GALILEO & FRIENDS
Open sesame
Galileo Processing Founder and CEO Clay Wilkes talks open APIs, the challenge of cryptocurrencies and battling card fraud with AI
Clay Wilkes has built Galileo Processing into one of North America’s largest payments processors and programme managers, investing heavily in tech and engineering innovation, and focussing on perfecting payments operations so clients can spend their time creating products and building customer relationships. A prolific thinker on payments topics, Clay joined Fintech Finance at Money20/20 in Las Vegas to share his thoughts on topics that are front of mind for him right now. Fintech Finance: In the UK and Europe, the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) will require banks to provide fintechs with open access to certain types of data to promote a more competitive and innovative financial services marketplace. The US doesn’t require open banking, but at Galileo – as a payments processor and programme manager – you voluntarily opened up three of your most important application programming interfaces (APIs). Can you explain why?
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Clay Wilkes: Much in the spirit of PSD2, we opened three of our key APIs because it’s the right thing to do to promote payments competition and innovation. Putting these APIs in the hands of virtually any developers – whether they’re working from their garages or in big banks – gives them powerful tools to create any payments programmes they can imagine. They can develop bankgrade programs with the time, cost and complexity of developing the functionality that sits behind the accounts. What we’ve done is enable industry-wide payments creativity without limitation and without risk. FF: Are you really that altruistic? CW: Look, we know that even after 17-plus years innovating in payments and with millions of dollars invested in tech and engineering, we don’t have a lock on great ideas. By giving virtually anyone access to the great tools in our open APIs and, of course, our open sandbox, we’re saying experiment, be bold, think outside the box. We want the next great idea in
payments to spring from our open APIs – regardless of whose idea it is. FF: And what about the commercial aspect? CW: Opening our APIs is important commercially, too. Prospect developers use our APIs to begin their work before any agreements between our companies are signed. Literally, they can kick our tyres in an environment that completely simulates live production and help their businesses make highly informed decisions. If we win their companies’ business, the developers are well ahead of the game, because their work is fully transferable. And current clients can iterate and test new products and features, focussing on creating great user experiences, because we’ve taken the complexity of payments connections, controls and processes off their plates.
Bridging the crypto gap FF: Since we’re on APIs, you recently introduced the Galileo Cryptocurrency API. What need does this new API fill? www.fintech.finance