SoftPOS and other innovations at the POS

Watch the video on YouTube to learn more about:

• Innovations and new payments developments
• SoftPOS and why it is relevant for the FinTech and payments industry
• Further developments at the Point of Sale
• What the future might hold

Interviewer: James, thank you so much for joining us here today at FF News Money 2020 coverage. How are you doing?

James: I’m good, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Interviewer: “Our pleasure. James, could you tell our audience your full name, your job role, and your organization?”

James: “Yeah, sure. I’m James Darren, I’m the Product Manager for Innovation at Aevi.”

Interviewer: “So, James, with that in mind, what are you looking forward to the most at this year’s Money 2020, or what’s caught your eye currently?”

James: “I think what’s caught my eye this year is the prevalence of the SoftPOS providers and evolution that has gone on. I’m also a bit keen on seeing how people are applying blockchain and that technology and kind of steering away from the terminology of crypto, which I think is much more focused on the future of where is that blockchain take us as a technology rather than the currency.”

Interviewer: “Absolutely amazing. And I mean, with that in mind, then, we’re seeing blockchain go from a buzzword to now the institutions are really looking at it. Do you think that it’s going to actually become a dominant technology?”

James: “I don’t know if it’s going to become dominant. I think what we’ll probably find is it’s going to be much more of a synergy. I think a combination of the technologies will be probably more likely. It’s never going to be a replacement, but I think it will complement the other primary services. And I think we also have to be a bit careful when we use the terminology blockchain because what we’re seeing in terms of the application of that, particularly the major institutions, it’s more along the lines that there’s still a lot of centralization still happening within the actual core platform itself.”

Interviewer: “Absolutely. I completely agree. It’s we’ve gone from the absolutes of the fintech scene in the 2015s where it was like, oh, the fintechs are going to overtake the banks, oh, the tech is going to disrupt, destroy. Yeah, and now this measured approach, and this is really where Aevi sits in and fits in really. You tell us a bit more about what Aevi do in particular?”

James: “Yeah, so Aevi are an in-person payments orchestrator, and I guess in that we’re quite unique and niche. Most people are kind of still focusing on the e-comm world and everything else, but they’ve actually forgotten that still a huge majority of the payments today are still done in person. And I think that’s where Aevi’s proposition becomes really unique for those fintechs for those e-commerce players, the ones that now have decided they want to get into that kind of in-person payments arena but they don’t really know how. And up until really at Aevi, there was really only a couple of options like a reseller deal through someone like Square. Suddenly there’s this Aevi opportunity where they’ve seen that they can do a simple API integration to us. They can have a full-service front-end payment solution for in-person payments that covers everything from unattended to traditional kind of normal payment devices and then through now to SoftPOS and IoT as we move into the future.”

Interviewer: “Amazing. And could you tell us a bit more about that SoftPOS technology?”

James: “Yeah, so SoftPOS, I mean everybody kind of I guess thinks of SoftPOS as a consumer-based technology for consumer devices and that is where it was born. But I think, you know, it was only maybe seven months ago that I was sitting in the room with the guys and talking and I actually said, “I think you misunderstand where this is really going, and I think the industry is misunderstood.” But now I think we’re beginning to see the beginnings of that this year where they’ve suddenly realized, “Hey, the use case here isn’t about the SME or the micro merch, and the use case here is about enterprise.” What if we could actually create a SoftPOS solution that could be deployed and certified onto any device with a single certification? And then you begin to get into the realms of changing the payment application forever because instead of having that traditional approach where you have to build a payment app, build it, and get it working with that particular piece of hardware and a secure element, and then doing a certification on every single piece of hardware, now suddenly people are realizing, “Hey, you know SoftPOS could actually be certified once deploy everywhere and give mass scale to payments apps in the future.” I think this is amazing because it’s such a human story because small medium enterprises have been hit so hard because of the pandemic of the last two years. Now Aevi is effectively enabling sole traders and SMEs to really go on and thrive.”

Interviewer: “What’s in store for Aevi in the future too?”

James: “So, I think in Aevi for the future, I think where we’re heading is definitely down that strategic route of bringing things together into a more unified customer journey for those people. There’s certainly a lot more work to do around I think the onboarding journeys, and we also need to look at the reverse of those onboarding journeys of how you actually bring people to the acquirer from a KYC/AML perspective instead of the general feed that usually happens where people go to the fire and come back because our clients are now asking for different things. But I think, you know, the real future for us is in the kind of expansion of that platform capability, so giving people access to multiple different types of applications through our marketplace so they can create really unique customized journeys that can be customized not only from an acquirer level but even potentially by the merchant themselves. They can select the products that they want to use and then actually build a journey that works for their business, rather than maybe being reliant on being handed a box to go work with. You know, this is what you have and this is what you have to have, right? I think it’s incredible to see how the merchant’s payment experience has just been dominantly cash, then having to take cards not wanting to, and now really being excited about what they can do, and then having full control of it because of Aevi.”

Interviewer: “Yeah, I think it’s a very exciting time. James, thank you so much.”

You can read more about payments orchestration here. 

sarah.koch@aevi.com