During the PayTech show 2023, the Fintech Finance team interviewed Martin Herlinghaus, the Director of Corporate Development at Aevi.
They discussed how the integration of in-store PayTech is saving the high street and boosting local businesses, and how ISVs can navigate their payment partner relationships to ensure they’re getting the most out of their own paycheck solutions.
For ISVs, partnering with the right payment provider is crucial to success.
Transcript
Martin: Aevi is really digitizing the last mile of payments. And what this really means is that we are delivering digital flexibility to the world of in person commerce or everything around terminals. And this really brings this new flexibility into this very traditional environment. And that’s exciting.
Fintech Finance: It’s a vertical of finance that maybe 15, 20 years ago would have been quite a slow moving part. But now it’s on the forefront of innovation. And to set the scene, what are the drivers of innovation in payments in 2023?
Martin: You can really see now how in person commerce is catching up. When people look at the world of commerce, everybody has a look at e-commerce and how exciting it is. But then if you then really look at the more traditional, maybe boring side of the business, in-person commerce, it’s still 80% of all retail transactions go there. This is really where there’s so much to innovate and to do, to come to your question. What we are seeing, and especially from our point of view, is that payments and also the checkout process really becomes far more personal, customer centric, and overall embedded into the overall lifestyle journey of the customer.
What this really means is two things. First of all, the traditional point of sale really becomes much more mobile and much more interactive. So really a mobile point of interaction. And on the other hand, the role of payments is getting redefined from just transaction cost and treating it as justice and necessary evil to really see the value in payment and payments data to understand merchants and also understand the customer better. And this is really exciting because this now brings in new players into this environment, which is, for example, the whole wallet experience that they provide us – building wallets in order to engage better with our customers. On the other side you have these ISVs, these business providers that build solutions for an aggregate business, for all these small businesses. And they redefine payments to understand their customers better and sell them more and do more. This is very exciting for us.
Digitizing last mile of payments is all about really bringing digital flexibility to the last mile of payments. And that sounds easy, but if you really have a look at the tradition of in store payments, the whole payments flow has been designed, or the checkout flow has been designed in the last millennium. It’s dated 1950 is when the first credit cards were evolved. So now you have, a world where the channels are blurring where you don’t have e-commerce and installed payments any longer. It’s all about holistic commerce. And now, this requires a different level of flexibility that you as a merchant, be it online or be it in store merchants, have to present to your customers. And while this is all easy on the ecomm side, where you have a lot of APIs where you have a plethora of payment methods, it’s extremely hard on the in-person payment side because the process is so old and the process has been designed in an analogue way.
Nowadays, it’s about much more interactive – identifying the customer across channels. And this is really where you have a problem with in-person commerce because really it’s not designed in order to share data and to reveal more of the customer. And this is where we come in as we want to really make in-person payments more open and more programmable.
