Payments & FinTech Magazine - Open Banking, Cloud & Payment Services

#3 2021

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Content Contents 4

Mastercard: Unlocking the open banking journey

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Navigating the PSD2 challenges and developments with Aiia

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Cloud-native Acquiring – the key to a Future Proof Solution

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Payment services powered by Ximedes

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TOP JOBS A selection of jobs in payments & FinTech

by PaymentGenes.

FinTechs and G+D – a partnership for success

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Interview Mastercard

Unlocking the open banking journey

The increased competition within the FinTech landscape has been driving more innovation and customer-centricity. Financial institutions that invest in differentiated propositions will become the front runners. Although we have not seen a big pickup in the Netherlands yet, all signs indicate that the market is steadily catching up with some other markets that are advanced in open banking capabilities and adoption rates. Read this interview with Jan-Willem van der Schoot, the Country Manager of Mastercard the Netherlands, to learn more about navigating the open banking journey.

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Where are we in terms of open banking and what to expect in the near future?

Looking at open banking I believe that there will be this “great equalizer” between traditional banks and FinTech companies which will drive more competition and most importantly, more innovation and customer-centricity.

Looking at today’s world, consumers expect full transparency. They want to be able to utilize their data, but of course only if there’s a benefit and if they consent with data sharing. with their consent and if it’s beneficial for them.

In terms of the future of open banking, banks and other FinTech companies that invest in solutions and differentiated propositions will certainly come out as leaders one way or the other. Although we have not seen a big pickup in the Netherlands yet when it comes to open banking, I see us quickly catching up with some other markets that are advanced in open banking capabilities and adoption rates.

Do you consider Europe to be up to speed when it comes to innovation in open banking?

It differs from country to country. That being said, our research revealed that many countries have a set of characteristics to embrace in open banking ecosystems and that some countries and regions also are leading the pack.

Just to name some interesting results, if you look at internet access, which is vital for open banking, the Nordics and the UK scored the highest with scores between 95% and 98%. Another important element is whether people use digital banking apps which turned out to be very common in the Netherlands but varied across different European countries. But then again, the countries that are leading, have impressive rates of 85% to 95% usage of digital banking apps.

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Interview Mastercard

But if you ask, are we there yet? not where I think we will be in a few years as consumers are not yet benefiting from what’s possible and what has been innovated at this moment. On the bright side, all the signs today show that we are in the right direction. Mastercard is helping banks with its Open Banking Connect solution.

For example, to make sure that the connections can be made I would say we are on track but there is much more to come very shortly.

Are there certain growth areas in open banking at the moment and what is Mastercard’s role there?

Mastercard recognized the potential of open banking quite some years ago.

We started investing in open banking solutions a few years ago and have always been playing a very crucial, central role with our data networks within the space. Having a considerable eco6 PaymentGenes #3 2021

system of clients has been key in stimulating our growth within the open banking space.

Not to mention that it’s also one of Mastercard’s missions to provide everybody access into the digital economy where open banking is vital because it is meant for providing consumers and businesses with more options, more control, and more intelligence.

Next to that, we’ve done the acquisition of Finicity, last year in the U.S and we are constantly looking at how we can improve further growth in the open banking space. We now see more and more clients, wanting to work with us in this area. While that is a good sign, it is not, the end as open banking is on a journey, and Mastercard will be part of that.

At the end of the day, Mastercard is a company that has innovation in its blood!

What are some ways the pandemic affected the payments infrastructure?

To say that the last year and a half have been like no other is an understatement. Comparing today to the previous decade, things have changed tremendously. I once heard a quote

“Payments now have been made strategically important for basically every company.”

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And it certainly was not the case pre-pandemic. Some of the most notable changes we have witnessed are large increases in online shopping frequency. As a consequence, many web shops have doubled in their volumes and went fully digital. Our research also revealed that more consumers now prefer to shop locally as opposed to large merchants. Contactless payments are a wonderful thing that went through the roof thanks to the support of the increased limits.

In fact, in the Netherlands and more European markets, 86% of the payments became contactless, and over 15 to 20% of all payments are done with a phone or a wearable. The travel sector is slowly but surely coming back, international traffic is still in the early stages of recovery. But once we get back to “normal” we will see that we’ve changed the way we pay due to the pandemic. More contactless, more online, and also we’ll see that

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Interview Mastercard

online and physical channels will become integrated experiences.

Mastercard announced some exciting

“69% of the Dutch consumers said that they shopped more frequently at local shops last year than the year before.”

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acquisitions of FinTechs such as Ekata, how do you integrate these new services within Mastercard’s portfolio?

Mastercard has done quite some acquisitions now for the past year. The common denominator between all these acquisition is that they can improve the experience of either the consumer or the merchant. Therefore, Mastercard has done many acquisitions in what I would call the cyber, identity, security, or the fraud space to facilitate seamless transactions and boost trust. Looking at EKATA, which is a company that specializes in identity management, with that we can help merchants, acquirers, and even issuers that specializes in identity management, with that we can help merchants, acquirers, and even issuers in making sure that they authenticate the person that specializes in identity management, with that we can help merchants, acquirers, and even issuers in making sure that they authenticate the person they are in contact with. In a nutshell, we slowly integrate acquired companies into Mastercard’s ecosystem and introduce them to our clients, being acquirers, issuers, and merchants.

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What is your take on the impact of collaboration and innovation in the merchant payments industry?

The payments industry as a whole wouldn’t be as successful if it wasn’t for partnerships. Looking at Mastercard alone, I can say we’ve been very active in partnerships with merchants and acquirers in the past year. Not only for contactless payments but also by looking at a digital debit card, which we are now piloting with some merchants and acquirers together with issuers, this can only be achieved by collaboration.

What are some of the challenges you are seeing amongst some of the players in the industry?

While I can’t speak on behalf of other players, one of the challenges is making sure that the customer experience is smooth and attractive to both consumers and merchants, while complying with new rules and regulations. The payments

system also needs to be seamless and secure by having Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).This has been a bumpy ride, but I’m proud to say that in the Netherlands, we are now at the point where the entire payments ecosystem is almost there. The next step is making sure that all the exemptions are in place to ensure an even smoother way of Strong Customer Authentication.

Another challenge we are seeing is ensuring the balance of a fast time to market that’s in line with consumer adoption.

For example, Click to Pay, and the digital debit card are products we would like to roll out very swiftly. But from experience, there is no way you implement a new payment solution within a year, or even within a few years. People need to get used to it, see the benefits and then adoption will follow afterward. That being said, the team and especially myself are looking forward to facing, tacking, and fixing as we go!

About Jan-Willem Country Manager at Mastercard Netherlands since April 2020. Jan-Willem has been with Mastercard since 2012 and in his previous role as Account Leader, he was responsible for maintaining relationships with Dutch customers. Prior to Mastercard, he worked at IBM, where he held various positions. Jan-Willem has a Master’s in Economics from Erasmus University in Rotterdam and an MBA from Warwick Business School.

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Interview Aiia

Navigating the PSD2 challenges & developments with Rune Mai CEO, Aiia

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FinTech Magazine

Being a player in payments for a decade, what are some of the biggest changes you have witnessed in payments over the past 5 years?

As society is rapidly moving towards a cashless society, fintechs, banks, and financial authorities have to constantly adapt to facilitate a safe and seamless transition. With this rapid change comes a lot of pressure due to the changing regulations and customer expectations.

Read this interview with Rune Mai, CEO and CoFounder at Aiia (now acquired by Mastercard)to learn how Europe’s most experienced open banking platform navigates these challenges.

Going back all the way to 2010, one of the reasons for building Aiia in the first place was that when the housing bubble burst and people lost all the cash they had bound to their houses. When they had to send their valuable items back because they could no longer afford it, I noticed that something changed with money.

There was no technology to make money tangible in the digital space. That’s what we set out to build as a start when we launched our own PFM app, Spiir, more than ten years ago.

What has happened since then within the payment space is that payments have become increasingly intangible as we are on a very fast journey towards a cashless reality. This has been accelerated even further as people have opted out of cash payments due to hygiene reasons during the pandemic. Even in Germany, some of the most stubborn cash users, you can see that cashless transactions exploded over the past year.

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Interview Aiia

The card industry itself has been working on tokenization of cards where they want to build an API out of a card. We had the EU policymakers who also started focusing on how to liberate both data and payments from banks themselves and make it a more competitive field.

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The biggest change I noticed, is that we moved from a fairly physical world when we talk about payments, to now and almost 100% digital.

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Interestingly enough, while self-checkout, an increasingly popular feature, makes it

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seem like your payments are anonymous, your contactless payments are more trackable than ever because merchants now can do behavioral analysis on every decision you make leading up to purchasing an item. In reality, a payment is 100% uninteresting by itself, what is interesting is the context of the payment and what that context generates in terms of data or trust.

“In reality, a payment is 100% How can open banking become uninteresting mainstream?by itself, what is interesting is the context of the First, there isand the API which needs to be payment what that context

fully matured for it to be fully effective.

Then, businesses who wish to leverage these APIs need to be educated on offering a solution that is desirable by the consumer. The next step would be to understand at what point consumers will adopt open banking in their daily lives. I would say that we are in the midst of that phase right now. The adoption is rising and the curve of maturity is significantly increasing, especially in the Nordics, Germany, Holland, and the UK.

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“The consumer needs to be educated about the opportunities open banking presents to unlock a massive wave of adoption.”

Two things people didn’t realize about PSD2 is that it came with very strict regulations on online security and strict SCA requirements (Secure customer authentication) which is a level playing field for any payments solution. That explains why online card flows aren’t as smooth as they used to be because you used to be able to put a card on file and then just execute a payment instantly. However, the SCA act states that you should be authorizing a party to move money from your account.

How does Aiia manage high-quality integrations given the numerous API standards set by the PSD2 regulation?

First and foremost, the hardest part about banking is getting the APIs right.

The analogy I like to use is that if you don’t have the best pipes laid out and the water runs smoothly, it starts to leak and your water becomes rusty until people refuse to use it any longer.

So getting these “pipes” right from the get-go is the hardest part because we could have also chosen to just very quickly scale to the European level with the APIs once they were there in 2020 or so when everyone became fully ready.

What we did instead was we saw ourselves as a European company from day one, but we started in the Nordics because we needed to study and implement procedures for building quality into open banking in a market where we saw that the providers of the main interfaces never before had been building public interfaces to be consumed by secondary technical services. So how do you do that? We have all the mechanisms by the FSA side, but banks don’t necessarily have a positive association with that. They see it as a compliance burden. We, therefore, spent a long time figuring out how to work together with banks. Only when we agreed to disagree, we brought in FSAs (Financial Supervisory Authorities) to mediate and got their view on how things were.

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Interview Aiia

I think with that strategy and also taking the role of maturing those interfaces on behalf of our clients, we matured into today having a process where we can go to a market and then move it from pilot to beta, to production fairly fast with a high level of confidence.

We implement data and payments in a market of up to 90%. That’s still only in the pilot because the next thing is that we use our own network of testers to test these networks. We leverage and work closely alongside pilot customers that we engage with and provide enterprise service levels for free throughout the starting phase.

This enables us to collect enough testing material, ensuring our high-quality of API’s and ensuring that the pilot customers get the best possible experience entering their open banking journey. To some extent, we have competitors of course. They are active and also doing a lot of maturing in many of the markets.

But doing this the right way has been very hard to structure without losing focus on your clients. If we had just hurried out to the rest of Europe, we would have ended up having a client in Spain and one in France and one in Germany, and some in the Nordics. All of them would be complaining about poor “pipes” at the same time. We would be clocked up in discussions with everyone here and there and every local effords team and so forth. So now we have the scaling model in place and we’ve shown over and over

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again that we’re the true craftsmen in the rapidly evolving world of open banking.

One of Aiia’s latest partnerships is with Tellow to simplify the accounting of freelancers in the Netherlands. What makes the Netherlands a good market for this partnership?

The Netherlands is a very digitized society where you expect these kinds of services to be present. Going into the Netherlands for us has been very natural because we see that the market from business owners to the citizens, is understanding and educated about using open banking. Additionally, the Netherlands presents a fairly large market in terms of FinTech companies. It’s a fairly large market in terms of population size as well.

In terms of adoption and being able to gain clients and have them build solutions that someone wants to use, the Netherlands is a very attractive market to us.

We mainly wanted freelancers and those starting a new business to be able to use data to enhance their lives so they can get away from the administrative burden. This allows them to focus on value production.

FinTech Magazine

is the most experienced open banking platform in Europe, with more than a decade of experience in fintech and open banking. Today, Aiia has more than 2,900 connected banks across Europe, processes more than 10 million bank logins and more than a million account-to-account payments every month for large banks and e-commerce payment gateways.

The open banking platform has received backing from Danske Bank and DNB to build a leading pan-European open banking infrastructure to support financial innovation in the rapidly changing financial services industry. Aiia provides open banking services to a long list of financial institutions, including Lunar, Danske Bank, Santander, OP Financial Group, DNB, Resurs Bank, BEC, Bankdata, and Pleo, and won the award for Best Mobile Payment Solution at Finovate Awards in 2020 for its immense work on open banking payments with multiple clients.

Learn more at http://www.Aiia.eu

About Rune Mai:

In 2010 Rune started his journey as a fintech entrepreneur, launching the personal finance management tool, Spiir, which later on has become a massive success in the Nordics supporting nearly half a million millennials with an app that nudges financial awareness automatically. He has always had an eagerness to bring positive change to society through technology and empower people to bring their financial data into play safely and transparently. A mission that he managed to scale even further in 2017, when the major Nordic bank Danske Bank strategically invested in the company to make financial innovation flourish even further. After the investment, Rune Mai managed to pivot the company into the open banking platform Nordic API Gateway (Today known as Aiia).

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Feature Silverflow

Cloud-native Acquiring The key to a future proof solution

with Robert Kraal

Co-founder & CBDO Silverflow

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In the past, having a new customer in a new market meant that you had to redesign the product once again from scratch. Today, new customers are being served by more flexible, modern platforms that can be adapted to changing requirements. Adopting a cloud-native approach that can handle these more complex environments is going to be the key to future-proofing your business. Learn more about running a future-proof acquiring platform in this interview with Robert Kraal, founder at SilverFlow.

About Robert Kraal

​​Robert Kraal has been working at fintech startups for over 20 years. After completing his degree in Geophysics, he started his career at Bibit, the first global PSP (acquired by RBS/Worldpay in 2004). He has managed teams at some of the leading tech enterprises including Google and Adyen. At Adyen, Robert was COO and responsible for financial partnerships from the startup phase. Besides his operational and partnership management, he also built and managed the global acquiring and processing services at Adyen.

As Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Silverflow, Robert is responsible for maintaining relationships with the investors, card schemes, acquirers, PSPs, and regulators.

The Shortcomings of Classical Acquiring Solutions We noticed a large gap in the market where acquirers’ systems were essentially based on legacy technology with additional technology built on top of that at some point. As today’s needs for eCommerce surged and the pace of the market has significantly increased, acquirers would struggle to keep up with the market as running new projects using these systems can take up to two years. Not to mention that even the daily operational processes such as setting up a new merchant or doing reconciliation is in many cases quite complex.

To succeed today, a short time to market, the possibility for a variety of payment options, as well as leveraging data in innovation and decision making are important to every business.

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Feature Silverflow

Cloud-native Acquirers vs. Classical Acquirers First of all, many traditional acquiring solutions were developed when engineers had to be very conservative with hardware, processing power, ram memory, and even bandwidth. As a result, they had to make trade-offs to get the most out of the available hardware. Most of these hardware limitations no longer exist today. This has allowed engineers to focus on optimizing the storage and use of data. Unlike cloud-native solutions, traditional processors that use data centers impose

significant upfront costs when entering new markets.

These costs consist of setting up data centers, managing them, and finding the right professionals. That being said, cloud-native companies still face other challenges in different markets, and there is certainly a long roadmap to follow before fully operating in a new market.Silverflow chose a cloud solution that offers a set of standard tools that can improve scalability, a critical component in payments.

How Silverflow’s Platform Works

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Maintaining an Agile, Future Proof Solution For many companies operating in a fast-paced environment, the challenge is to make sure that they do not run into the same problems eventually as those bigger ones. But thanks to the modularized architecture we’re using with microservices, integrating or building new functionalities is no longer a time and cost-draining task. Of course, there are few techniques that have changed today compared to when those old systems were still at their infancy stage.

Visa, MasterCard, and other cards create new functionality on a regular basis. And of course, it can only be active in the market if the acquirers and issuers support it, and quite often, from a commercial perspective, acquirers and issuers would like to support this, but they look at their processors and say, listen, I want to have this functionality that’s new. Because their systems are quite complex, it’s quite risky for them to make changes. Particularly if you get to the core of those systems, so those changes are high risk and therefore more expensive and therefore take more time.

How Silverflow Makes Acquiring Accessible to Clients We make acquiring more accessible in many ways. On the one hand, If you look at the products, Silverflow’s products differ from other options on the market. We grant easy access to data for chargeback, reconciliation, or conversion optimization and more.

Additionally, if you look at the product functionality, we are able to provide the latest functionality much quicker, because we are at par with the actual functionality from Visa, MasterCard, and we don’t run the years behind.

On the other hand and the particular thing of our clients being payment service providers, Neo banks, and acquirers, there are also these operational and cost aspects and there are your direct costs or indirect costs. But simply because we make the integration to our platform, the daily operations of things are significantly more efficient.

In a nutshell, clients can run a financially efficient operation. What all of this means to the retailer who is the end customer, is that you would be able to pass on some of those financial benefits or give them a better deal and still make your own good profits.

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Feature Silverflow

The Next Step as the First Cloud-native Processor The next steps will be, how can we actually show that we are a globally operating company and it would be ideal if we can work with partners not just in Europe and the US that we have today but also in other tier one markets. We’re particularly interested in tier two and tier three markets because those are also the markets where the traditional processors leave behind and where a lot of interesting stuff happens, but we aim to be visible in all those markets.

The Roadmap to Becoming an Acquirer To become an acquirer, there’s an extensive process to be followed. First of all, from a financial regulator point of view, 20 PaymentGenes #3 2021

companies who want to offer acquiring to their service portfolio need to be regulated. They need to have a license or permits to be active in this particular part of payments. That means that they have to have a certain way of looking at KYC (know your customer) customer onboarding, but also risk management, et cetera. That should by itself be the biggest challenge.

The second element is, of course, to talk to Visa and MasterCard. They will require that companies are allowed to step into that business from a compliance perspective. They have sets of digital items that you may not have come across If you were a payment service provider working with external acquirers, and you should not take them lightly because they are crucial.

The last step is setting up discussions with Visa and MasterCard to demonstrate your business plan. They are interested in knowing how the company’s portfolio is composed and whether it is on the high-risk side or a low-risk side.

They look at the portfolio in different categories including, the technical, security, and stability categories. That’s what you have to figure out yourself.

Silverflow can help in this process to a degree, but we’re not building compliance teams at companies that want to become an acquirer.

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Hygiene Factors and Differentiators in Acquiring It would make sense as an acquirer to have a clear strategy and know exactly where the sweet spot of your customers is. That can be a small business, a medium-sized enterprise, or an international eCommerce company. This is because people who are running bars or restaurants have different needs from the acquiring perspective than people who sell online subscriptions for TV or digital video content. Acquirers might decide to serve all types of merchants, which is great, but then they have to make sure that they can support them with all the needs that they have, and those needs they’re different in the sense of how they look themselves.

What I see lacking quite often, not so much in the Netherlands, but in many other countries, for instance, the simple aspect of how you work with multi-currency across the globe as an acquirer.

Many acquirers are able to work with euros and, maybe if you’re lucky with pounds or US dollars, but that’s usually where it ends. That means that there is conversion somewhere in this pipeline and acquirers completely miss out on all the revenue they could and should be made on the conversion.

Silverflow is the first and only cloud-based acquirer processing platform and provides a stateof-the-art upgrade for global acquirers and payment providers, shielding them from the current antiquated legacy technology still in use today.

With Silverflow, you can now directly access card networks, instantly add new functionality, have real-time insight into transaction fees, and get smart data directly from the networks – all to better serve the end merchants.

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Feature Ximedes

Payment services powered by

In this age, merchants must accept debit and credit cards, Apple Pay, Google pay and other digital payments to survive, especially after the huge rise of such payments during the COVID pandemic. Banks and other financial institutions must offer these Payment Services to their customers in a modern way, up to par with the offering of large Fintechs.

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So, providing Payment Services became very important for financial institutions. It offers valuable insights in the business of your merchants. Which in return helps to offer new products and services to these merchants: a loan, or an extension of credit facilities for example. And offering the merchants great insights in their own business, by providing them with dashboards and overviews you can help them prosper, as they can see which of their marketing campaigns work. You can even let them compare their own stores to similar ones, to see how they are doing relatively.

“Banks and other financial institutions must offer these Payment Services to their customers in a modern way.”

Acquiring a PSP to obtain Payment Services Many banks decided to incorporate Payment Services by buying a PSP. Swedbank acquired Payex, ING acquired PayVision and recently Deutsche Bank and Fiserv founded a Joint Venture to offer Merchant Services in the German market. However, these acquisitions require investments of hundreds of millions euro’s, in a market where it becomes clear that the acquisitions of cheaper non-performing PSP’s doesn’t make sense, while the acquisition of successful PSPs becomes unattainable, as their valuations soar well beyond € 1B.

Technically, financially and compliance-wise the new PSP must be integrated in the acquiring financial institution, which often gives rise to many headaches, and more money spent.

Ximedes’ alternative There is an alternative, even for banks that don’t want to settle for bland off-the-shelf solutions. Ximedes developed MerchantServices components for ING, Swedbank, Fiserv and EMS. These components fit seamlessly in the existing infrastructure that is already in place, making the time-to-market short. Rabobank and Loomis Pay went a step further.

Ximedes developed almost the complete payment services platforms for these parties, allowing them to launch the new service in about 6 months. Yes, six months, probably shorter than the time needed to shortlist suitable PSPs to acquire. In that short span of time, Ximedes develops the components, but also work with the organisation and auditors to become PCI-compliant and have a palette of terminals licensed by Mastercard and Visa, so they can actually start processing payments for their new merchants. “Ximedes developed almost the complete payment services platforms to launch a new service in about 6 months.”

And the acquisition of a PSP is only the beginning.

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Feature Ximedes

And for both Rabobank and Loomis Pay, Ximedes added the possibility to run cash payments over Ximedes’ platform. So, merchants just need one contract and receive one consolidated payout for cash, terminal and online payments. Most financial institutions perceive it as a downside that with this self-built solution, marvelous as it may be, you have to attract the new merchants one by one, whereas in the acquisition scheme the clients come for “free”. However, spending even 10% of the money you’d spend on an acquisition brings you many new merchants, but it does require setting up the new merchant services department in an autonomous way, with a separate laser-focused marketing and sales department.

Important building blocks AML-compliant onboarding and sales flows While building PSP’s, Ximedes almost automatically specialized in B2B onboarding. It is possible to onboard new Merchants within minutes with all AML, KYC, Credit Rating checks being performed during the process. And the best part of this: This onboarding flow is fully yours!

Often this onboarding flow doubles as a whole new sales channel, offering the appropriate terminals and payment methods to the new merchant as they are boarding.

Gateways The Gateway is the software that connects the online payment APIs and the payment terminals to the acquirer.

This is the software that gives you control ove the merchant’s payment requests, guiding them to the right acquirer, connecting them to loyalty schemes, controlling if they are processed right away, or later, which can have tremendous cost-advantages. Gateways have to be compliant with PCI-regulations and play a large role in getting the card schemes to certify your payment platform.

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Merchant Dashboard From a merchants’ perspective, this is by far the most visible part of the payment platform.This is the place where they go when they decide to become a customer. This is the place where they start the boarding flow, and this is the place that provides them real-time information about the transactions that were processed and all their details, the settlements they may expect the invoices that were sent to them, etc. The Merchant Dashboard should be the focus of our UX-teams, but it should also be able to handle billions of transactions, like the Merchant Dashboard Ximedes created for one of the largest Dutch banks and that has been running without a hitch for the last 3 years.

Reconciliation and Settlement The most invisible set of components are formed by the Reconciliation and Settlement features. Keeping track of every transaction, making sure the right fees are applied, and settling with the customer, these components control and validate every fraction of a cent that flows through your organization. So although less visible, arguably these are the most important components to get right, having built these types of components for over a decade, Ximedes nailed them all.

Reporting As merchants want to keep up-to-date with their transactions, settlements and invoices, the organization offering Merchant Services wants an aggregated overview of all transactions. This helps them to make an analysis of the market, and compare similar merchants, but also allows them to run a service desk that can actually help merchants if they call. Reporting can be provided by a technology Ximedes provides, but data can also be streamed to existing data warehouses, or data lakes.

Many banks and other financial institutions start offering Payment Services to their clients. Today’s question is: how to expand and tailor these services to enter new segments. And that’s where Ximedes comes into play. Ximedes’ team converts business plans into state of the art software. Maybe it isn’t that hard after all, and can we all witness your bank launch modern, high-quality Payment Services at an affordable price in a short time frame.

For more information and examples, visit ximedes.com or send an email to sales@ximedes.com PaymentGenes #3 2021 25

Feature Giesecke+Devrient

FINTECHS & G+D A partnership for success!

Feature by

The banking landscape is shifting and has done so for quite some time. We see how markets are adopting not only new technologies but also the providers behind: You do your banking with your retailer; you do your shopping in an OEM app; you pay with your “search engine”…aka Google Pay. All these new ways to manage payments and transactions are driven by customer behavior. Behavior that kicked off a spark that evolved into an idea of making it easier and better to perform financial services. But how to go from an idea and scale? The answer is: with the right partner!

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At G+D we see that this industry shift offers potential for identifying new differentiators in order to create value to your customers. Still, these opportunities also come with demands, from infrastructural, regulatory and technical perspectives, as well as from customers and their expectations.

For Fintechs this can be challenging, as innovations within banking and payments also are connected with changing the value chain. In order to succeed, it is important to understand the underlying payments landscape – not only the techy nitty gritty, security and legal aspects, but also for identifying future revenue streams and creating customer stickiness.

Meet G+D’s Fintech expert!

For instance, digital banking customers want stronger security online, with users expecting systems that safeguard their credentials; offering tailored solutions across all touchpoints to ensure the customer journey is not only convenient but secure, is therefore essential.

Alexa, how secure are my digital financial services?

And the statistics speak for themselves: 71% of digital banking customers request more stringent verification methods, with 58% wanting greater fraud protection measures.

So far, financial institutions have been the main target for serious security attacks, with confirmed data loss of 24%, compared to healthcare organizations and the retail / accommodation sector both at 15%, and the public sector at 12%. Leaving Fintechs to ask: how secure is your payment app?

Want to know more about security in the payment landscape? Check out this infographic!

Indeed, mastering security is at the heart of all future business, with 66% of digital banking customers concerned about malicious software, 68% about identity theft, and 63% about banking fraud.

Several Fintechs across the world are making big progress when it comes to security. Also dipping into various parts of the open banking ecosystem.

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Feature Giesecke+Devrient

The next major milestone will require safe and secure access to product information from this ecosystem, which will enable consumers to easily compare financial services - and change providers with ease. This will create a far more competitive landscape and create a heightened need for innovation in order to provide the best value and service to customers. The best offer will win!

Securing everyday digital payments – how it is done!

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And due to these advancements in banking technology globally, what we are seeing now is a new age where the customer is king. At a minimum, customers are now expecting to: • have access to their own money anytime, anywhere • receive competitive interest rates and minimal fees • do banking at their fingertips – no branch visits or call centres • access real-time payments • control and have transparency of their transactions The key to unlocking future success is managing and securing customer credentials throughout the whole customer journey, to authentication with channel-agnostic verification, and authorizing transactions in a safe and convenient way.

FinTech Magazine

“There is a strong need to combine convenience and security for remote authentication,” says Rüdiger Vogt, Head of Payment 4.0, G+D. With digital solutions and the convenience afforded to customers by mobile and digital payments have become more common, today’s customers have become more discerning and demanding.

G+D is delivering a striking customer experience supporting Fintech innovation!

As a leading global provider of physical and digital authentication and payment solutions, we are well placed to support any Fintech business, whether it’s early stage inception, design and launch, or scaling, growth and customer retention. We have delivered projects and solutions for over 700 financial institutions worldwide, and this experience has led us to develop our approach to working with Fintech providers as partners – an approach that we feel will enable our partners to deliver results, fast.

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Feature Giesecke+Devrient

How we do it?

We offer a complete range of solutions and services to support our Fintech partners in building innovative solutions for their customers.

Our award-winning digital payment solutions are enabling Fintechs with IoT payments, wallets and wearable technology – and we are best-in-class according to Juniper research!

Our premium personalized payment cards offer a range of options to customize and configure for true differentiation – like what we do for Fintechs when it comes to metal!

We also offer optimizing solutions for PIN delivery and printed material – as we do for many Fintechs with our issuance solutions!

When looking at how finance can go green, we have a whole suite of eco-friendly products and services to attract, engage and delight your eco-conscious customer, and make a positive climate impact – and we have the partnerships that make that extra difference!

Last but not least, in the Regtech space we support Fintechs with strong customer authentication and compliant onboarding to services – and we do it well!

With this said, the industry shift itself isn’t a value add. So just offering innovative services is not enough, they need to be seamless, secure and easy to use. And G+D is your partner to make it happen, and for your business to reap the benefits. Are you ready to scale up and offer next generation banking and payment solutions? Then get in touch!

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FinTech Magazine

About G+D

G+D has been at the forefront of advances in payment for over 160 years.

From printing the first banknotes for the central bank of Germany to inventing the Euro-cheque card, the company has developed industry-leading technology that is trusted by over 700 financial institutions around the world. By partnering with experts that are embedded in the fast-moving technology space, Fintechs can concentrate on their core mission, safe in the knowledge that they won’t have to play catch up with technology behind it.

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Author: Jennie Johansson Carnhamre PaymentGenes #3 2021 31

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