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Show Notes: Recapping the PCI North American Community Meeting 2023
Quick Take
This week on Compliance Unfiltered, the CU guys give their account of the week that was in Portland OR.
The Pacific Northwest played home to this year’s PCI North American Community Meeting, and wow, was it an experience! Adam and Todd chat about the preparation for the event, share some of the wild tails from the convention center floor, and talk in depth about some of the key take aways in the PCI space this year.
You won’t want to miss all this and more, on this episode of Compliance Unfiltered.
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Read Transcript
So let’s face it, managing compliance sucks. It’s complicated, it’s so hard to keep organized, and it requires a ton of expertise in order to survive the entire process. Welcome to Compliance Unfiltered, a podcast dedicated to making compliance suck less. Now, here’s your host, Todd Coshow, with Adam Goslin.
Well welcome in to another edition of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow, alongside the lettuce and mayo to your original compliance chicken sandwich, Mr. Adam Goslin. How the heck are you, sir? I am doing fantastic on this fine day. How about yourself, Todd? I can’t complain. We are coming off of a whirlwind of a last week or so that we got to spend in the fine Pacific Northwest at the PCI North American community meeting.
So let’s start at the beginning, Adam. Talk to me, how was prep and tick off for the show this year? I was going to say, it sounds like it’s easier said than said. Or done in this case, go ahead and tell the folks about it, Adam. So actually coming into this show, a little bit of history will help the listener. Back in 2019, we did the North American community meeting in Vancouver. We packed up all of our stuff and we shipped it to go to the show. We were sitting there waiting to go set up our stuff. meanwhile calling up the people that were doing the shipping and saying, well, what the hell’s going on? There’s stuff in here. And all of our stuff for the show got stuck in customs in the US. And so it was literally across the Canadian US border. We were in Vancouver, it was in Seattle. And so I said, okay, well, what are my options? And I ended up jumping into a, we ended up renting a van, driving across the border into the United States, finding the place where it was stuck in customs and having them put it in the van. And then we drove it all back over. And anyway, we normally would do set up like during the daytime and then have a nice pleasant evening. Well, in this case, we were starting to set up at night. It was exciting, shall we say. So this time around, I’m sitting here going, hey, you know what, at least we don’t have to deal with that. We’re in Portland, right? We shipped all four containers of stuff, you know, etc. And on the Monday, when we were supposed to be setting everything up, it’s like one of the four f-in boxes of stuff shows up. I call up the company, which, I don’t know, for the sake of this discussion, we’ll, we’ll call them, you lost my shit. And so, so they, so anyway, so I’m like, where’s my stuff? They’re like, no, no, and actually, the listeners can’t see it or whatever. But I’m literally like shrugging as I, as I’m saying this. And we don’t have any idea where your other three boxes are. Okay. So, so anyway, we, we pulled some strings and rabbits out of hats and all that fun stuff and kind of made a, made a decent go of it got getting set up for the show. But with that hiccup aside, the first day of the actual conference, first thing in the morning, they had magically found our stuff and, you know, and dumped it off to us right in the middle of the probably the busiest portion of the entire show. But we navigated those waters and, you know, and whatnot, but we got it all, we got it all figured out. So that was, that was certainly a plus. And, you know, kind of goes with the ongoing theme of, of expect the unexpected, shall we say.
Most assuredly. Now, how was the reception for participants at the show this year? Well, the cool part about TCT going, especially going to the PCI community meetings is that we have a ton of friends in the space. You know, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got closing in on like three dozen assessors that leverage our platform to run their stuff. And just at the end of the day, thousands of people that, you know, that leverage our platform to manage their compliance. And so it’s really cool. there, being able to regroup face-to-face with people that we, you know, typically would be on, you know, calls with all year long, you know, and whatnot. Even just at the show, we have, you know, a multitude of organizations that also have booths that happen to be clients. So, you know, it’s just all the way around. It’s really, really cool. You know, I had, I had a lot of fun, you know, having conversation. One of, one of the big challenges, you know, with vendors these days is that, you know, this vendor’s getting gobbled up by this, you know, moderate-sized company. And then the moderate-sized companies are getting gobbled up by the gigantic companies, you know, etc. And I had several conversations with people kind of telling them about my background, telling about my experience with, you know, starting a prior organization with a couple of business partners and that, you know, going to hell in a handbasket. And, and so, you know, I like to tell people that I learned from my mistakes. And when I started TCT, I, I started, as I love to say with, there were three owners, there was me, myself and I. And so, and, you know, and it was nice being able to, you know, have conversations with organizations that had, it’s almost like you’re dealing with a whole bunch of people that have PTSD from dealing with just horrifying vendor experiences of, you know, them either not fulfilling their obligations or them getting gobbled up and service going to hell, you know, and whatnot. It was just, it was fun to be able to just be absolutely open with folks and say, Look, you know, you know, there’s been the same three owners of TCT since the start. We don’t have, you know, we don’t have external influences that are guiding how we do what we do. There, you know, we aren’t beholden to some, you know, board that’s really steering the ship or whatever. It’s just, you know, we got a job to do. You know, from the onset, it was helping people make compliance management suck less, and really at the root of it, helping others. And, you know, it’s something that TCT has taken seriously all the way along. And it was fun being able to talk to people as they were coming up to the booth and just giving them that reassurance that, hey, look, you know, we’re not, we’re not in the, we didn’t build this to sell it, or we’re not looking to, you know, looking to off the company, you know, anything along those lines, you know, your, the consistency that our clients have is a consistency they can, you know, expect to look forward to. You know, and, and it was funny, you know, kind of the sense of relief that you could see in, you know, in those folks. Having, you know, kind of close friends with booths right near us, etc. That was also fun, because it’s funny, you’re sitting there you’re talking to somebody who’s never, you know, kind of never met TCT before or never heard of us or whatever. And they’re just starting to learn about it. And all of these first-time conversations with folks sound amazing. But, you know, I had the opportunity to, you know, ask a lot of people that were coming by. I said, look, it’s one thing to hear it from us, and I think we do a pretty good job at representing ourselves and, you know, things along those lines. But why don’t you go hear about it from somebody that experiences it from the same perspective as we’re, you know, kind of, you know, saying you should experience it from, and go over to one of our, you know, one of our current client’s booths. And so we would send people over to the, you know, to go talk to existing clients, what’s your experience, how did it go, etc. You know, it’s just fun being able to do that as well. You know, it’s, it’s one of the rewarding elements.
Because part of the reason why I started this company is that, I mean, I tried to manage compliance, you know, using manual, manual processes and spreadsheets and blah, back in the day, and it sucks. It just straight sucks. And, you know, it was fun. It’s always fun having those conversations with people that are learning about TCT for the first time, and just kind of watching the look on their face change as they start to realize, you know, holy crap, this is it. This could actually be helpful, you know, type of thing. And, and this looks like a good solution, etc. And so it’s kind of fun watching the light bulbs go on, which you can almost kind of see, you know, see on their faces. And, you know, kind of the last, the last piece of it is this, is that this is one guy, he was walking by. And, you know, a lot of people when they walk by the booth at these shows, right, they’re like, Oh, God, I don’t want to look in the vendor booth. I don’t want to have to talk to these people, because, you know, they’re just gonna waste my time or whatever, right. And they really got this kind of I’m gonna put my blinders on and just keep, you know, keep marching. And, and this one guy was walking by. And I literally just called up to him and I said, Hey, said, you know what, I said, you win an award. And he’s like, award for what? I said, you have the most majestic beard that I’ve seen at the show. And, and so that was kind of, that was how it started, right. And we just get to talking. And it really, you know, kind of goes to the point that I would that I was headed toward, which is the best part about going to the PCI conference is this, we serve people that are going through compliance, we serve people that have offerings for compliant customers, we serve people that are doing consulting for compliance, we serve people that are assessors or auditors, you know, against compliance, there isn’t a person that can walk up to the booth that is there for a purpose that we can’t have a good conversation with. And it really makes it unique for TCT in terms of the interaction we get to have because there are no bad conversations. We get to have a lot of really good chat with folks and that’s probably just kind of some of the fun part about it.
But I tell you what, I don’t get this opportunity very often but I’m going to take the opportunity to ask you a question. And you know, part of the cool part about this particular conference in North America and quite frankly in Dublin is that TCT was selected to present a technology and payments demonstration of the TCT portal that you guys put on. So I don’t want to say more about it but how did that go Todd? It went really well. We had the good fortune of having our head of product, Jon Dodson, and I had the good fortune of being able to do about a 15-minute presentation on what they considered a tech demo, as you mentioned. That was in one of the large conference rooms. They had a really nice space set up with the stage and whatnot. We had probably about 50 people in the room to actually see it live, and then it was streamed out to all of the folks that were watching and attending the PCI conference virtually as well. Probably the best part about that is just that we’ve already had such a positive response from what people saw there, either saying it wasn’t something that I was aware it was available in the space, or we really liked your guys’ presentation style, just all the way around. It was super complementary. The nice thing about this is that for those of you who didn’t see the presentation but may have interest in seeing it and will also be at the PCI European Community Meeting in Dublin next month, where we’ve actually been selected to give a presentation there as well, Adam. I think folks will get a second chance. Before you leave that topic, I wanted to tell you one of the cool parts was that after you guys did that demo, it was fun. People were coming up to the booth and talking and kind of setting me aside real quick, saying that they had watched several of those tech demos. They said that far and away you and Jon did, by far, the best job of folks that were doing presenting. I certainly think your styles, your personalities, etc, seemed to gel well with the participants, but I want to let you know I had several people. that came by the booth, pulled me aside to let you know, just what a great job that you guys did. So kudos to you and Jon.
Thanks for that, I appreciate that news. Now, as we move forward here, Adam, what types of preparation have been performed to be ready for the PCI conferences this year? Well, you know, we had PCI, PCI version four, obviously came out earlier this year. The PCI council has been kind of sending out various modifications, changes, updates, clarity, over the course of the year since they initially released it.
So, they actually released a new latest and greatest, I believe it was in August. So we basically dove through our butts to go get that functionality developed into the TCT portal. We definitely want to do that in advance of the community meetings. So they released a new capability and infi spreadsheet. You know, so they put out they put out that infi spreadsheet that they did. We also last go around, they went out, we went out and we put together an instance for the TCT portal over in Europe, because we had a lot of international clients that were looking for us to be able to host their information over within Europe rather than it being within the United States. So we stood that up actually in Q4 of 2022. And so we had that in there as well. So it was kind of fun to be able to go get everything kind of lined up and prepared, you know, for going through that process. The infi worksheet is it’s an acronym for items noted for improvement. So that, you know, as the assessor is going through going through the annual assessment process, if there were things which they had identified, which needed to get rectified, etc., then they have a way to be able to go in and document those.
So, you know, for a lot of organizations in the space, I was kind of trying to keep an eyeball on who, you know, kind of who of the providers were doing what. I mean, certainly in TCT’s case, our objective at all times is to, you know, kind of improve efficiency, do it in appropriate fashion. You know, could we have just, you know, basically said here you can download your sheet here, you know, type of thing. Yeah, that would take us about three seconds to go do. But instead, in kind of true TCT fashion, yeah, we actually integrated the functionality right into the system so that you can capture the data points, etc. on the infi spreadsheets, spreadsheets, attach those appropriately to the right items. It’s fully integrated into the TCT portal. So that was really nice to be able to have that ready to go. Jon Dotson the head of product and his team did a great job with getting everything in place button up, etc. TCT has a number of additional things that we’re going to go do in terms of continuing, improving efficiency for PCI v4. But we were able to walk into the conference with a just absolute compendium of good solid functionality that we could share with the participants at the community meeting.
Very cool. Now, it’s one of my favorite parts of the podcast here today. Tell us more, Adam, about the networking event that TCT hosted on Wednesday evening. Yeah, so, you know, for the last couple of years we’ve been doing this, and that is setting up a networking event to be able to invite people to have some more kind of relaxed conversations. We were very fortunate to have a couple of our existing clients co-sponsor the event. So it was co-sponsored by both RSI and Confide. You know, we had it at an organization called Lulu. So the arena, it’s not the arena, but the area around, you know, the convention center in Portland was a little tough. There wasn’t a lot that was, you know, right there, but we managed to, you know, we managed to get a space, quite frankly, thanks to you, get a space that was close enough to not make it overbearing in terms of being able to navigate there. And we had a registration page, and the cool part was of the people… that registered, we easily had north of 80% of the registration, registered folks show up. We ended up being able to have a quaint evening taking over the entirety of Lulu with 60 of our closest friends. So, no, it was a great time. It was nice being able to have discussions and chit chats in a kind of less formal setting. You know, we got a great reception from those folks that were new to TCT. Man, one of the cool parts was being in an environment where it’s not quite so formal and being able to basically go grab somebody that’s an existing client, have them go have a chit chat with somebody that’s thinking about it, you know, or needs help or whatever it may be, you know, and just doing so, you know, doing so over. Cocktails, I mean, it really doesn’t get much better than that. It’ll be worse. Exactly. Very cool.
Now, we’re at that time again, Adam, parting shots and thoughts for the folks this week. Well, we overall had a great time with all of our old friends and our new friends that we made in Portland. Just a reminder to the listeners that TCT will also be in Dublin for the EU conference this year for the first time. And the TCT was selected to present their technology and payment demo for the Europe conference as well. So it will be fun. This will be our first opportunity to go over to EU and kind of meet folks over there. So we’re really, really looking forward to continuing the theme of regroup with old friends and making of new friends over at the Europe at the PCI, EU community meeting in Dublin. So hopefully we’ll be able to see you there.
Absolutely. And that right there, that’s the good stuff. Thank you. Well that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow. And I’m Adam Goslin. Hope we helped to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.
