Meet Miles Schwartz, CEO at Business Payment System: Zūm Rails

Tell us about Zūm Rails.

Zūm Rails gives businesses a single platform to run payments, banking, prepaid cards, secured credit cards and other financial services – all without juggling a dozen separate banks or fintech vendors. Instead of piecing together multiple providers, companies can access everything they need through one portal.

As more organizations turn to payments to grow revenue and offer new services, Zūm Rails makes it easy to embed branded financial experiences directly into existing operations. Its open-banking-driven risk management tools let businesses choose the payment methods that fit their needs while keeping transactions fast, secure, and efficient.

Major brands like Western Union, Robinhood, and Questrade already use Zūm Rails to streamline payments and broaden their offerings. Behind the scenes, these capabilities are powered by partnerships with leading financial services providers including Visa, Mastercard, and Fiserv.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

The idea for Zūm Rails really came together while I was working at a data-aggregation fintech. I was the most customer facing person at this company as the Chief Sales Officer and clients would regularly express their pain points around money movement after we connected to the bank account.

I met Marc a few years prior, who at the time was referring a lot of business to me as he was running a payments company and payments and data aggregation are complimentary. I then pitched hiring Marc and expanding into payments, but the company wasn’t ready at the time. That’s when I decided the best move was to team up with Marc and build it ourselves.

We got to work designing the concept and technology to bring open banking, payments, and risk management together in a single gateway. Back in 2019, most companies treated those capabilities as separate – or didn’t consider them at all – so our goal was to unify everything in one platform.

Five years later, that bet has paid off. Zūm Rails has grown dramatically and now processes more than $1 billion in transactions every month.

Tell us about your core product or service: ZūmOS. 

ZūmOS is a full financial operating system for companies that want to offer bank-like services without dealing directly with a bank. From card issuance and payment rails to invoicing, credit card processing, data aggregation, reporting, and risk management, everything is built into one platform, one API, one portal.

The system also scales as a business grows. A company might start out using ZūmOS just for payments and risk management, then later add features such as fully branded prepaid or secured credit card programs – all on the same platform they already use.

Think of it as a “bank in a box.” ZūmOS lets organizations operate like a bank and unlock new revenue streams, without the lengthy, costly integrations normally required to deliver a full suite of financial services.

What most excites you about the payments industry?

Companies are finding new ways to use payments to grow every day. In our conversations with businesses, we often hear creative use cases we hadn’t even imagined.

One example came from a company that operates bottle-deposit locations. Instead of giving customers cash receipts, they can issue digital cards – an approach that improves profit margins as they can now make a percentage of every transaction moved on the cards (the interchange). We’ve also seen companies move toward paying workers on a card the same day they work rather than waiting for a traditional two-week paycheck, a perk that can help attract and keep gig workers.

And those are just a couple of the ideas we’re already seeing. As more businesses start issuing their own cards, even more innovative payment use cases are sure to emerge – which is exciting to watch.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

One of the toughest challenges early on at Zūm Rails was earning the trust of enterprise clients. We were a young company going after well-established players, and without a track record – especially among large financial institutions – it was hard to prove we could deliver. The bar was even higher because most of our prospects operate in highly regulated financial services, where compliance and trust are non-negotiable.

We tackled that by proving ourselves one project at a time. Each successful deployment became a concrete example we could share with the next prospect, showing that we could do exactly what we promised. Today, we have a strong roster of client deployments and use cases, so that initial hurdle is far lower.

A more recent challenge was expanding into the U.S. At first, we handed the effort to an executive with experience scaling similar businesses and kept our distance. But traction was slower than expected, so I moved to Miami to lead the expansion directly. Having boots on the ground has made all the difference, and we’re now seeing real momentum in the U.S. market.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

My biggest advice is to operate as if you’re already five steps ahead of where you are today. When we first launched, we were still scrappy, but we carried ourselves like a company with a solid client base and a network of partners. Part of that was mindset, manifesting what we wanted, and part of it was putting in the work to back it up.

That approach has stayed with us from day one, and time and again we’ve hit the goals we set because we acted like we were already there. It’s a mindset that keeps pushing the company forward.

What can we hope to see from Zūm Rails in the future?

Right now, we’re fully focused on expanding our card offerings. Looking ahead, we want to help companies scale creative new use cases with these cards while continuing to grow our base of enterprise and small business customers who rely on us to expand their payments capabilities.

We’ve seen rapid growth over the past few years, and our goal is to keep that momentum going. By continuing to invest in the payments technology and solutions businesses need, we aim to help our customers stay ahead and drive innovation in their own industries. As our product suite grows, so will our global footprint as we expand on expanding beyond just North America as our platform is country agnostic.