 50-year career, you
know, building up sewers andMichelin, Mackinac Island, and
you know, all these differentthings.
And like, okay, but all of asudden all that stuff, you know,
(34:48):
they put up the they put up thewalls and you don't even know
how it happens.
You just turn on the electricityand it works.
You just turn on the water.
So I know that my role as acivil engineer at payments and
payment security has probably,at some point, everyone's gonna
be like, oh, do you know peoplehad to figure all this stuff out
at one point?
So I know there's you know, thatit's all marching towards that.
And I'd like to look back on onmy on my career and be like,
(35:10):
yeah, I was a part of making allthis stuff disappear into the
walls, but be absolutelydependable, resilient, and
secure.
SPEAKER_01 (35:18):
Well, Rustin, thank you so much for being on the
show today.
I know your time is veryvaluable, so I really appreciate
you being here.
Thanks, Rick.
And to all you listeners outthere, I thank you for your time
as well.
And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00 (35:28):
Thank you for joining us this week on the
Leaders in Payments Podcast.
Make sure you visit our websiteat leadersinpayments.com, where
you can subscribe to the showand where you'll find our show
notes.
If you enjoyed listening, pleaseshare on your social channels as
well.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast,
where we talk to sea levelleaders from across the payments
landscape.
We'll be discussing the productsand services that impact the
payments space today, as well astrends and predictions for the
future of payments.
We will also hear stories fromour guests about their journeys
to the top.
SPEAKER_01 (00:18):
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in
Payments Podcast.
I'm your host, Greg Myers.
And today's special guest isRustin Miles, the founder and
chief strategy and developmentofficer at Bluefin.
So, Rustin, thank you so muchfor being here and welcome to
the show.
SPEAKER_02 (00:31):
Great to be here, Greg.
Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_01 (00:33):
All right.
Well, let's dive in.
If you don't mind, tell ouraudience a little bit about
yourself, maybe where you grewup, where you went to school,
where you currently live, a fewthings like that.
SPEAKER_02 (00:40):
My parents were originally Upers, Upper
Peninsula, Michiganders, right?
But they had me in New Orleans.
So these are two different,completely different uh
experiences.
So I was raised, et cetera,outside of, well, actually
between New Orleans and BatonRouge, sort of a swamp area.
That's where I grew up, and thenmoved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which
is uh, you know, the second NewOrleans.
So just kidding.
I like to say downsized fromhurricanes to tornadoes.
(01:03):
So definitely loving it out herein Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Went to college out here, andeventually moved a good bit of
my extended family out here andand do like it.
Turns out that uh Tulsa was asort of a mecha, if you will, or
a base for telecommunications,right?
Because of Will Tel, WilliamsCommunications, uh MCI, all
these things that are nowVerizon, but lots of other
brands because of the fact thatthey used a lot of the
(01:25):
pipelines, host sort of oildelivery, energy delivery to put
fiber optics and run thesethings around the country.
So it turned out to be a greatplace when the World Wide Web
came out in 94 to be here, rightsort of at the epicenter of
telecom.
And then what do we do withpayments in telecom?
Well, that was the next thing.
And so that took my 25-yearcareer for the last quarter
century out here in workingpayments through
(01:47):
telecommunications.
SPEAKER_01 (01:48):
Well, let's dive in and discuss Bluefin.
So tell the audience whatBluefin does.
SPEAKER_02 (01:54):
Sure.
Uh when I started Bluefin uh 25years ago, started it as a
payment gateway.
So it was a pure play paymentgateway developed by a
frustrated user, you know, thethe old story, was working with
some brands that we probably allknow that weren't quite
satisfying the needs of what Ineeded at the time, which was to
bring payments to contactcenters, call centers, things
like this, where you've gothundreds, in cases thousands of
(02:16):
people sitting in rooms uhtaking direct response from
television or or these differentthings, campaigns.
And so being in the middle ofAmerica out here, that is where
a lot of contact centers kind ofwere from time zone, from the
way people uh sound on thephone, and also to the good uh
interconnectivity.
All of the payment gateways atthe time were focused on
e-commerce, shopping carts,these kinds of things,
(02:38):
subscriptions, and it's like,well, we need something that
actually can serve business whenit comes to doing phone payments
and real-time authorizations.
So from there, the naturalprogression happened.
You know, of course we got intoe-commerce and card not present
kinds of things, Moto, uh, whichis what we were already doing.
But then eventually you becomean ISO for payments.
And our brand Bluefin, my brandBluefin that I came up with, we
(02:59):
were focused on larger kinds oforganizations.
So less like, you know, all theother local credit card
companies, dot com, you know,were all selling terminals from
the boot of their car, going tothe retail and restaurant things
in the front row.
And all of my businesses that Iserve were second-story
businesses, back and boilerrooms and contact centers and
these kinds of places where youdon't really even know that
(03:21):
those businesses are there.
It might be a group that sellssign shop equipment to 60,000
sign shops across America, andthey're working it all from you
know, this two-story building inTulsa that you don't even know
what's going on inside of there.
Well, they need payments, right?
And so that got us into ISO andpayment processing.
But because of those kinds ofbrands, we started getting into
security pretty early on becausewe're doing lots of um higher
(03:44):
education institutionsinstitutions, nonprofits, of
course, being out here in theMidwest, a lot of faith-based
kinds of ministries andtelevision things like this.
So a lot of these folks thatreally minded their brand more
than maybe you know someoneselling shoes if they have a
breach or they have a problem.
Well, let's start a newbusiness.
Change from Steve's shoes toJane's shoes and move on with
life.
Can't do that if you've got aloyal following, et cetera.
(04:05):
So that got us into securitywell before, I mean, before PCI
was a thing.
This is like it was CISP, itwasn't even called PCI at this
time.
So we had to get in on that veryearlier because of the folks
that we were serving.
And it was complicated becausewe were we were securing, you
know, not just websites andshopping carts, but physical
things, virtual attendants,people working from home, people
(04:26):
working from physical things,you know, wires going, keep key
loggers, all these kinds ofdifferent things that needed to
be protected.
Well, that got us intoend-to-end encryption pretty
early on, right?
And then come along in 2012,merged the company with capital
payments and kind of cametogether.
They brought sort of the ISO,the payment processing piece,
and I brought the technology andthe security.
And they asked me, like, okay,what's the next thing?
(04:48):
What does the crystal ball say,Rustin?
And I said, Well, the crystalball says P2PE.
You know, they're like, What?
But point-to-point encryption,you know, PCI has a standard, no
one has followed the standard.
Standard might even be at riskof going away, but it is the
answer to because I was atelecom uh kind of person from
my background with MCI WorldComand all that.
(05:09):
And so I knew kind of how riskyall this stuff was.
You could see stuff going overthe wires, you know, and if it
didn't take that much to be ahacker, if you can get in on the
wire and pull the data off, evenif it's encrypted, you might be
able to get at it and decryptit.
It was it was sort of the WildWest, literally, at that point.
And so I was kind of concerned.
I could see, you know, the twofreight trains coming together
100 degrees, 100 miles an hourat each other.
(05:29):
And I said, we we ought to dothis P2PE thing, guys.
So we invested into that.
And a year later, as soon as wehad our product out, the target
breach happened, which thenturned into a thousand credit
card breaches a year, literally.
I'm not exaggerating.
Some of those years it was overa thousand credit card breaches.
We might have only heard of 20or 30 in the news, but there was
lots of them going on uh, youknow, in down the stack.
(05:50):
And all of a sudden, our companyjust started to 10x because we
had the solution.
Then we took that and said,gosh, we can't just use this for
our own payment processing.
Well, that's going to limit it,and it's really hard to do.
We were the first to do it inNorth America to be validated
for this and audited.
And so we said, let's go aheadand pull that apart and sell it
to our competitors and make ourcompetitors our partners.
(06:11):
And now we have 130, you know,gateways and processors, and you
know, you can go look at ourlist, all the big names out
there, you know, the cybersources and these kinds of
folks, you know, all thesepayment gateways and processors,
they're out there and they'repartners of ours using uh
point-to-point encryption as aservice, but not using us for
the payments.
So we kind of started in gatewaythe acquiring and processing,
(06:32):
and then said, let's actuallyfocus down, double down on
security solutions and doingthat.
And so that's really really tookthe company into its third act,
which was focusing on that.
I think most folks know of usnow as the P2PE company, P2PE as
a service, and more recently uhP2PE as a proxy, which is sort
of the thing that we've beendoing for the last year or so,
which is a way to implement thisvery hard to thing do with zero
(06:55):
very hard thing to do with zerointegration, zero lift, kind of
like uh just send it through thetunnel and it's secured, right?
It's it we can get into thedetails at some other point.
But it is that new, elegant wayto deliver what we do to make it
easier and maybe faster toimplement in the system.
And that's that's what uh uh youknow is generating a lot of the
buzz and interest right now.
(07:16):
But we we started in thegateway, went on to the
acquiring, picked up paymentsecurity, and then the company
10xed, and like that's what wedo now.
We're we're a payment securitysolutions company, and having to
do that, extend that beyondpayments, because these
companies have way more tosecure than just payments.
And so our platform doeshealthcare, PHI, PII, you know,
all this other kind of uhprivacy data as well.
(07:37):
So anything that's involved withpayments and non-payment data.
SPEAKER_01 (07:41):
Okay.
So your main customers are otherpayment companies, and then
maybe some healthcare, is thatabout right?
SPEAKER_02 (07:46):
Yeah, I mean our partners are payment gateways,
payment processors, and softwareplatforms.
So you can think of all the ISVsand SaaS and practice management
systems out there.
Um, some of them go direct tothe processors.
We don't go through a gateway,right?
And so they'll use us.
Some of them go through agateway that doesn't have P2PE
until they'll say you need toget P2PE, you know, integrate
(08:08):
with Bluefin for this, you know.
We have lots of the bigenterprises out there in logos,
obviously because we're part oftheir security posture.
Don't like to talk about them ona public platform unless they're
present or or give specificspecific permission.
But you can think of like, youknow, 25% of the large airlines
in the world, you know, sort oflike the largest car rentals in
(08:30):
the world, probably the largestpetroleum gas station networks
and state and stations in thecountry, all of the tubes and
and tolls and everything inLondon, you know, and and in
Boston, et cetera, et cetera.
Point being, the largest brandsthat you can think in the world,
and retailers and malls andthings like this, very, very,
very super prominent brands areflowing over our networks either
(08:52):
directly to us or by by drivingtheir vendors to be required
because they won't they won'ttake it without point-to-point
encryption, or by going direct.
But I have to say, we are not ago-to-direct company.
Usually these enterprises andthese organizations are working
with us because they alreadyhave so many things solved
through other gateways andsoftware, but they just really
need that point-to-pointencryption piece to be fully
(09:12):
secure.
SPEAKER_01 (09:13):
So you mentioned London.
Is that mean you're a globalcompany all over the world?
SPEAKER_02 (09:18):
Yes.
So obviously started the companyhere in Tulsa, our headquarters
are in Atlanta.
Got folks around the country,huge center of excellence in NOC
and development in Waterford,Ireland.
We've got you know offices inAustralia, Bratislava, you know,
data centers in Germany, and youknow, we're we're definitely a
global company with with bothemployees and and infrastructure
(09:40):
across uh North America andEurope.
And we, of course, serve otherareas of the world, but
predominantly in those marketsis where we would have our
employees and infrastructure.
SPEAKER_01 (09:50):
Aaron Powell Well, it sounds like you were the
first, but it's uh you're you'renot the only one these days.
So what would you saydifferentiates Bluefin from your
competitors out there?
SPEAKER_02 (10:00):
Yeah, I mean, so we were we were the first and very
much didn't want to be the onlybecause when a standard only
serves one player, then it's nota standard.
It's you know what I'm saying, astandard is there so that you
can create an ecosystem.
And we wanted adoption, right?
And in fact, part of the reasonuh we decoupled or componentized
or worked with the PCI Councilwith our P2PE 2.0 standard to
(10:24):
create a standard that wouldbreak apart the point-to-point
encryption to like key injectionfacilities and you know HSM uh
decryption entities, terminalentities, people creating
devices, all these differentkinds of entities.
That's in the beginning withpoint-to-point encryption, it
was all or nothing.
You had to do the wholesolution, get it all validated,
or you couldn't just do onepart.
(10:45):
You're like if you were a keyinjection facility or a KIF, you
couldn't just do your part.
You had to be part of a largersolution that was all audited.
So we wanted that to be, inorder for this thing to grow, it
needed to be sort of federatedand componentized.
And so we very much pushed forthat, which, you know, scratch
your head in the beginning.
Didn't you want to rule theworld, Rustin?
You know, well, yeah, everybusiness wants to be build a
(11:06):
monopoly, right?
But uh, but that's just not theway my brain works.
I'm like, if this thing reallyneeds to grow, we need to have
an ecosystem of participants,everybody doing their part.
So we drove that and then wecreated a platform called P2PE
Manager, which allows them allto interface and do their
various parts in it.
So I'd have to say, when you askwhat differentiates, every other
solution out there is asolution.
(11:27):
Every other solution in the PCIlisting is of which I would say
20% of the listings in the PCIlisting for P2PE, of all those
hundreds of listings, 20% ormore are actually sublistings of
ours for other brands, likeWhite Label, right?
And then there are hundreds, asI said, of folks out there using
this, but who are who are justusing our solution and hadn't
taken the extra step to gettheir name with us sort of being
(11:50):
the Intel inside kind ofsituation, right?
But the point is that we are aplatform, we are a network, we
are the sort of the back-endprovider of services to this
industry, which many of them areusing.
And all of the other guys outthere are like, hey, I've got a
POS and we built our own P2PE.
Or I've got a gateway out here,my payment gateway, and my
(12:12):
payment gateway, we built P2PEfor it.
We decided not to do it as aservice with Bluefin, and we
decided to do it ourselves.
Those are great, those are pointsolutions because that one
gateway may focus on retail.
That one may gateway may focuson hospitality, and they might
be the best hospitality-focusedpayment gateway with their own
P2PE, you know, in America.
Okay, great, great, great.
(12:33):
But that's one small vertical,not vertical, large, one
vertical and one usage point,and our system is across all
verticals and basically aplatform that serves that
market.
So there's nobody else, believeme, when you do these analysis
and you try to do the quadrantand see who's where.
There's nobody in our quadrant.
I know if that's like, oh, it'salways nice to see the Venn
diagram or you just kind of ownthe world.
(12:54):
But but it is true that it isvery difficult to do this.
It's very difficult to keep upwith it.
You know, for example, we've got150 different devices or so
across 17 manufacturers.
Like when you look at all theother solutions, they'll have
like, oh, we're just an Ingenicoshop, you know, just one
manufacturer, and these are thetwo devices, right, that we
support.
And so I think that's what wehave is sort of that decade lead
(13:16):
of that.
And I don't see anybody elsehaving a direct competitor as a
as a service or as a platformoffering, but certainly within
verticals, hospitality andretail, there are there are some
great players.
And I'm glorious great to havethe competition because that
that kind of drives it allforward.
SPEAKER_01 (13:31):
Sure.
Absolutely.
Well, let's talk a little bitabout the future.
Where do you see payments in inthe fintech space headed in
maybe the next three to fiveyears?
SPEAKER_02 (13:40):
Well, uh, you know, we're we're seeing this march to
sort of eradicate, I would sayeradicate primary account
numbers or pan or credit cardnumbers moving towards network
tokens, for example, maybe lessdependence on cards.
The idea was there to be moredigital wallets.
Now, if you're if you're readingsome of these things are like,
well, gosh, with AI agenticcommerce and these things, well,
isn't that just gonna leapfrogthe wallet?
(14:00):
You know, why do you even needto have a wallet, right?
This is things need to besecured.
So I I think we're going to seea lot of this, this, this uh
agentic thing really, reallytransforming.
I'm a I'm a big AI user and it'sit's it's almost frustrating to
me when I'm dealing with vendorsthat don't allow me to use it,
you know, for my Instacart orDoorDash or Uber Eats or all of
my different things.
Like, you know, um, so it's a Ithink if that's where the stuff
(14:22):
is going.
Does that mean that paymentswill go away?
No.
We always need payments.
Does that mean payment securitywill go away?
No, it becomes that much moreimportant as we get closer to
AI, as we get closer to quantum,as we get closer to these
things.
Payment security.
Because I always like to say,payments, you know, innovation
should never outpace too faranyway, payment security
innovation.
They should always be, you can'tget to security before the
(14:44):
innovation too much because itstifles the innovation.
So you gotta have that kind ofgoing forward.
But it has to be right there,nipping on the heels, not
dragging it down so much, butbut making sure it doesn't just
go off the tracks.
And so that's really our missionis to secure point-to-points,
payments between two points.
Point-to-point encryption islargely thought of as two
hardware points.
(15:05):
A credit card machine, it'sencrypted, it goes through over
here, it's cryptid over there.
But really, we're about securingeven virtual points-to-points.
If that goes from inter-agenticcommerce or if that's between
two token providers, et cetera,we are that not just the
physical, but also the virtualpoint-to-point security
platform.
And so that's where I think it'sgoing and why I think Bluefin
(15:27):
has a bright future in thatfuture.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01 (15:28):
So that agentic commerce, I mean, we've seen
some announcements by someplayers, and you know, we were
talking a little bit earlieroffline about this.
You know, there's a lot ofannouncements.
A lot of people say they'redoing things, but no one's
really committing, in myopinion, to do a whole lot.
But I think everyone knows it'scoming.
And I know you're reallyinvolved in a lot of different
organizations around AI.
(15:50):
So kind of where do you think weare in that?
Like is, you know, are are wegoing to have agents buying
things for us in the next yearor two, or do you think that's
pretty far out?
SPEAKER_02 (15:59):
Oh, I already do that like daily on a daily
basis, man.
So for example, in and the thedifferent GPTs and and and
platforms have differentdifferent uses, I would say, you
know.
For example, the perplexity, youknow, the comet product, the
agentic browser.
So, you know, I'll go in therefor my birthday.
My sister sent over a Worddocument list that she had
(16:19):
copied and pasted people's textsof what they wanted from a
restaurant that I like, right?
And so I just put that in to theAI and said, and I logged into
my um to DoorDash and said, youknow, go do all this.
And it did it.
And then it gets to the end,it's like, would you like me to
click by?
Uh yes, click by, right?
So that's just all so that'shappening today.
I mean, you know, I I do all myweekly ordering on Instacart.
(16:43):
Anything that takes more thanlike five or six minutes to do
when it comes to that stuff, I'malready doing that, right?
JAT GPT has a little bit whatdifferent way that they deliver.
It's not an agentic browser,it's sort of a virtual PC
desktop that it has that ituses.
Um, but I think they're going tobe coming along pretty quick
with their own agentic browser.
So I this is already being usedlargely, a sort of, I would call
(17:04):
like commerce automation.
But that next leap is when younot only just do commerce
automation, you know, where it'sbasically automating and being
my agent to go out and make allthe orders, but my credentials,
my card number, my informationstill exists inside of Instacart
or DoorDash, and all it's doingis calling up that credential
and saying, yes, use that one,but it's not actually handling
(17:26):
the payment outside of outsideof that platform.
That next step is where it says,oh no, I've got the payments.
I'm not going to trust Instacartor DoorDash or Uber Eats with
this stuff.
And when it comes time to pay,I'm going to hit, you know, an
MCP or an API or whatever, andthat's tokenized, and I'm going
to deliver payment because now Itrust perhaps my agent with my
(17:48):
payment security more than I dothat software or that platform.
Right.
So now that platform can'tbreach my credit card
information either because theydon't have it.
So now I grow I grow even moretrust.
So I think that's it's going toget closer to that kind of
thing.
That's not here yet becauseright now it's more automation
in the way that it'sinteracting.
And we have to have those sortof uh protocol pipe tunnels
(18:09):
where both sides can agree andthat there's a standard to say,
okay, here's I'm going tocommunicate to you outside of a
web browser to communicatepayment or that payment has
occurred and authentication hashappened.
So I think that is that nextstep, and we're not quite there
yet, but right now it's moreautomation uh-based.
That's what I believe.
And I think the place whereP2PE, I think where P2PE will
(18:29):
exist in that in that world iswhat I kind of call
interagentic.
So these are two agents, right?
My agent and your agent, tryingto, I'm trying to send you some
money, or you're trying to sendme money, or we're trying to
send something, and our agentsare talking, or maybe we're two
businesses.
So it's interagentic boundarymediation, right?
So in other words, there's aboundary, my boundary is here,
(18:51):
your boundary's there, and we'retrying to authenticate each
other.
Make sure Gary's getting Greg'sCraig and Rusty's Rusty, you
know, we're communicating overhere.
So we're authenticated, and nowwe're passing data securely.
And that encryption or thatpoint-to-point encryption comes
in virtually, I think, there andnow is becomes is able to
mediate boundaries and pass datasecurely.
And so I think that is thefuture, and I don't think that's
(19:13):
far off.
You know, last point there, whenI built Bluefin, I started it in
around 2002 timeframe.
I was uh working on the WorldWide Web in '94.
Like I was in an intern group in1994 when the web came out.
That was my job, was to figureout if this web thing could
drive telecom traffic.
Because they wanted to figureout how to drive more traffic,
and they're like emails and texton a web page, it's just never
(19:36):
gonna drive a lot of traffic.
You know, that was true, thatwas the truth.
That's what they thought then.
And you can imagine, what'sthat, eight years later in 2002?
That's almost a decade later.
I was still the first realpayment gateway provider to do
real-time authorizations in acontact center with the web.
So like it took that long forthat huge disruptive innovation
(19:58):
to like make it to a contactcenter.
The world is different now andit operates much faster.
So I think the cycles with thisAI thing are not going to be
judged in in decades andprobably not even years.
I do believe that between now,call it you know, 26 already, in
the next four years will be amassive change uh in the way
(20:19):
that we pay each other and getpaid.
SPEAKER_01 (20:20):
Yeah, I guess for you the beauty is those payments
have to be secured.
And so you're you're sitting ina in a great spot.
We hope so.
All right.
Well, let's switch gears alittle bit and talk about you.
And I know you've talked aboutyour background a little bit,
but maybe tell us aboutprepayments and you know, kind
of what you were doing, and thenwhat really you know exactly
(20:42):
happened that led you intostarting Bluefin.
Gosh.
SPEAKER_02 (20:46):
Figure out where to start.
So the very first business Istarted was selling music
equipment because the at thattime, you know, if you were I
was a musician, so I'm from fromthe New Orleans area.
So you gotta imagine, like, youknow, took 10 years of jazz drum
lessons, you know, played guitaron the side.
When I went to college, starteda band with guitar, won battle
(21:07):
the bands, because it was okay,it was cool to suck at guitar
for a little while there withthe grunge era.
You had to have good rhythm andno music, but you didn't have to
be a shredder on the guitar.
Well, then eventually you becomegood at guitar because you're
playing live enough with it.
And then also, people, somefolks only know me as a
keyboardist or a piano player.
So it's very much of a musician.
And in buying music, you canonly buy it locally, and so you
(21:29):
had tax, and you also had, youknow, they'd double up the
price.
And you could buy this stuff,you know, mail order for half
the price and no sales tax.
And so I started a businessdoing that, and it actually took
off.
I got some fairly big contractsat when I was only, wasn't even
18 yet.
I was like 16, 17.
And it took me to spend timeabroad in Russia and in Mexico,
(21:49):
spent probably almost a yearabroad before I graduated
because I was on the fast planwhen it came to school.
I kind of, I don't know how yousay that, but didn't do houser
it quite, but you know, finishedearly and had some time between
that before going off tocollege.
And so built that business,which got me, got me in the bug
of business, you know, I'mbeing, oh man, this is great.
And also using, you know, mailorder, which, you know, that's
(22:10):
old school now, but it wasn't inthe 1990s so um, you know, so
that was pretty rad.
And then, and then I went tocollege and you know, I had a
choice to choose where I wasgonna go, and I made that choice
based on, well, it was eithergonna be UIUC, University of
Illinois or Ban of Champaign,which is where ARPANET or
DARPANET invented the internet.
So I was like, I'm going there,you know, because I knew the web
(22:32):
was gonna change.
I just didn't know how it wasgonna change or when it was
gonna change the world.
But they had that was all insideof the engineering program, and
it was, and they also had reallythey still had modems in the
dorm rooms, you know.
And so I found a universitywhere it was like they had a
program, MIS, that was inside ofthe business program, and you st
and you did computer science,but it was it was business first
(22:52):
with computer science, and theyhad a T1 on every floor.
They had just invested, whichwas, if you remember back then,
a T1 was like hugely fast.
Of course, that's silly slownow.
But that was that was the wholethat was that was a several
thousand dollars a month youpay, maybe even thirteen
thousand dollars a month you'dpay at that time for a T1.
Only businesses could affordthis, but education had it.
So I had to go to thatuniversity, right?
(23:14):
That kind of just really put meon a fast track.
I think gave me an unfairadvantage of other folks at the
same time working on the web onthings like this in other
universities.
They didn't have access to thespeed and they were in
engineering and not coming fromwith the business and
engineering um perspective.
So that just gave me a hugeboost.
Started interning at MCIWorldCom, entered a program
(23:37):
there called STARS SelectionTraining and Rotation was
supposed to come out of manager,and then Y2K hit.
And I was the only young man,only person that, because I was
in the rotation program thatknew what email administration,
network administration, systemsadministration, calling, rating,
all the different departments,you know, across this vast
telecommunications network, andthey were also buying others,
(23:57):
knew what was going on becauseeverybody was so siloed.
So they put me in charge, and Ilook back, I'm like, Rustin, you
weren't even, I wasn't even 21.
And I was the Y2K, you know,project manager for all of the
WorldCom side of MCI WorldCom,which is now Verizon, which
means I got to miss Y2K andspend my night there running a
command center, you know, andand all that stuff.
But uh, and as soon as that wasdone, they said, okay, that all
(24:22):
went well, and we're gonna selloff this entire group to to EDS,
I think it was at the time.
And so EDS, you know, had thisnon-compete.
I I now I realize as an olderman that it probably wasn't
enforceable, but as a young man,it just seemed like I'm never
gonna get to work again toanywhere else.
I had to make a decision.
Am I gonna branch out, startthat business I always wanted to
start, or am I going to take thecorporate route?
(24:44):
And it was a tough decision,Greg.
But I took the, I took the thelet's go ahead and let's do
this.
And so went out, um, started thebusiness.
Wasn't Bluefin.
A couple businesses later, andlots of learning.
And I'm glad I had the learningabout learning how to work with
other partners or not, and alsohow to build a business that
works for you that you don'twork in it, then started
(25:06):
Bluefin.
The time was Blue Financial, anduh and it really kind of went up
from there.
But really, uh, you know, intomusic, into scuba diving from
New Orleans, like to cook mysaucier, like to try either a
new sauce every week that I makeor take sauces and I have made
and tweak them.
So very much uh more of acreative mind, but still uh do
(25:26):
love to nerd out in theengineering details.
So uh like to play on both sidesthere.
SPEAKER_01 (25:31):
Okay.
Okay.
So the next question was whatwere your or what are your
passions?
So I think you mentioned allyour personal passions,
work-related, it sounds likevery technology driven.
So just curious, any otherpassions within uh the work
environment?
SPEAKER_02 (25:45):
Yeah, I uh you know I was passionate about payment
gateway, built that.
You get to a point whereeverything was going great, and
then what started happening wasyou kind of hit a hit a wall
with payment gateways where allthey could do then was lower
their price and add morefeatures, which is sort of like
your 10 cents.
Now you've got to be subpenny.
(26:06):
Oh, by the way, we need to haveall these new features because
there's so much more happeningwith digital payments.
So it was kind of a runawaytrain in the other way.
So that it just didn't seem tobe, it was the first 10 or 15
years of my work of the Bluefincareer, but it just didn't seem
to be a sustainable offering,right?
And also with the advent ofsoftware, ISVs and SaaS, a lot
of what a lot of paymentgateways did was just
(26:28):
pre-packaging and pre-sellingcomponents or logic that was
software anyway, so that thesoftware companies didn't have
to build recurrents or theydidn't have to build their own
reporting from raw data, justmaking life easier for
programmers and developers,right?
But eventually they figured thatout, and all they need are
interfaces to talk to thepayments, right?
And they don't need a lot of thebells and whistles, at least if
(26:49):
they're past that startup phase.
So the passion kind of startedto move to payment security,
right?
So payment security was you knowdefinitely a decade where I was
the wild man in the wildernessabout this P2PE stuff, right?
I'm on the PCR board of advisorsnow and have been for some time,
and you know, so I very muchwill always be payment security
evangelist.
And I have to say, going back tothe AI thing, I have been very
(27:13):
much into that for the lastyear, which turns out to be a
long time in AI time.
And so that is where you see alot of my writing, a lot of my
interactions.
I'm four different AI committeesfor various industry
associations across our world,ETA, RSPA, PCI, these kinds of
groups.
(27:33):
You know, so uh very much aproponent of that, not just
because it's the cool thing, butI feel it's my mission to secure
it for payments so that it allmakes sense.
Because I saw how being on theside of security in uh for the
last 10 or 12 years, I've seenhow many organizations have
limited their internalinnovation and the things that
(27:53):
they would go out and adopt forlike, you know, mobile payments
or bringing the payments out tothe customers rather than the
customer coming to them.
And all these large enterprises,because of security, how they
kind of hold it held upinnovation and making life
easier for the experience foreveryone involved.
And then once if they finallygot, oh wow, it doesn't matter
what software you use as long asit's encrypted and tokenized,
(28:17):
then all of a sudden it's backopen.
Well, we can use all we can doall these things, and then all
of a sudden you see this huge,big innovation.
And I'm like, my goodness, Ihave to pat myself on the back,
but I'm glad I did that becauseyou wonder to a certain degree,
all those hard times, wild manin the wilderness trying to tell
everybody, you know, prophesiesabout, hey, there's a thing,
there's an easier way to dothis, you know, running myself
ragged 200,000 miles a year onplanes, and then all of a sudden
(28:40):
you see, okay, there's liftoff.
I feel like I don't want AI tohave to go through that same
thing where everyone's like, wecan't use AI until it's secure.
Yes, agenda commerce, yeah, butwhat happens over here?
What's over there?
It's like, no, let's have realclear platforms, products,
protocols, lanes.
Let's have things that everybodyalready trusts, like
point-to-point encryption.
How do we implement that overhere?
(29:01):
Things that are already knownand credible, and how do we put
them in the right places so thatthere's not this big half a
decade hiccup with this movetowards AI?
Because I truly believe that AIis as much or more of a change
than the World Wide Web is.
And I'm just so lucky to have myfirst year in college be 1994,
(29:22):
which was the first year the webcame out.
And I'm kind of seeing this aslike, okay, this is that second
chance in life where you'relike, this is that next big
thing that's gonna maybe evenhave that much more relevance
uh, you know, 10 or 20 yearsfrom now, or five or now, or
even now.
And so I feel that is my missionand my passion to bring payment
security into that.
SPEAKER_01 (29:39):
Aaron Powell Great.
Thanks for sharing that.
So obviously, you've been inpayments for a long time.
So if someone came to you andthey're maybe wanting to start a
career in payments, maybethey're moving over from another
industry, what kind of advicewould you give them to help them
have a successful career inpayments?
SPEAKER_02 (29:56):
Aaron Powell, that that advice would have changed
four or five times over the Last25 years, yeah.
Now it's okay to be a nerd.
It's okay to be a payments nerd.
You know, there was a time whenpayments was very, very
specific, right?
And it was a certain kind ofperson, and maybe I don't know,
it was it was different, I haveto say.
You know, folks like you and mewere probably unique 10 or 20
(30:17):
years ago, maybe 20 years ago,15, 20 years ago in the payment
space that are havingconversations like this.
You know, it was either uhselling devices or getting lower
rates or trying to figure outhow to bring down fraud and risk
or something like this, which isimportant, but it was a little
more e-commerce-centric orwhatever, or or retail centric
in these these boundaries.
(30:38):
I think that all that stuff'skind of going away.
We're starting to see more openbanking concepts coming, you
know, from the from the East andfrom our European side.
We're starting to see moreprivacy things happening.
We're starting to see more opento new kinds of payments,
stablecoin, you know, networktokens.
Uh, we're we're seeing a lot ofthings happening in a faster
timeline.
I would say that for for someonenew coming in, A, you know, be
(31:01):
curious, B, be prepared.
Used to be like, that's thebusiness guy, and he's gonna run
the business thing, and that'sthe tech gal, and she's gonna
run the tech lane.
And it's like, man, you reallydo need to understand maybe more
than the basics about how thingswork, because sometimes that is
the angle, that's the lever,that's gonna drive the business
thing, that's gonna make thingshappen.
(31:23):
And that and the ingenuity andthe innovation that you're gonna
provide may have a technicaltwist.
And so you're, you know, you'reas a founder really need to,
really need to understand thisstuff.
Doesn't mean you have to be anengineer, but it does mean that
you need to have a goodunderstanding of payments.
So I'd say be prepared, becurious, don't be afraid to be a
nerd, and don't be afraid to uhto get in a little bit over your
head, maybe even a lot over yourhead.
(31:44):
You know, when I got intopayments, you know, it's that
onion thing, and I'm sure youyou've been in payments for a
while too.
It's like as soon as you figureout what a gateway is, oh,
there's acquiring, there'sissuing, there's security,
there's how things happeninternationally, there's there's
optimization, and you just keeplearning and learning and
learning, and I'm still learningafter a quarter of a century,
you know, about the things.
You know, you can still find theback-end settlement and clearing
(32:06):
and all the different thingsthat go on.
And then you add in the bankingside, which is getting all mixed
up in that as well, you know,and to learn.
So be curious, be alwayslearning.
Be okay to just to be in asituation where you don't know
everything.
Because I think some folks needto know everything before they
take that step, and you willnever know anything in payment,
everything in payments.
And as soon as you knoweverything, boy, it's gonna
(32:28):
change next year anyway.
So it's so you so in some cases,it's easier for the newer folks
to to to surpass the older folksbecause they're not dragged
behind by what they know.
So they can just come in and belike, hit the ground running.
Here's the new, here's the newparadigm.
Let's go make this happen.
So I I think it's it's a reallygreat time to be in payments,
(32:48):
far more accessible than it waswhen I got into it.
And it's getting so much moresoftware.
We say software is eatingpayments, it's an interesting
one.
But you know, I I would saythey're past eating it, they're
digesting it now.
We'll see what happens on theother side of things.
It's so much now becomingcombined with where does
software start and payments stopand all of that.
That if you're just a softwareperson that's interested in
(33:10):
payments, go for it, get intoit.
You can figure this stuff out.
And before you know it, they'llhave you speaking on a panel,
you know.
So uh it's it's like when GarageBand came around, like, oh, I
can I can make some music thatactually sounds great at home.
When I was making music back inthe 80s, you know, you better
get ready to drop 20, 30 grandon a home studio if you really
(33:30):
want to make music.
Now you get a garage band and anapple, you know, and boom.
So that's payments is gettingmore like that.
SPEAKER_01 (33:37):
Great.
I think that's great advice.
So, Rustin, it's been a greatconversation so far.
So, is there anything else you'dlike to add before we wrap up
the show?
SPEAKER_02 (33:44):
At Bluefin, we're we're passionate about payment
security.
We're passionate about wherepayments is are going through
this whole agentic AI piece ofit.
And we're not just um we'retrying to rethink how we deliver
things as well.
I oftentimes will talk to folksabout Bluefin and they're like,
oh, you're that gateway, orit'll be like, oh, you're that,
you're that this.
It's like, yes, if any companythat's been around for a quarter
(34:05):
of a century, it's gonna havedone a lot of things, right?
And so you've got a lot goingon.
But we are rethinking what we doall the time and and actually
oftentimes finding areas in thespace that we're um that we're
still pioneering even in andhelping drive what the standards
should be.
But yeah, um excited to be here,definitely excited to be in this
business and still excited aboutit after all this time, which
(34:28):
not a lot of folks can say aboutthe businesses that they're in.
So I think we're lucky.
You know, I my dad's a civilengineer, you know, he kind of
did the wires and the plumbingand the walls, you know, and
that was a very exciting thingfor his 50-year career, you
know, building up sewers andMichelin, Mackinac Island, and
you know, all these differentthings.
And like, okay, but all of asudden all that stuff, you know,
(34:48):
they put up the they put up thewalls and you don't even know
how it happens.
You just turn on the electricityand it works.
You just turn on the water.
So I know that my role as acivil engineer at payments and
payment security has probably,at some point, everyone's gonna
be like, oh, do you know peoplehad to figure all this stuff out
at one point?
So I know there's you know, thatit's all marching towards that.
And I'd like to look back on onmy on my career and be like,
(35:10):
yeah, I was a part of making allthis stuff disappear into the
walls, but be absolutelydependable, resilient, and
secure.
SPEAKER_01 (35:18):
Well, Rustin, thank you so much for being on the
show today.
I know your time is veryvaluable, so I really appreciate
you being here.
Thanks, Rick.
And to all you listeners outthere, I thank you for your time
as well.
And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00 (35:28):
Thank you for joining us this week on the
Leaders in Payments Podcast.
Make sure you visit our websiteat leadersinpayments.com, where
you can subscribe to the showand where you'll find our show
notes.
If you enjoyed listening, pleaseshare on your social channels as
well.
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