Walking through Barry McCarthy’s CV is like walking through the history and evolution of the financial technology world itself.
Today, he’s President and CEO of Deluxe, a financial services giant that today processes more than $3 trillion in annual payment volume (about 15% of the US GDP). But before leading the Fortune 1000 company, he was part of creating some of the most recognizable consumer products found across the payments space.
From Shampoo To Checks
After twelve years at Procter & Gamble (where he was the top performing sales manager in the shampoo category, an accolade he calls one of “life’s great ironies”), McCarthy moved to Wells Fargo as large banks were looking to create a better consumer experience. That included bringing modern ATMs and debit cards to the market. In 2000 he co-founded MagnaCash, a SaaS company focused on small dollar transactions. He would go on and join VeriSign as VP and GM of the domain name registry service company.
VeriSign was bought by PayPal in 2005.
McCarthy then joined Atlanta-based FirstData (acquired by Fiserv), where he would build his career for 14 years.
From the ATM to the debit card, and then ecommerce to the contactless payments revolution, McCarthy was part of bringing in the new and the next in the financial technology space. So when he got the headhunter call to lead Deluxe, the company that invented the paper checkbook in 1915, McCarthy said he laughed.
“I said, I don’t think you understand. I spent the last 14 years of my life trying to get rid of checks and I run the second largest debit network in the country,” he told Hypepotamus.
But upon digging into everything that Deluxe was doing, both inside and outside of the paper check book world, McCarthy was hooked.
“It’s not very often that there is a 110 year old company that’s got great, reliable cash flow that is really reinventing itself, investing to drive innovation, and investing in new AI tools. We aren’t doing what I call “dial twisting,” or modestly improving on the margin. We’re fundamentally reinventing this 100 plus year old company for the next generation,” he added. “I felt like we really could take this strong legacy of being a paper payments company and become a digital payments and data company. And that was a transformation that sounded super exciting to me, and a great thing for my career.”
Innovation At A Legacy Company
McCarthy joined Deluxe in 2018, and now is at the helm of the company’s innovation change from its headquarters in Minnesota and its technology hub in Metro Atlanta. In Georgia alone, Deluxe has 126 working in the office and 68 additional remote employees.
Deluxe serves four million small businesses and over 4,000 financial institutions today. Customers range from local SMBs to major banks, telecommunication companies, and insurance brands.
Now, checks are becoming a smaller part of Deluxe’s business. But its payments and data tools are becoming a larger part of the company’s business, as customers look for stronger consumer insights. On the growing data side of its business, Deluxe works as a “super aggregator of consumer and small business marketing data” helps customers better understand who to target when it comes to specific products and services, McCarthy explained to Hypepotamus.
McCarthy said that today, innovation needs to be top of mind for giant enterprise corporation like Deluxe. For McCarthy, this isn’t just about digitizing an old business model. It’s about fundamentally rethinking what innovation means at a century-old company.
At a large corporation, he sees that often people make the mistake of thinking “innovation is somebody else’s job” or that it is something that is just for the product team to own.
“Innovation is about improving and changing and fundamentally altering absolutely everything about your business. Some of the most important innovations haven’t been about creating something entirely new,” but rather about changing how something is delivered or how a consumer interacts with a product, he added.
That philosophy is playing out across Deluxe’s entire operation, McCarthy explained.
“We are reinventing every aspect of our business.”
Leading In The AI Age
Central to this transformation is how Deluxe is approaching artificial intelligence. For McCarthy, it isn’t a buzzword or silver bullet, but as a practical business tool.
“AI is a tool that can help a company go faster, can help drive innovation, can improve operating efficiencies…[and it] has applications we don’t even yet understand. AI is not a thing by itself. I think people get confused about that. It is a tool or set of tools that can be applied to solve business problems.”
For McCarthy, the transformation of Deluxe represents something bigger than just one company’s digital evolution. It’s proof that in an industry where incumbents are often disrupted by nimble startups, legacy companies with the right leadership and vision can still shape the innovation landscape.