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.

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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.