At Money2020 in Las Vegas, Fintech Finance talked to Joe Rodriguez, our Business Development Manager, about our US expansion progress and efforts to streamline the payments user journey.
He also discusses Aevi’s views on APIs, and our commitment to advancing technology through a unified integration for multiple solutions.
Transcript Highlights
Fintech Finance: Hello and welcome to Fintech Finance news is coverage of Money2020 Las Vegas. We’re here today joined by Joe Rodriguez from Aevi. Joe, how are you doing?
Joe: I’m doing great. It’s been a pretty jampacked show. Twenty plus meetings through the last couple of days. It’s been a whirlwind.
Fintech Finance: That’s absolutely incredible. Now, Joe, we’re here in the United States and I’m really fascinated to get your goals for Aevi here in North America.
Joe: Aevi has done a pretty good, pretty good job of distribution and growing in Europe. We were born out of Europe. The growth in us, I think it’s it’s a ripe time for what we’re trying to do. We’re working with a lot of solution providers, folks that could be vendors of large ISVs or large merchants. So we don’t necessarily go to market with them directly per se. We’re really kind of like the Intel inside.
Fintech Finance: That’s absolutely incredible. There’s so much data behind a payment, and especially when we’re going to be looking at in-person payments in this conversation, I’m really fascinated to illuminate some of our audiences to some of the quirks or idiosyncrasies. Could you provide our viewers just a general overlay of what in-person payments are like here in the United States?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So for the consumer, it’s it’s a pretty seamless checkout experience. Typically it’s, you know, you dip your card or you use an Apple Pay or Google Pay just to kind of check out relatively quickly. Those integrations have have done wonders, I think, for being able to check out a lot quicker in the past. But in the back end, there’s so much that that doesn’t happen necessarily in the past. The data that you had mentioned, typically that doesn’t get rerouted, so everything is highly secure. It’s encrypted or tokenized. And so it gets sent from from the unit up to the payment processor. And there isn’t a whole lot of data that that gets consumed that way. The point of sale doesn’t really even have it. They just know that that the transact has been processed. That’s where Aevi sets in, is being able to decrypt that information and send it up through to the payment processor or to the ISV, or to the point of sale, and being able to to really give them a 360 degree view of what’s going on, because many times it’s very disparate from the online transaction versus an in-store transaction.
Fintech Finance: That’s incredible. Now, when you think of America, you think of innovation, but you also think of a brilliant customer experience. And also we’ve we’re in a market here where there are it’s such a high demand for card. The card penetration here is so key. So what are the opportunities for Aevi in this market?
Joe: I think the opportunities are very vast. There’s been a lot of just a ton of innovation that’s happened over the last few years. And I think Aevi has been at the forefront of that. You know, we started selling payment terminals, payment devices, the actual hardware. And taking a step back early on and really installing some software layers to help folks really transform their business, I think is just going to create tremendous opportunity. There are a lot of folks that have been tied to specific vendors, and now they’re trying to that have owned the ecosystem. Now these folks are trying to own their own ecosystem, a lot getting a lot closer to the experience and making sure that they can tie the same sort of customer experience, whether it be online or in-store or unattended payments. And so we’re allowing or we will be allowing folks to take take advantage of that.
Fintech Finance: I think that’s so brilliant. It’s such a brilliant place to be in the market because people do love shopping in person. People love shopping online. And when we can get to this point where we can combine them through the invisible nature of payments, it’s going to be it’s going to make the customers lives so much easier. How are Aevi’s solutions going to make the merchants end user, the payments end users lives better? What’s the customer at the end end journey going to look like in America with Aevi?
Joe: Well, hopefully it’ll be as seamless as possible to the end user. My wife has shopped at a craft store online and she doesn’t like it. She goes to to try to return it to go in store and it just doesn’t work. So they have to go through a different sort of channel. And in her mind, they’re operated as two separate merchants. Whereas we want to bring that together and make it so it’s much easier on her. Just to go up to the store and return it and be done with the journey.
Fintech Finance: It’s fascinating to think how e-commerce just went. So fast that it almost dislocated itself. Like you said, two different brands people think of the online store fronts is a different company to the in-store one, and I think Aevi is going to be so pivotal at changing that. Now, with that in mind, obviously Aevi has added software to a hardware kind of kickstart. So how important is partnerships in this industry and Aevi sat in this ecosystem? It’s really exciting to think of. But how important are partnerships to Aevi?
Joe: Partnerships are crucial as to how we’re going to go to market. You know, we will we white label our solutions. So many folks that are looking to, like I said earlier, transform the way that the experience works. They can actually really start to get their brand out there, own the experience. And you know, from our perspective, we don’t really care to have our brand out there as much. We just want to make sure that it’s as easy for them as possible. And and just make things a lot easier for the for them on the reconciliation side as well as the end user when they go to, to operate back and forth between the channels.
Fintech Finance: Tremendous. Now we wouldn’t be Fintech Finance news without talking about the tech. And I’m intrigued. Could you tell us a bit more about how APIs are going to be important for you as well?
Joe: APIs are the way of the future, but they’ve been around for a while, obviously. They help with being able to to solve and simplify the solution stack. So what we do is we offer one set of APIs so that typically in the past, customers or partners that would have wanted to solve for all of these would have had multiple multiple partners, multiple vendors, multiple sets of APIs that they would be subscribing to. So from our perspective, we’re just trying to solve for that solution stack with with one integration.
Fintech Finance: That’s absolutely incredible. I think that’s going to be the literally the most pivotal point of it. And now lastly, we’re here at Money2020. What’s been so exciting for you?
Joe: Just seeing the buzz. I’ve been to to many other payments conferences in the past. And you know, there are smaller regional shows and things like that. And they can be very heavily populated, but there isn’t as much of a buzz. You don’t really hear people talking. And through here, it’s like everywhere you go throughout throughout the hotel there are folks talking, buzzing, happening.
Fintech Finance: Thank you so much for your time. I hope you have a lovely day.
Joe: I appreciate it. Thank you.
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Listen to the full interview here.
