Financial IT x Aevi: Payment orchestration and a customer-centric approach

Our SVP Channel & Partnerships, Peter Spee, talked at Money20/20 Europe with Financial IT about everything payment orchestration and why a customer-centric approach is vital.

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Financial IT: Greetings from Money 2020 here in Amsterdam. Joining me today is Peter Spee, Senior Vice President, sales for Aevi. Peter, good day – please tell us about Aevi.

Peter: We specialize in innovating, the in person payment space primarily. Also looking towards payment orchestration between alternative payment methods and card payment methods to extend and expand the in store experience for in person payments.

Financial IT: So, in person payments, you’re talking about individual people buying something or some service, and they could be paying cash, or they could be using a card of some sort, or they could be using their phone. And I guess there are other possibilities as well.

Peter: Exactly. Over the last 20 years, as you can imagine, the show has grown into more fintech. The payment ecosystem has become more complicated. There used to be cash and checks and cards, and now a variety of payment methods, which are card based or alternative payment methods. QR, code based, phone initiated loyalty schemes that offer a variety of means of payments that a consumer can adopt. And a merchant, of course. And even on top of that, payments can be initiated not only in front of the merchant, but at other places. On the Internet, on your phone, in the store, pre orders. All of these flows become more and more complicated. But still, at the end, the transaction is in person, meaning between the merchant and the receiver of the goods or the services.

Financial IT: You mentioned the word orchestration for people who are perhaps musically inclined and not so payments inclined. Could you explain what that means?

Peter: Well, I’ll use the words indeed, it is a symphony. When you are a merchant, what you want to be is being paid for your services. You want this in a secure manner and you want this in an auditable manner. You want to know that person ‘a’ has paid you with that payment means. And you want to make sure that that transaction acts seamlessly. When, however, from different varieties, from different areas of technology, payments come in at different points. Maybe your ECR, your cash register or your payment device or the Internet or a QR code on a phone. You as a merchant need to feel or need to be sure that that payment is properly passing all of its steps. And at the end of the day, the amount lands in your account. This requires what we call orchestration, the orchestration of all of those different, let’s say, means and technologies coming into one pipe. And our aim at Aevi is to securely manage those different flows and to bring, let’s say, the account, or to credit the account securely and auditably.

Financial IT: Who are your clients? Are they the merchants or are they someone else?

Peter: That is a very good question. So at Aevi are very customer centric. The key to the customer for us is the merchant. It’s the merchant that interacts with its consumers, with its clients. And that is a key on how we design our solutions. However, our customers are in fact, acquirers banks. ISOs is everybody who provides payment services to those merchants. So our solution is both customer centric towards merchants, but also customer centric towards those that are providing these payment services towards our customers.

Financial IT: In other words, if you’re the organizer of the orchestra and the conductor, you have to bear in mind the needs of all the different players.

Peter: That is correct. That is why we built a very open ecosystem, an ecosystem and a business model that favours and actually helps partners on board, let’s say, integrate their technologies there, add value very easily on our payment system, on our ecosystem, if you like.

Financial IT: When you say partnerships, what I have in mind is a situation where a great fintech company comes up with some technology. It can see an application to what you’re doing, and by working with you, two things happen, both of which are good. You get access to new technology that might otherwise not be available, also readily available, and they get access to the entire ecosystem that Aevi runs. Is that what you mean by partner?

Peter: That’s very correct. I mean, after all, Aevi cannot change the payment landscape by its own no. And so partnerships are key to our growth, key to our success. Not recently, in April and March for the North American market, we announced two, what I would say key partnerships to enable growth on the SMB market segment. So Ovation, which is a company that provides support, very detailed support to merchants with very complicated technology, is a partner that we’ve onboarded, I think, in March of this year, and in April, we announced our partnership with a long term supplier of ours, XAC. Why are those partnerships so important to us? Is because we see both the technology and the needs of the markets constantly evolving, and strong partnerships favor more close collaboration, more sharing of ideas, and more sharing of resources and technology. And we see that across the globe.

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Listen to the rest of the interview here.

sarah.koch@aevi.com