TreviPay – Ignacio Jayanti (Corsair Capital)

“If you're buying something from a supplier and you're experiencing a 30% invoice error rate, which is not unusual in the industry, it creates an enormous amount of friction. If you suddenly replace that with a software and invoicing system that creates almost no errors ever, you're more likely to want to channel more volume through that channel.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Operations & Execution · Technology & Engineering · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

Friction elimination drives volume concentration

“We will generally err on build unless we think that something is pretty specifically fulfilling a gap that we need to fill as part of our strategy. You can waste an enormous amount of time buying stuff, worrying about integration, dealing with disruption that comes with M&A, and it's not often rewarded.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Operations & Execution

DUR_ENDURING

Quality growth beats scale in exit value

“When you think about the timing of our transaction, we put in place vendor financing. So instead of having to rely on the external credit markets during Q2, Q3 of 2020, which were in flux to say the least, we were able to secure vendor financing from the seller, which gave us a very comfortable leverage package effectively to move the deal forward.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

Vendor financing bypassed frozen credit markets

“Within software payments has become very specialized, so there's value to the strategic industry in payments businesses that have developed really differentiated capabilities of serving certain industry verticals. Specialists within payment software will still be rewarded, generalists will be less rewarded, and building an undifferentiated generalist payments company will likely be less valuable than building the highly specialized payments company that owns industry verticals.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Technology & Engineering

DUR_ENDURING

Vertical specialization outperforms horizontal scale

“We did have access to management so we could actually meet with Brandon and his team. That enabled us to understand the basic building blocks of what they had built in terms of the software and its value proposition to their customers. Because we are financial institutions investors, we also understood the balance sheet nature of the business and were able to use our network within the financial services space to explore ways pre actually getting exclusivity to simplify and effectively render th...”— Ignacio Jayanti

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Operations & Execution

DUR_ENDURING

Specialist knowledge creates deal flow advantage

“The wrong way to do it is hire someone to do a role without giving them adequate insight into what their team is on the ground when they start, or a clear mandate to evolve, grow, or change out that team. It starts with who are the immediate people in your vicinity that you'll be relying on to do your job and fulfill your role, but equally, it's about giving them the exposure ahead of the hiring decision to their counterparts in the C-suite and how they interact with those counterparts.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Leadership & Management · Operations & Execution

DUR_ENDURING

Pre-hire team exposure accelerates effectiveness

“Our ideal company is a company that has developed into a segment of the market that has structural tailwinds where specialization is actually being rewarded, where product market fit has been proven and some basic go-to-market strategy has been implemented. The entrepreneur or founder will typically be sufficiently aware of their growth potential to know that they could benefit from an institutional partner.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

Four filters for middle-market targets

“When people have built their businesses from small to medium-sized, they sometimes can get wedded to individuals on their team that have brought the team from zero to 20, and it's hard to recognize that that person might not be fit for purpose to bring it from 20 to 200, and that's where we spend a lot of time with our CEOs.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship

DUR_ENDURING

Founder loyalty blinds to team mismatch

“Our approach has tended to be reasonably conservative on the underwriting and then very fair on the pricing.”— Ignacio Jayanti

Business & Entrepreneurship · Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

Conservative underwriting, fair pricing builds trust