Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

When enterprise meets Fintech: Highnote and Lowe's on payments as a competitive advantage. At The Fintech Summit as part of New York Fintech Week (FTW: NYC), Highnote CEO John MacIlwaine joined Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services at Lowe's, for a panel conversation that challenged a common assumption in enterprise payments: that the biggest companies only partner with the biggest players. What unfolded over the course of the session titled "Beyond Checkout: Payments Built Around Real Workflows", was a candid, experience-driven conversation about why innovation in payments is no longer coming from legacy infrastructure, how enterprises like Lowe's are rethinking what it means to partner, and why reducing friction has become the new battleground for customer loyalty. Payments have become a front-door experience. Jay Waters has spent decades in retail payments, first at Home Depot, now running all of financial services at Lowe's, including branded payment programs, network agreements, acquiring relationships, and gift cards. His opening observation set the tone for the entire conversation. Payments, he explained, used to be the last step. Something that happened after everything else went right. That has fundamentally changed. "Payments was always that thing you thought about at the end - do a great job, sell the product, give the customer what they want, and then figure out how they pay. Now it's embedded up front. If your customer finds a lot of friction in the payment process, it destroys the entire relationship. We can do everything perfectly - product, service, selection - but friction at the payment kills the satisfaction. Reducing friction is a competitive advantage." - Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services, Lowe's The implication is significant: for large retailers, payment experience is no longer a backend concern. It is a core part of the customer relationship, one that customers notice, remember, and factor into loyalty. Why a company like Lowe's works with a Fintech. One of the most direct moments in the panel came when the conversation turned to a question many in the audience were clearly wondering: why would a company the size of Lowe's choose to work with Highnote instead of a major bank or established payments provider? Jay's answer was blunt. "You're right that big players deal with big players - that's the old assumption. But innovation in the payment space is going to come from fintechs. Payments are changing by the minute. Most of the payment innovation is going to happen over the next couple of years, because you guys are breaking down barriers and finding ways to do things that were before very unachievable. And fintechs can now get to scale very rapidly." - Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services, Lowe's For Highnote CEO John MacIlwaine, this reflects a broader shift in how enterprise-fintech partnerships get structured. Highnote was built not as a processor bolted with features, but as a product platform designed to let enterprises innovate on top of a solid payments foundation, without requiring them to tear apart their existing infrastructure. "When we started Highnote, the concept was really about how can we create a better payments platform that does two things: allow customers to move faster than with existing providers, but also be differentiated - to really think about payments as competitive advantage. Everything we have built at Highnote is owned by Highnote. We don't sit on top of a gateway. We don't have multiple partners in the mix. That allows us to really partner in ways that facilitate rapid time to market and differentiation." - John MacIlwaine, CEO, Highnote The art of the deal: how this partnership actually came together. The panel went deeper than most into what it actually looks like to start and build an enterprise-fintech partnership. John described Highnote's approach as deliberately discovery-first, not arriving with a pre-packaged pitch, but spending real time understanding where Lowe's had friction. "We didn't go in and say, I know we have a solution for you. It was more about understanding what's going on within Lowe's. What are the points of friction? Not trying to do a hard match with what we have, but really understanding - this looks like money flows, this looks like virtual issuance, this looks like integrating with existing infrastructure. You can't solve problems in a large enterprise if you cause that enterprise to change multiple things to fit your technology. It has to be the other way around: here's a platform that can help you solve problems in the near term and then expand from there." - John MacIlwaine, CEO, Highnote One concrete example that came up: money arriving via wire transfer that needs to be available for in-store spending. Highnote's general ledger infrastructure, combined with virtual card issuance, allows those funds to be activated and used across Lowe's ecosystem, without disrupting existing workflows or requiring a systems overhaul. Jay framed the value of the partnership in terms of what Highnote brings to how Lowe's thinks, not just what it builds. "Working with John and his team is a good example of coming in and helping us work on some of our unique business solutions. But the cool thing is a lot of what we've done makes us think about things differently. That's the ability to be mentally flexible - just to be curious. And I want to make everybody better. The more ideas we can collaborate on, we both benefit. All boats rise." - Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services, Lowe's Serving everyone from Fortune 50s to the solo contractor. One of the most grounding moments in the panel was when the conversation turned to who Lowe's actually serves, and why that complexity makes payments so hard to get right. "We probably have one of the most diverse B2B portfolios of any retailer. We service a wide range of customers, all the way from large Fortune 50 companies to the small contractor with a truck doing renovations. You can't just focus on the big one. You can't just focus on the small. You have to focus on the overall population and say: how can I provide something that's meaningful to this wide range of customers - and do it at scale?" - Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services, Lowe's This is exactly the kind of complexity that, as John noted, requires a platform built for configurability, not a one-size product or a heavily customized one-off. It requires repeatable infrastructure that can flex across customer segments without rebuilding from scratch each time. Jay also flagged small business as an underserved and underappreciated opportunity in payments. "The small business side is a huge opportunity. It's so fragmented. Getting the right solution and demonstrating value to SMBs - they're really starving for a lot of this innovation and for the consumer experience and benefits that this combination can make." - Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services, Lowe's Build, buy, or partner, and the role of AI. The panel also touched on a question every enterprise is now wrestling with: in the age of AI, how do you think about build versus buy versus partner? John's answer was grounded in the reality of what AI actually requires to be useful inside a payments context. "Highnote has always been designed to allow customers to innovate - in fact, to encourage customers to build. We're not a platform with a bunch of features that you come back and ask us to build for you. We have a platform of enabling capabilities that allows your team to innovate on top of. With AI and other things that are coming, that process gets smoother and faster. But if you don't have the back-end platform to support it, you can innovate all you want - and as soon as you connect to old legacy payment infrastructure, the innovation stops." - John MacIlwaine, CEO, Highnote For Jay, the answer came back to partnership as a philosophy, not just a vendor relationship. "Partnering with the right partners who are innovating keeps us compliant, but also keeps us relevant and moving forward. That's what interests me most - having that conversation between how we look at our business and our customers, and having it with a smaller company that's out there innovating, finding ways to make a difference." - Jay Waters, Senior Director of Financial Services, Lowe's What this means for the industry. The conversation between Highnote and Lowe's at The Fintech Summit offered something rare: a real, unscripted look at how an enterprise-fintech partnership actually gets built, from the first discovery conversation to active use cases, with more on the horizon. The broader takeaway for the B2B founders, investors, and executives in the room was clear. The enterprises that win on payments in the next few years will not be the ones who moved the fastest alone. They will be the ones who found the right partners, stayed grounded in solving real problems, and built toward the future without having to dismantle what already works. As John put it at the close of the session: the goal was never to build a better customer experience than Lowe's. It was to give Lowe's the platform to build it themselves. Payments are no longer the finish line in the customer experience. They are becoming the infrastructure that makes the experience possible, the layer that determines whether a customer feels the friction or never notices it at all. The companies building that layer thoughtfully, in genuine partnership with the enterprises they serve, are the ones shaping what comes next. Highnote Team

Cross River Bank, Highnote join Visa stablecoin settlement pilot. * Cross River Bank and Highnote have joined Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot, enabling USDC-based card transaction settlement on Solana within a regulated U.S. framework. * The pilot allows eligible issuers and acquirers to settle with Visa seven days a week, improving clearing speed and capital usage without changing the consumer card experience. * Visa said the initiative reflects growing adoption of stablecoins in mainstream payments, with U.S. banks now settling live transactions using USDC at scale. Cross River Bank has joined Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot, launching the capability in partnership with payments platform Highnote as stablecoins move deeper into regulated payment infrastructure in the United States. Cross River Bank, Highnote join Visa for stablecoin pilot plan. The initiative brings USDC settlement into a live production environment, allowing eligible issuers and acquirers to settle card transactions using a dollar-backed stablecoin on the Solana blockchain. Visa said the pilot is designed to support faster clearing, continuous settlement, and improved capital efficiency, while leaving the consumer card experience unchanged. Cross River, which provides embedded financial services infrastructure to fintechs and enterprises, said the program reflects growing demand for on-chain settlement within traditional payment systems. The bank will support stablecoin settlement for Highnote-powered card programs, enabling issuers to settle network activity seven days a week rather than relying on legacy banking hours. "For stablecoins to reach scale, they need to operate inside unified financial systems," said Luca Cosentino, head of crypto at Cross River. He added that the bank's infrastructure is built to bring on-chain settlement into mainstream financial services in a controlled and compliant way. The collaboration with Visa and Highnote, he said, demonstrates how stablecoin settlement can function in real payment environments. Visa's pilot marks a shift toward practical deployment of stablecoins in the US banking system. For the first time, US-based issuer and acquirer partners can settle directly with Visa using USDC, a fully reserved stablecoin issued by Circle. Settlement takes place on Solana within a supervised framework that defines parameters around liquidity, reconciliation, and treasury management. Highnote's role centers on integrating stablecoin settlement into its unified issuing and acquiring platform. The company said the goal is to simplify how funds move across payment operations while improving reconciliation and settlement speed. Highnote CEO John MacIlwaine said stablecoin settlement only matters when it delivers measurable advantages in real payment flows. He described the pilot as a step toward faster and always-on payment operations. Cross River recently launched its own stablecoin payments offering, which unifies fiat and stablecoin flows through a single interoperable system. The Highnote program will test stablecoin settlement performance across live issuing and acquiring use cases, focusing on settlement timing, accuracy, and operational impact for card programs running at scale. Services under the pilot are currently limited to select US states, reflecting the structured rollout and regulatory oversight tied to the program. Visa has said the controlled launch is intended to evaluate how stablecoins can support shorter settlement cycles without introducing additional risk into the payment system. According to Bloomberg, Visa has confirmed that Cross River Bank and Lead Bank are among the first US institutions to use USDC for transaction clearing through the Solana blockchain. The deployment represents the first full use of Visa's stablecoin settlement service within the domestic banking system. Visa reported that its stablecoin settlement volume has reached an annualized run rate of $3.5 billion as of late November, alongside a broader increase in stablecoin-linked card programs worldwide. Alongside the settlement pilot, Visa announced the launch of its Stablecoins Advisory Practice, a new service under Visa Consulting and Analytics. The practice is designed to help banks, fintechs, merchants, and enterprises assess stablecoin use cases, develop market strategies, and plan technical integration as regulatory standards continue to emerge. Visa said interest in advisory services has grown as the stablecoin market capitalization surpasses $250 billion. Financial institutions are seeking guidance on how stablecoins fit into payments, treasury operations, and cross-border settlement. The advisory practice will offer training programs, market analysis, go-to-market planning, and technical enablement support. Visa executives said stablecoins are increasingly viewed as a core payment rail rather than a niche crypto product. The company already supports more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across over 40 countries and territories. Additional pilots under Visa Direct aim to enable businesses in certain jurisdictions to pre-fund cross-border payments using stablecoins and send payouts directly to digital wallets. For Cross River and Highnote, participation in the Visa pilot places both firms at the center of a broader push to integrate stablecoins into regulated payment infrastructure. The focus remains on settlement speed, reliability, and compatibility with existing card networks, as stablecoins continue to move from experimentation into everyday payment operations.