PCM vol. 3 Issue 8

Vol 3. Issue 8 | August 2017
YOUR GATEWAY TO THE WORLD OF PAYMENTS
PAYMENTS IN MOTION
How data is fuelling the future of payments

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Contents
STORIES
4
Artificial intelligence is our past, present and future
7
10
Establishing a culture of listening through payments
technology
Shifting perspectives through Data &
Analytics
13
16
19
23
The power of Data Science in the Payments
Industry
Start-up Spotlight: NORTHSTAR
The importance of data in the evolving
payments ecosystem
Transforming the POS experience
Amir Abdin
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
amir@teampcn.com
https://nl.linkedin.com/in/amir-abdin-21365683
26
Aligning the physical and digital domains
28
30
31
Setting new standards in the world of
payments
Hot Jobs
Industry Events Calendar
Duc Dang
Production Editor & Head of Creative
duc@teampcn.com
https://nl.linkedin.com/in/ducdanghh
THANKS TO OUR PARTNERS
PCM is designed by Duc Dang, Payments & Cards Network. Art and
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PCM is property of Payments & Cards Network, Herengracht 576,
2nd Fl., 1017 CJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. All material contained
within PCM is the property of Payments & Cards Network. All other
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companies. ©2017 Payments & Cards Network. All rights reserved.
Reproduction of any kind is strictly prohibited without express prior
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ADVERTISING INFORMATION
For details, please contact amir@teampcn.com
3

Thought Leaders Corner
Artificial intelligence is our past,
present and future
by Roberto Valerio
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the current buzzword of
business. Computer software is helping us choose our
films and music, dealing with our customer service
enquiries, and improving our healthcare 1 . It is also
helping fraud managers across the world to spot and stop
fraudsters, keeping us safe online.
Concepts of artificial intelligence have existed for hundreds
of years 2 . More recently, mathematics and engineering have
combined to produce algorithmically-driven probability-based
systems that can perform pre-defined tasks. The advent of
today’s digital technologies has opened infinite possibilities
and fostered tremendous progress in the theories and
capabilities behind these algorithms.
Essentially what we mean when we refer to artificial intelligence
is the ability of a machine to solve tasks. The ultimate goal is
often seen as mimicking human intellect as closely as possible,
but the reality is that we are seeking automated solutions that
make our lives easier.
In modern fraud fighting, machine learning is the essential
reasoning system that enables fraud managers to track and
respond to the rising threats faced around the world. More
of us now transact online, which means greater potential
rewards for fraudsters. But all of us leave a trace online, in
everything we do, generating huge amounts of data. Using
“stream processing”, we can constantly ingest huge streams
of data, which enables faster reactions to emerging threats –
a significant enhancement on rule-based fraud systems that
process data in batches.
AI learns from this data, meaning that businesses can address
their specific fraud problem rather than requiring expensive
custom-built solutions that drain resources. More data also
means we are beginning to understand how fraud itself works,
which means we can get ahead of it.
Let’s look at a specific fraud issue as an example. From June
2015 to June 2016, we saw an increase of up to 300% in account
takeover attempts on our ecommerce customers. The relative
ease with which fraudsters can access less secure accounts
is causing a major headache for retailers. Fraudsters can buy
login details from the black market, or steal them through
malware or phishing attacks, or sometimes simply run through
the most common passwords to crack a customer’s online
shopping account.
The challenge in tackling account takeovers is that they’re
typically hard to detect. Fraudsters operate from within
genuine and trustworthy user accounts, often with an
impeccable purchasing history, but will make small changes
to the account so they can obtain goods to sell for a profit.
Importantly when it comes to AI, fraudsters will also change
their tactics frequently, whether it’s going for lesser-known
brands, smaller value items, or masking attempts via proxy
services or numerous devices.
In Europe, data privacy regulations are stricter than elsewhere,
and will become more so after GDPR is implemented in 2018,
but by anonymising the data, we can still identify fraudsters
based on these ever-growing data pools. Artificial intelligence
provides us with levels of information above and beyond
individual fraud. The speed and scale at which AI can analyse
and make connections between different data points enables
us to identify orchestrated attempts of fraud; in other words,
we can stop multiple attacks in parallel.
1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2017/05/16/see-how-artificial-intelligence-can-improve-medical-diagnosis-and-healthcare/#1bb649e86223
4
2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/12/30/a-very-short-history-of-artificial-intelligence-ai/#74ab649a6fba

Roberto Valerio
CEO & Founder of Risk Ident
Roberto Valerio is the founder and CEO of Risk Ident, a software
development company specialising in fraud prevention and credit risk
evaluation based on machine learning. He plays an active part within
the fraud prevention community and is a member of the European
Advisory Board at the Merchant Risk Council. He has also founded and
worked within different management roles for software start-ups.
Many fraud attacks take place within a given timeframe
and AI provides fraud managers with the capabilities to
find similarities and connections with relative ease. Fraud
departments can then find not just individual fraud, but use one
fraud case as an anchor to find much more fraud information,
protecting the business and customers from other risks.
This interaction between man and machine is essential in
building the best defence against fraud. Without support from
each other, connections and cases can get missed or wrongly
interpreted. Together, human intelligence (HI) and artificial
intelligence (AI) learn more about their fraud problem.
Unlike old anti-fraud systems, AI software adapts to changing
data and fraud managers can label cases as they discover them.
So, if the software incorrectly identifies something as fraud
based on multiple risk factors, the human expert can say no,
and the system learns. This means if new fraud trends began
in the last week, companies can spot them quickly and act on
them. Giving the system feedback enables it to absorb changes
in patterns and provides stronger fraud defences.
Tuning fraud on a consistent basis is particularly important, as
different companies have a different risk appetite depending
on the nature of their business. Economics drives every aspect
of the commercial world and some businesses are more willing
to accept risk if it means more custom. AI can help compute
false positive rates if it makes economic sense. The purpose
of anti-fraud engineering is not simply “to stop fraud”, it’s to
limit damage to the company.
Alan Turing’s “imitation game”, better known as the “Turing
Test” is world famous for identifying the level at which a
machine can be identified as intelligent. Turing proposed
that in order for a machine to truly think, it must be able to
answer questions in a way that is indistinguishable from that
of a human.
Fraud prevention should work in similar fashion: the HI and
AI elements should be blended seamlessly so that it is almost
indistinguishable between the two; the priority is in reducing
the risk for businesses.
What could once only be imagined is becoming reality. The
Turing Test has been passed (albeit subject to interpretation),
and each day, huge volumes of data are processed by AI
algorithms, creating greater accuracy as software becomes
stronger. The journey is ongoing, but with constant
advancements in the capabilities of AI the future is looking
bright. The same cannot be said for fraudsters.
Risk Ident
Do you want to meet Risk Ident?
Feel free to check their presence
on upcoming events in 2017 here
and arrange a meeting.
Risk Ident is a software company that offers world leading anti-fraud
solutions to companies within the ecommerce, telecommunication
and financial sectors - empowering fraud managers with intelligence
and self-learning machine technology to provide stronger fraud
prevention. The company is home to a team of skilled data scientists
and software engineers with long-term experience in data analytics
and machine learning. Risk Idents products are specifically tailored
to comply with European data privacy regulations.
www.riskident.com
3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27762088
5

MAXIMIZE
YOUR DATA
VALUE
THE LEADING SOURCE FOR DATA SCIENTISTS IN PAYMENTS
CONTACT US NOW
Having data dilemmas? Please contact: simon@digitalsource.io
Digital Source | Herengracht 576 | 1017 CJ | Amsterdam | The Netherlands | +31 (0) 202 373 639

Thought Leaders Corner
Establishing a culture of
listening through payments
technology
by Georgina Nelson
Amidst the noise of ‘big data’, how are merchants
to distinguish the crucial information they need
in order to understand and improve the customer
experience? Can the customer feedback gap that
seems to be growing ever wider, with merchants hearing from
a tiny fraction of their customers, be addressed through point
of sale technology?
So much is changing in the retail and payment industries.
While self-checkout capabilities have been available in the
grocery sector for years, we’re now starting to see clothing
retailers like Zara take advantage in a bid to reduce lines and
wait times. And without question, mobile has created a fantastic
opportunity to engage consumers throughout the shopping
experience regardless of where they are located. While the
focus is on the disruption for both merchants and consumers,
the payments industry is equally challenged in keeping pace
and driving change – and this brings opportunities.
So, it may seem that the future of shopping is low touch and
mobile, with traditional touch points becoming less relevant.
We hear about security benefits, no checkout wait times, less
friction, more sales. This all sounds very shiny and cool, but
perhaps we need to take a step back and think about how else
this might affect the customer experience. Less friction sounds
great, but when that ‘friction’ includes a conversation between
the customer and sales staff or servers, how can merchants
replace that vital opportunity for customer engagement?
It’s a critical time for merchants to understand what drives
their customers. It’s hard to go a day without learning about
a new company with a disruption trying to woo them away.
Aside from competition, an unhappy customer is one of any
merchant’s biggest threats. Our own data indicates that, on
average, two out of every ten customers have a negative in
store experience; 96 percent of those shoppers will never
complain and 91 percent will never return. If companies had
the knowledge and insight about what kept customers happy,
buying, and coming back, wouldn’t they act on it?
Imagine if a merchant could gain instant feedback through
a customer interaction that is so simple, 88% of customers
will respond? Feedback that brings with it knowledge of the
customer journey, along with actionable insights? This is
where TruRating comes in.
By capturing customer feedback in store at the point of
payment, merchants can increase their bottom line by as
much as 18 percent. Consider Crisp, a healthy, quick-serve
restaurant. While undergoing a brand and menu refresh,
Crisp also raised their prices. While naturally cautious on
the impact of the change, they wanted to measure ROI by
monitoring customer perceptions at the POS, before and after
the changes, and observed customer satisfaction remained
constant – in fact, customers rated prices as slightly cheaper
after the brand refresh, even though their average total value
of orders increased by $1. Meanwhile experience and product
scores also trended upwards: a fantastic outcome for Crisp.
7

Thought Leaders Corner
Georgina Nelson
Founder & CEO of TruRating
Georgina began her career as a leveraged finance lawyer at Clifford
Chance. Georgina then joined Europe’s largest consumers’ association,
Which? where she was responsible for advising the EU and the UK
government on their technology strategy, as well as advising internal
teams on their online propositions. It was in this role where she
identified a market need for mass, representative, reliable consumer
ratings. She saw how this need could not only serve to improve the
world of business but also be valuable to consumers alike. With this
vision, she set about realizing the huge potential of TruRating by
bringing together a wonderful team, exciting customers and partners
in the payments industry with the ultimate objective to bring the truth
back to ratings.
One better value, global sports retailer also used feedback at
the POS to grow customer transactions. The company used a
custom question to find out if customers were being offered
a variety of options by staff, every time. When the procedure
was followed, customers spent a whopping 46 percent more
per transaction. Clearly, an opportunity to drive same store
sales growth.
This feedback loop can and should also transcend the current
notion of the POS to encompass mobile and other checkout
environments. For example, if you order your morning coffee
via a large chain’s mobile app, as I sometimes do, you can
probably swing in, pick it up and pop out without missing a
beat. However, that’s not to say that my experience should go
unnoticed or unchecked by the company. There’s a valuable
opportunity for them to integrate feedback into the transaction
by pushing a question to me.
When it comes to the high street, this is one area where small
independent stores and restaurants can actually outdo their
larger counterparts, and is a big part of why some people
prefer to “shop local” and go back to browsing traditional
bookstores and vinyl record stores. There are lessons here
that the bigger chains can build on - and fortunately there is
now technology that makes it easy to capture that feedback
and gain actionable insights from customers, even as the same
technology provides a low touch purchasing experience.
This was part of my motivation for building TruRating in the
first place. I believe that for a business, there is nothing so
vital as listening to the people that pay you. Now, merchants
looking at reinventing their POS have an opportunity to think
bigger about how they use it. The payment experience no
longer has to be purely about money changing hands – the
technology now exists to position a payments system as the
hub of communication for businesses and customers.
TruRating
TruRating is the first mass point-of-payment consumer feedback
system, providing accurate ratings from 88% of validated
customers. By asking one anonymous question via the payment
terminal, TruRating enables every customer to instantly feed back
on an aspect of their experience. Businesses benefit from timely
insight that links sentiment to basket data.
8

- NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER -
When successful anti-fraud risk manager, Edoardo Fiorentini is approached
and asked to help find a way to carry out a fraud successfully, it is the
beginning of a journey into the secretive world of e-commerce fraud with
some astonishing outcomes.

Thought Leaders Corner
Shifting perspectives through Data &
Analytics
by Ana Assis Jesus
Data Science is an umbrella term for technologies and
techniques that in some cases have already been
around for decades, but which through maturing
usability, increased computational resources,
larger amount of data and more sophisticated algorithms are
becoming easier and easier to use. A data scientist can turn
these resources and the data available at a company into a
set of tools for the business to make informed, science-based
decisions which will in the end contribute to improving the
overall performance of the company.
Data Science in the FinTech world
The data insight on payment authorization and card usage
patterns lead us to better conversions; at the same time
that pattern recognition and predictive analysis have been
revolutionizing how Fraud Prevention works, making acting
on new trends as fast and efficient as they change, instead of
chasing behind.
Moreover, decisions are being made faster and smarter. It is
not just about automation but also about optimization; using
the insights extracted from data to challenge “gut-feeling”
decisions and also discovering new possibilities that maybe
wouldn’t be explored without.
The rich diversity of data usage
Data Science is not only about collecting big amounts of
data and “digging” but most important about pre-processing
and cleaning. The cleaning stage is a very important one,
even more since in the Payment market, not all merchants
neither all Payment platforms use the same formats and data
definitions, so it is very important to clean and transform
these data into uniform batches for the desired analysis,
making sure we draw the right conclusions from our data.
Information can be gathered anywhere, there are processes
which generate data that can be collected and processed,
from the purely operational such as system log files, to
payment and ad clickthrough data. In principle each data
source provides an opportunity to improve decision making;
whether it is used depends on the potential impact and the
ease with which useful information can be distilled from it.
And this can also bring another challenge on how to integrate
the data collected in various parts of the organization.
Data driven organizations learn from their data and use it
to optimize their processes, improving services at a higher
speed keeping ahead of competitors. For Travix this means
scalability and personalization; for instance, on the Fraud
Prevention side we focus not only on stopping the risky/
10

Thought Leaders Corner
Ana Assis Jesus
Senior Data Scientist at Travix
Ana Assis Jesus is the Senior Data Scientist at Travix and she has a broad
background in statistical data analysis, from working on implementing
databases, setting up basic analysis environments, data cleaning, basic
statistical analysis and visualisation for building dashboards or reports,
to statistical modelling, both in academia and in the industry.
suspicious transactions but also on facilitating the faster
process of our valued customers. By having a data-driven
culture, we are able to easily share data among the different
departments of the organization and advancing the work on
offering a personalized customer experience.
The outlook
The end goal is a continually learning and improving
organization with rationalized decision-making processes
based on continuous data collection and updating models. As
a company, you need to be able to facilitate this, and should
therefore be very agile and adaptive to change.
A Data Science department is not a stand alone department.
Data is a key enabler of the business and success of a company,
therefore communication between all departments and great
collaboration between Business and IT is crucial.
Travix
Travix is one of the leading global online travel agencies managing
an extensive portfolio of travel-focused websites operating under
the brand names CheapTickets, Vliegwinkel, BudgetAir, Flugladen
and Vayama; providing both search and book capability for flight
combinations worldwide on both legacy and low cost airlines.
Travix operates its five brands in more than 40 countries, employs
over 550 people with more than 50 different nationalities worldwide.
11

TURN YOUR STRATEGY INTO ACTION
“
”
THE ABILITY TO ASSESS AND REVIEW PERFORMANCE
AND EFFICIENCY WITHIN EVERY PART OF THE BUSINESS
N ORTHSTAR
PORTWALL PLACE, PORTWALL LANE, BRISTOL BS1 6NA

expert interview
The power of Data
Science in the Payments
Industry
Daniel Linder is a data scientist at Adyen, the
technology company reinventing payments for the
global economy. After starting his career as a Bio-
Medical Engineer and CEO at the start-up GreenOn, he
moved on to become a data scientist in 2014, joining
Adyen in 2016. Daniel works on building models to
improve authorization rates of payments across the
Adyen platform and consulting merchants in solving
data problems.
by Daniel Linder
Much like the other areas
of finance, the payments
industry can benefit
tremendously from adopting
the latest techniques in data storage and
analysis. To get an insight into practical
use cases in the Payments & Fintech
industry we interviewed Daniel Linder,
Data Scientist at Adyen this month.
PCM: Why is Data Science needed?
Daniel: There are a few reasons why
data science is important for any
organization. First of all, the amount
of data that most organizations are
dealing with and could leverage for their
organizations is not scalable to analyze
in a manual way. Data scientists have
the ability to free up valuable resources
by automating the known solutions and
working on the unknown.
For example, as the data increased
at Adyen, querying one day of raw
payments at Adyen took 5-6 minutes. As
a result, we started using a customized
version of big data streaming platform
- Apache Spark and can now query 3
years of raw payment data in less than
3 minutes.
Without changes like this, analyses
of all of the analysts in the company
slow down, leading to a big decrease in
efficiency in the system as a whole.
PCM: How did the rise of Data Science
influence the Payments & FinTech
space?
Daniel: More and more Payments and
FinTech companies are using data
science to solve a number of problems
across the organization, for example
uncovering insights around customer
journeys, fraud prevention, corporate
compliance, and overall service quality.
Data science creates products that
often become a differentiating factor
in every field. Most of the best fraud
prevention tools today use some form
of artificial intelligence, many times
leveraging expert knowledge in the
payment industry. This combination of
AI and expert knowledge is able to obtain
much better results than any traditional
tools. This combination is really where
the future of the Payments and FinTech
space is going, and you won’t be able to
compete for very long without a strong
data team.
PCM: How is Data influencing
decision-making?
Daniel: Frankly, any FinTech company
without a data team is making decisions
in the dark. This is not just for fraud
detection, but also for questions such
as: What markets should we enter?
Should we block the payment as fraud
or route it through 3D Secure?
Once the data is clean and visualized
in front of you, the decision will be
so much easier to make. At Adyen we
have a very large reporting system
that is constantly being improved,
as we don’t only want to make good
decisions internally, but also educate
our merchants to make their own data
driven strategic decisions.
PCM: How do companies make sure the
Data is legit and can be used efficiently
throughout the organisation?
Daniel: Cleaning data is a skill that
every data analyst and scientist must
have, and it’s not just removing outliers,
incorrect/null values etc. At Adyen we
make sure we define metrics that when
looked at together will paint a more
accurate picture of what’s going on and
have those available whenever anyone
looks at the data.
Every data scientist should always be
skeptical of the data they’re looking at
should try to leverage their technical
skills and domain specific knowledge
to really ask themselves “Do these
numbers make sense?” Especially
when the numbers seem too good
to be true, many data scientists will
allow their confirmation bias to blind
them to the faultiness of the data. This
13

expert interview
will unfortunately lead to incorrect
decisions and a loss of time and money
that could have been saved by looking at
the data through a skeptical eye.
We also do a Data Roadshow at Adyen
where we send data scientists to other
parts of the company every few months
to look over how they’re using data and
to come up with data driven solutions to
make sure they’re using the correct data
in the best way.
PCM: What purpose does Data serve
in an organisation and on how many
levels is the information used?
Daniel: Data should be involved in as
many decisions as possible throughout
an organization. I think a data driven
organization can really be seen by how
many people in the company actually see
the data. Often, companies will create
data “silos” within the company, hiding
the data from all but one or two teams,
relying on them to make decisions and
share their results in reports. When a
company is really advanced, the data
is spread throughout the company,
allowing anyone to easily double check
the work of another and many times look
at the data in a different way.
At Adyen data is really used from top to
bottom. We have built dashboards for
our account managers to break down
all of the data on their merchants in
real depth, which not only allows them
to make smart decisions, but also frees
up resources from the data team to
work on the more advanced projects.
Management uses other dashboards
to review growth of merchants and
markets, compliance for AML alerts,
and marketing for understanding the
effectiveness of a campaign.
PCM: As a service provider, how
does Data help you stand out of
your competition and what’s in it for
Merchants?
Daniel: Adyen has a true end-to-end
platform, which allows us to have a full
overview of every part of a transaction,
in all markets and channels. Old
payment systems are a black box to
merchants. With them, transactions
are either approved or declined, and
that’s the end of the story.
We have developed a number of datadriven
automated tools, which work
in the background of each payment
to drive authorization rates. One of
these tools is RevenueAccelerate,
which by analyzing data to increase
authorization rates for our merchants
lead to an average revenue increase
of 1.43%. Since our platform is fully
omnichannel, these insights across
channels also help merchants offer
a more unified experience to their
shoppers.
Next to the business benefits, having
access to these insights also helps our
merchants think data first when it
comes to their payment and commercial
strategy.
PCM: How will Data Science help
shape the future of the industry and
what developments are we going to
expect in the future?
Daniel: There are a lot of exciting
things that will happen around risk
management. In the near future ML
risk systems are likely to be standard,
and there will be many new data points
when it comes to fraud preventions,
such as identifying fraudsters by mouse
movements on a webpage or scanning the
dark web for breached card information.
I also think that we can expect an
influx of a lot of smaller players into the
business focusing on one problem and
doing it better than the big players by
using data science solutions.
PCM: Any words of wisdom for
aspiring Data Scientists or companies
looking to branch out a Data Science
department?
Daniel: For budding data scientists I
would say just start. I studied music,
biology, bio-medical engineering and
fought in the special forces of the IDF.
Later I worked as a Bio-Medical Engineer
and as a CEO of a start-up, then moved
to The Netherlands and decided to be a
Data Scientist. I think my background
makes me a better data scientist than if
I had just studied computer science or
something similar. The rest of our team
is made up of Astrophysicists, Aerospace
Engineers, Mechanical Engineers and
Computer Scientists. Don’t worry that
your background doesn’t “fit”. In the
end, diverse backgrounds mean you
have a more open approach to the same
problem.
For companies looking to branch out a
Data Science department, remember
that good data scientists can improve
processes all over the company, not just
in classic data science areas.
Make sure your data scientists work on
gaining as much domain knowledge as
possible. A data scientist that doesn’t
understand his domain can sometimes
make great solutions to things that
are technically difficult, but aren’t
necessarily the most impactful. It’s
also important to make sure your data
scientists are merchant facing, as they
can often be a key factor for opening
up discussions in many merchant
meetings that may lead to big decisions.
Adyen
Adyen is the technology company
reinventing payments for the global
economy. The only provider of a modern
end-to-end infrastructure connecting
directly to Visa, Mastercard, and consumers’
globally preferred payment methods, Adyen
delivers frictionless payments across online,
mobile, and in-store. With offices all around
the world, Adyen serves more than 4,500
businesses, including 8 of the 10 largest
U.S. Internet companies. Customers include
Facebook, Uber, Netflix, Spotify, L’Oreal and
Burberry.
14

Spotlight
You think you have what it takes to start a
business in a super-hot market?
PCM takes a close look at some of the most
innovative and promising startup companies in the
payment industry.

startup spotlight
Glyn Blaize, Founder & Director
of Northstar Innovation Group
NORTHSTAR …SALES ALCHEMY?
For centuries people have sought to uncover the mysteries
of Alchemy, a belief based on the premise that there are
four basic elements in nature: air, fire, water and earth.
Too often business and sales leaders have believed like
Alchemy, the key elements to success are shrouded in mystery
and secrecy. Practitioners of Alchemy mainly sought to turn
lead into gold, a quest that has captured the imaginations of
people for thousands of years. For organisations, the holy grail
has been growth, profitability and ultimately an event.
Like the Alchemist, everyone wants to be in control - when we
are not in control we experience fear, anxiety and tension. For
businesses control is an incredibly important commodity as
a lack of control means a lack of growth, unengaged staff and
ultimately a loss in profitability.
Enter NORTHSTAR… NORTHSTAR is an application that puts
control back where you need it most. Our innovative platform
enables you to Map, Measure and Monitor the key elements of
your business which are the drivers for success. Whether you
are a trainee starting in a new role and wanting to know what to
do next or a CEO needing a bird’s eye view of the performance
of the business, NORTHSTAR provides a clear indicator of the
health of the organisation through three modules.
Business Appraisal
NORTHSTAR Business Appraisal enables you to gain an insight
into the current state of the business. Using our assessment
tool, we measure the health of the key pillars of your business
providing a benchmarked score for each of these areas. The key
benefit of the NORTHSTAR Business Appraisal is it allows you
to make incremental gains, or in some cases quantum leaps,
in the areas that are important to you. From ‘Leadership and
People’ performance measurement through to ‘Systems and
Infrastructure’ NORTHSTAR provides crystal clear indicators
of the health and efficiency of the key factors important to
your business.
People Analytics: Employee Appraisal
Aggressive sales targets and employee development have not
always walked hand in hand due to the perceived competing
objectives of both these objectives. However, in the age when
employer branding and staff engagement and retention are
as important elements of business success as hitting sales
targets, there is an unquestionable need to marry these
elements. NORTHSTAR provides a platform for Directors
and Managers to set aggressive sales goals; for employees
16

startup Spotlight
to feel in control of their own destiny; and organisations to
simultaneously achieve strong sales growth while moving from
a performance management driven approach to a performance
development culture, which inevitably contributes to happier
more productive staff.
Whether you are a CEO, Manager or Sales Consultant
NORTHSTAR will enable you to conduct agile appraisals and
keep your team engaged with their individual targets and
goals, aligning these to the vision of the organisation. Through
incredibly clear and intuitive screens staff can see exactly
where they are at and Managers can promptly employ suitable
tactics in order to achieve greater success. NORTHSTAR is the
perfect catalyst to data driven decision making.
Management Analytics
It has been said that the best race car drivers are not
necessarily those with the best dashboards but those who have
the best feel for the road. With our Management Analytics
module NORTHSTAR provides curated information that gives
Manager and Director a great feel for what is going on across
the business. Pulling data directly from your CRM, finance
and accounting system and other data sources, NORTHSTAR
provides Managers with real time financial data and activity
metrics that give them the edge.
The holy grail is being able to influence what matters most and
NORTHSTAR does this seamlessly providing key organisational
insight so that decisions are no longer based on emotions but on
fact. Curating the elements most valuable to your senior team
NORTHSTAR displays variances, maps trends and provides a
running commentary on the touch points that will affect your
sales team most.
Why NORTHSTAR
NORTHSTAR transforms businesses and sales teams. Enabling
CEO’s and MD’s to quickly and efficiently turn strategy into
action and allows all key stakeholders to ensure these elements
that guarantee business success are being improved upon day
in day out. With business ‘happening at the speed of light’
and competitive advantage being harder and harder to gain,
NORTHSTAR gives control where it matters most. What excites
me most about NORTHSTAR is the difference it is making to
so many organisations… and we have only just begun.
About Glyn Blaize
Glyn is a leader, motivator and creator of the ground-breaking
application, NORTHSTAR. His people-led approach to business
change started in 1999 when he was forced to retire from a
successful rugby career due to injury. The experience of an
elite team-orientated environment allowed Glyn to focus on
the people element of businesses leading to him hold Director
positions at a number of organisations. Perhaps a natural
succession was founding Northstar Innovation Group. His
experience within and outside the sales sector has allowed him
to develop a platform that maps the mind of the entrepreneurs
and sales teams and better enables businesses to recognise where
they must adapt and improve in order to grow.
17

Payment Collective
To get a more complete view on the all
businesses in the payments ecosystem, in this
rubric PCM showcases how merchants deal
with payments and fintech challenges.

Kristen Morrow-Greven
Director of Payments EMEA at
Netlfix
With 10+ years in payments and
e-commerce, Kristen is an experienced
strategist who focuses on customer-centric
and results-oriented solutions. At Netflix, one
of the largest recurring billing merchants in
the world, she is primarily responsible for
expanding the offering of consumer payment
methods to help with member acquisition
globally and implementing front- and backend
optimizations for better performance.

Payment collective
The importance of data in the
evolving payments ecosystem
In this month’s Payment Collective we interviewed Kristen
Morrow-Greven, who is the Director of Payment EMEA at
Netflix. She points out how data & analytics are creating
value for organizatons and and customers alike. Moreover,
Kristen shares some of her thoughts on the future of the
payments landscape.
PCM: Tell us a bit more about yourself (background and
what lead you to Payments & the Netflix specifically)?
Kristen: I have been with Netflix since 2015, having joined just
in time to help Netflix bring its internet television network to
more than 130 new countries around the world. The timing
could not have been better - it has been a remarkable challenge
solving the puzzle of how to bring local payments to many new
markets. As Netflix’s creative teams work to bring great stories
from all over the world to people all over the world, the Global
Payments team works to ensure potential members have a way
to pay for their subscription.
Prior to Netflix, I spent 8 years at PayPal where some of
my notable projects included building the payment risk
management infrastructure across EMEA and driving the
migration from national direct debit schemes to SEPA Direct
Debit. I also spent several years in tech consulting and
payments / financial services regulatory innovation in both
the United States and in Europe.
PCM: How important is data analytics when selecting a
payments partner?
Kristen: At Netflix, we generally prioritize a partner’s data
capabilities over all other qualities, including cost. What is
most critical for us is having a partner who provides key data
elements during a transaction. Typically, Netflix creates its
own analytical tools using external payment events data from
partners merged with other internal data elements, so it is
important to receive reliable and rich partner data to make
our tools and analyses as robust as possible.
Our Global Payments team relies primarily on our internal data
analytics and tools, and our strongest payment partners are
nimble with their own data and can provide additional insights
in a timely manner. Within a few clicks in our internal tools,
we can analyze payments data at the country-, issuing bankand
even BIN-level, and when partners can match our agility,
it allows us to move quickly and efficiently in building new
optimizations. Combined with being able to understand our
business objectives, data analytics capabilities are the driving
factor behind our decision to partner.
PCM: What role does data play in your organisation
when it comes to payments and how has it affected your
organisation?
Kristen: Netflix is a famously data-driven company, and
payments is no exception. Data enters every discussion:
measuring business performance, identifying opportunities
or anomalies, designing and analyzing experiments, or making
strategic decisions. There is no payments optimization where
approval or conversion rates are not discussed — everything
we do is measured.
For testing new payment methods or optimizations, we prefer
to run randomized A/B tests before rolling out changes. These
tests may last a few days, weeks or months depending on the
type of change being made, and to account for patterns in
usage and traffic. Our 100 million strong member base allows
us to obtain a sample size relatively quickly, and this allows
for rapid iteration and multiple system experiments to be run
sequentially for optimization. We monitor these tests across
many performance metrics to evaluate whether to productize
a feature.
Data-driven decision making complements Netflix’s company
culture well. We trust our employees to do what they think
is best for Netflix, and we realize this by ensuring they have
the power to make informed decisions. In turn, this freedom
generates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline that we
believe brings better results for Netflix. A recent post in our
Tech blog summed it up well: when you have highly talented
individuals who have lots of great ideas, it’s important to have
a framework where any new idea can be developed and tested.
This ensures that intuition alone does not drive decisions.
PCM: Taking a look at the payments landscape, what
developments do you see in the future when it comes to
data?
Kristen: I expect to see analytics becoming more of a
strategic product offering by innovative emerging payment
companies. Some processing partners already offer very indepth
insight tools, which enables them to invest in datadriven
optimizations, executed in real-time with a simple user
interface that merchants can control themselves. We see more
vendors moving in this direction as merchants shop around
for the best approval rates.
Similarly, Netflix is testing ways to integrate data science into
our payment engine. We have offline methods for optimizing
payment processing and identifying fraud, but we want to
20

PAYMENT COLLECTIVE
move the bulk of these processes online to drive more impact.
Additionally, we are focusing on enhancing our machine
learning tools which can apply intelligent logic to support
transaction routing and market-specific retry logic in real-time
with the goal of improving our approval rates.
As the industry becomes more data-driven, I hope to see
more data sharing for collective benefit across the ecosystem.
Payments-savvy merchants have already realized benefits from
transparency with other merchants. If partners would share
data from acquirers, networks, and issuers with merchants,
the customer experience will benefit the most.
PCM: How will these developments affect your payment
operations?
Kristen: As Netflix continues its global expansion, payment
tools will likely get more complicated to support our growing
network of processing partners and payment methods. As the
number of different processing routes and configurations for a
payment transaction increases, so will the amount of data and
number of ways an event can improve or fail. It becomes ever
more important to stay on top of critical metrics and ensure
that we are constantly monitoring and testing for optimal
performance.
Additionally, expanding and integrating machine learning to
our payments platform will bring us new opportunities to find
and interpret patterns for optimization. As machine learning
sends our vast amount of data through complex algorithms, it
reframes our data which requires us to interpret the business
impact and to find actionable insights for improving member
acquisition and retention.
PCM: From a merchant PoV, what needs do you see coming
up in terms of payments in the near future and what are
you excited about most?
Kristen: In recent years, the global payments ecosystem has
been evolving rapidly, with the emergence of startups that are
finding new ways to enable consumers to pay and incumbents
racing to evolve their business models so as not to become
irrelevant. As a merchant, we stand to benefit from the vast
amount of financial products being offered in the payments
space, and I am excited to see how this develops further,
particularly in emerging markets.
Furthermore, I see innovative approaches in detecting
and authenticating fraud for e-commerce payments. Card
network tools like CVV and AVS are dated and ineffective
compared to behavioral analytics, device ID, and other tools.
Merchants like us embrace the idea of moving fraud detection
to the background of the customer experience, but we need
collaborative efforts between banks, regulators, and likeminded
merchants in order to affect change.
Netflix
Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network with 104
million members in over 190 countries enjoying more than 125
million hours of TV shows and movies per day, including original
series, documentaries and feature films. Members can watch as
much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any Internetconnected
screen.
21

Money 20/20 EU
Executive Interviews
During Money 20/20 Europe in Copenhagen we
had the chance to talk to high level executive
and find out more about their innovative fintech
and payments organizations.

M20/20 Special
Transforming the POS experience
At Money 20/20 Europe in Copenhagen we conducted
an interview with Nelson Holzner, CEO of AEVI,
who told us how his path has led him to AEVI and
why the company’s mission is excatly what he was
looking for in the Payments & FinTech domain.
PCM: Tell us more about yourself. What is your story behind
joining AEVI and what excites you so much about it?
Nelson: I’ve been in the Fintech space for almost 10 years now.
Before joining AEVI, I founded a company called Bill Pay that
was focused on online payments with instalment solutions
for e-commerce merchants. Back then, we always wanted to
go from e-commerce to in-store solutions. Offline commerce
is still far bigger than e-commerce and our merchants asked
for omni-channel solutions. The challenge is, however, that
it’s hard to get to the physical point of sale because it’s a very
complex system as it currently stands. For the past few years
I thought it would be great to build an app and leave it up to
someone else to take me to the point of sale. When I came
across AEVI, that was exactly the value proposition I was
looking for, which is what attracted me most. I’m all about
checkout optimisation and for Bill Pay I was just optimising
checkouts at the point of sale in e-commerce, whereas now I’m
looking after the checkout at the point of sale in the real world.
PCM: What do you hope to achieve in this position?
Nelson: AEVI is a hidden gem in the Fintech scene. It’s a
sizeable company as we already have a revenue of €80 million
and have taken 1.2 billion transactions through our platform,
but because we are a white-labelled solution our brand is not
front and centre. This makes our first mission getting it out to
market and continuing to increase people’s awareness of AEVI.
We created a whole new market through our open Marketplace
app store for business applications at the point of sale. We are
the pioneers in this field, developing the first device which
could take payments through a smart point of sale tablet
solution as well as apply innovative B2B apps directly at the
point of sale, making it both consumer facing but with the backend
functionality required to run a small business. Our value
propositions are extremely powerful, and have been proven
in the Australian market with the Commonwealth Bank of
Australia, and right now it is all about developing our solution
further and continuing to expand into new markets. We are
now far beyond the proof of concept stage, and it’s time for us
to take our solutions global. One of my key responsibilities is
to enable the company to do just that.
PCM: What markets do you currently operate in and what
are your expansion plans?
Nelson: We have a very solid footprint in Australia and we
want to continue expanding there. It’s very sizeable and
working out very well, however, the growth potential is still
exceptionally huge. In Europe, we also have a good chunk of
business in various markets and are proud to serve large tier
1 retailers such as Tesco and Total, which establishes us with
a very good customer base that I look forward to building
upon further moving forward. The next area for expansion
for us is the Americas, starting from the US market, which is
very complex but also very interesting. Following that we will
focus on adjacent markets where we have already developed
some very interesting synergies and are currently having
discussions with interested parties that are eager to do more at
the point of sale. This is a natural trend and there are very few
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M20/20 Special
Nelson Holzner
CEO at AEVI
Nelson Holzner is AEVI’s first ever CEO, having joined the company in
May 2017, and oversees all AEVI’s business operations. Before joining
AEVI, he served for 3 ½ years at private equity firm Cerberus Capital
Management, before founding his own online payments company BillPay,
where he served as CEO for 7 years.
organisations that can do what we are doing across multiple
platforms.
PCM: What are the three things you want people to know
about AEVI?
Nelson: First and foremost comes openness, which is our
biggest value proposition and our global Marketplace is a
poster for how open our solutions are. We invite any third-party
developers to come up with great ideas about how they can
transform the point of sale for the merchants and consumers,
providing them with a platform to showcase their creations to
some of the world’s leading merchant banks and acquirers. It’s
a white-labelled solution, as we want to keep our customers
brand in the focus of merchant’s/consumer’s attention, so that
they can position themselves with an innovative solution at
the point of sale. We are a Fintech supporting the big players
in the market. Everybody wants to ride the app train, but
most of the other players are in closed loops, so it’s hardware
manufacturers or vendors who would like to keep that as an
extra functionality in their family of hardware devices.
Many of our customers typically have a family of devices from
different vendors, and what they are looking for is to have
apps across these devices, but nobody wants to explain to their
sales force how to sell five different marketplace solutions. We
want to connect as many devices as possible and be hardware
agnostic. We see very interesting hardware devices with
different price points, so our ultimate goal is to enable all those
devices to interact with our Marketplace. The same philosophy
of openness is in our payment gateway. We are agnostic and
reduce complexity by connecting as many devices as possible
so that merchants who want to serve multiple countries and
currencies have one gateway to talk through. This is a great
way of simplifying the very complex payment landscape.
PCM: Why AEVI
Nelson: It’s definitely the great innovation we can bring to
the merchant base, which is much needed. In terms of where
e-commerce eats very much into the overall pie of commerce,
it’s very important for merchants to also have a line of defence.
It’s the human element, the interaction with the customer,
which for me is the strongest proposition for a small merchant
who has local customers, and wants to keep them coming back.
By enhancing the in-store point of sale experience merchants
can increase their customer retention, while cutting runningcosts,
thanks to the addition-al back-office apps and services
made available to them through our Marketplace. The customer
experience is becoming an integral part of how people shop,
and it is vital that we provide merchants with the necessary
means to provide the best point of sale experience possible.
At AEVI, we listen to the needs of our customers, and collaborate
closely with customer’s teams to deliver high quality products
and services that they can rely on. Our collaborative, open
platform connects merchants with the very best in innovative
technology solutions that will enable them to optimise the way
they run their business directly from the point of sale. We
already delivered over 100,000 of our leading SmartPOS device,
Albert, to merchants in multiple markets, and this number is
continuing to grow.
PCM: What is your main goal for the next year?
Nelson: I’ve been with the company for seven weeks now and
at first you look at the team, the product, our customers and
app partners to get real feedback. I’ve been through that and
I’m very pleased that we have taken the first steps in terms
of changing the way we work together. We want to work
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M20/20 Special
collaboratively across the two business channels, the payment
business and the Marketplace business, because so many
things can be done jointly, more effectively and successfully.
We are also in the process of moving the headquarters to Berlin
to attract more talent. We are already positioned in key Fintech
hubs such as London and Prague, and we will add Berlin to the
growing list. Finally, we are continuing to push the US side of
the business and recently hired a team there for our expansion.
We’re making very good progress and I hope we will be live
with the first customer in the US later this year.
PCM: Any exciting news / announcements you would like
to make?
Nelson: Needless to mention, it’s our second year at Money20/20
Europe and we have had very interesting discussions. Many
people came by our booth and told us we made a lot of progress
since last year, so we know that what we are doing has a clear
trajectory, and it’s great to see the team growing into that and
shaping the future of payments at the point of sale. This was
the best message we received at Money20/20 and that kind of
market feedback is great. Alongside this we had some very
good negotiations and meetings with customers. Everybody
wants innovation and change to happen, but not many people
drive that change, and I see AEVI as one of those drivers.
We recently announced several influential app partners who
joined our Marketplace, most recently Moroku and Epos Now,
who also joined us on our booth at Money20/20 Europe. Going
forward we also have several major announcements that we
will be making during Money20/20 Las Vegas, so stay tuned!
AEVI
The “Albert” with PINpad
AEVI brings acquirers closer to their merchants, and merchants
closer to their consumers, with an open Ecosystem that combines
apps, payment services and a multi-vendor selection of payment
devices. Selecting from a marketplace of high-quality apps and
services, Acquirers can quickly create differentiated, innovative
SmartPOS solutions under their own brand. Our centralized
payments as a service platform eliminates obstacles, and helps
Acquirers simplify the complex payment landscape with a single
integration and access to a comprehensive suite of cloud-based,
back office reporting tools for enhanced control and flexibility.
25

M20/20 Special
Aligning the physical and digital domains
Market Pay is a payment institution, whollyowned
subsidiary of Carrefour Group, where we
handle all the acceptance and acquiring side and
operate all the payment solutions that Carrefour
developed for its customers. The idea is to bring something
ahead of innovations for all the countries in which Carrefour
is operating. First we started in Europe but we can bring the
same kind of solutions for other countries where we currently
operate, such as Latin America (Brazil and Argentina), and of
course Asia. At Market Pay, we are always willing to break new
grounds and think up new experiences. Here, we know how to
adapt in order to rise to the new challenges and meet the ever
changing consumer demands in these markets.
Payment is an inevitable step in the retailer/customer
relationship, often imposed on the customer who takes the back
seat in the purchasing process. “People come to buy, not to pay”
Yet it is a powerful and engaging point of interaction between
a company and its customer. A “transaction” that can make or
break the customer relationship. Our goal is to focus on the
customer journey and the shopping experience by building the
best customer experience with a simplified, rapid, fluid and
secure purchasing process. Bringing all the payments along
mobile payment service which smartly combines payment,
loyalty and coupon functionalities, marks a new step in Market
Pay’s innovation strategy.
There is also one main ground for which this entity has been
created, and that is around security. We handle all credentials
of our customers through payments, which needs to be fully
secure. This is why, we chose to be fully certified including
Market Pay as an entity. There is no room for compromising
in the management of personal and bank data. All data and
money flows are and must be controlled and secured.
PCM: Tell us more about yourself. What is your story behind
creating MarketPay and what excites you so much about it?
Frederic: My career has always been focused on financial
services, oriented around the merchant and client vision. I’ve
been working for the Carrefour group for the last 15 years
and have been specifically involved in financial services for
the last 10 years. In those years, I focused on the merchant
and customer vision alike. Bringing value through strategic
product development, operational excellence and resource
management.
Apart from the core banking functions as a CFO, I was heading
up the business development for Carrefour Bank for several
years, and bringing innovation on both, the retail and the
bank divisions through the launch of the first MasterCard Only
and Contactless card on the French (2009) and Spanish (2013)
markets. We were the first to offer the use of contactless cards
to our customers by creating a pan-European issuing platform.
At a later stage, we extended this platform to acceptance and
acquiring. These solutions enable faster checkouts and adjust
the acceptance in Carrefour stores. When you operate both at
the same time, the acceptance of the retailer and the payment
solutions that you provide to the customer, it’s easier to bring
innovations to life.
PCM: What markets do you currently operate in?
Frederic: Our main focal points today are France, Spain and
Belgium. The idea was to ensure that we create and operate
the best payment solution to turn payments into a real
opportunity to grow the business and enhance customer
relationships. Our ambition is also to centralize payment
acceptance and acquisition services for all of the retail
channels of the Carrefour Group. Market Pay enables the setup
and management of customized, secure, high-performance
payment solutions. It will improve the security of payment
data collected from customers of Carrefour and develop new
payment solutions for the Group. We are also trying to provide
new solutions for all the other countries the Group is currently
operating in, Brazil and Argentina for instance.
PCM: What are your expansion plans and how do you go
about choosing your next region?
Frederic: There’s a lot to do within Carrefour Group. The first
step was to bring highly customized and performance solutions
for acceptance and acquiring as well as on the issuing side
using different devices, cards, mobile and of course tomorrow’s
IoT.
The first expansion is to implement the solution where the
Group is already present. We are currently working on making
this happen and are studying how we can be relevant in those
markets. The main goal is to add value to Carrefour entities
at first, but also to close partners, especially shopping malls
to deliver value to all the merchants there. Once we know we
are relevant to them we can also be relevant for others in the
second step, which is where we’re heading. Payment is about
volume, so the more volume we aggregate, the more relevant
and cost efficient we could be.
We are open to providing the solutions to the market for those
who would be interested in investing in our solutions. However,
the first step is to create relevant solutions that can evolve
quickly and fit to those markets because we know that there
will be more new means of payments in the future. This is
also including PSD2 specs, where initiation of payments and
aggregation is something we are very interested in, not only for
our B2B payments, but also for customer to business payments
as it is the main basis of payments within our Group.
PCM: What are the three things you want people to know
about MarketPay?
Frederic: The first thing, which is quite unique to me, is that
we operate as a dynamic energized company with a 360 degree
vision of payment. Market Pay fully masters the French and
European electronic payment ecosystem through the daily
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M20/20 Special
support of a pool of experts. “Tried and tested” know-how in
France and across Europe. Expertise in retail, the purchasing
process and the customer experience backed by over 35 years
of work within the Carrefour Group.
The second thing is that we always try to be ahead of innovations,
meaning being bold and disruptive. This is one characteristic
of how we operate in the country. Always willing to break
new ground and precipitate new experiences. At Market Pay
we know how to adapt to combat the new challenges and
meet the new customer demands. Being the first to develop
contactless payment in France was something important as
well as being able to issue pan-European solutions. Right now,
we are focusing on being the first and most innovative for new
customer journey by using mobile solutions.
Finally, maximum data security - There is no room for
compromising in the management of personal and bank data.
All data and money flows are controlled and secured on the
highest level.
PCM: What are your goals for the upcoming year
Frederic: Our main goal is to bring the best payment solutions
to the market as well as include payments behind the shopping
experience into the retailer App. Also, one of our key objectives
is to get tractions for all the merchants App including the
Carrefour App that we are operating in all the different
countries. Globally, it is about the improvement of the
purchasing experience using mobile, contactless technologies
and innovative solutions based on new terminals.
Secondly, thre is the extension of our platforms in other
countries where Carrefour is present. Our goal is to bring
together all the Group’s payment infrastructures in the same
solution. Last but not least, we initiate PSD progression. Strong
customer authentication is something we need to watch, but
working on initiations, aggregation and instant payments is
something that we’re going to invest time and money in.
PCM: Any exciting new / announcements you would like
to make?
Frederic: Yes, there are some news we’d like to share. Right
now, we’ve launched two products in two different markets of
which we are very proud. The first is in force with Carrefour
Bank, the first current account that you can find on the shelf.
It was a great success, we launched that two months ago and
I’m quite happy to hear that it’s well received by our customers.
Also, just last week we launched a new mobile payment solution
in Spain which was even in the news on TV, displaying the
customers thoughts where it was very well received.
Frederic Mazurier
CEO at Market Pay (Carrefour Group)
Frederic’s career has been focused on the Financial
Services, oriented merchant and client vision, with
an emphasis on building value through strategic
products development, resource management and
operational excellence. As CEO of Market Pay,
from January 2016, he’s driving one of the most
important European payment institution and I’m
convinced that tomorrow’s payment process will
become a strategic point of interaction to create
value and enhance the relationship with customers.
Market Pay (Carrefour Group)
Created to support the brands of the Carrefour Group, Market Pay
develops and operates custom solutions to boost the business
and improve the customer relations. The payment institution,
which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carrefour Group, combines
all of Carrefour’s electronic payment systems, such as Carrefour
cards, POS terminals and online payment solutions, and centralizes
payment acceptance and acquisition services for all of the retail
channels. Market Pay enables the setup and management of
customised, secure, high-performance payment solutions. It will
improve the security of payment data collected from customers
of Carrefour banners and develop new payment solutions for the
Group.
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M20/20 Special
Setting new
standards in the
world of payments
Arnaud Crouzet was elected General Secretary
of nexo Standards in 2015. Within this role,
Mr. Crouzet oversees the activities of the nexo
Board, Technical Steering Committee and
technical working groups. He also manages the
association’s membership, which comprises
representatives from the payment acceptance
ecosystem.
I
n our last interview at Money 20/20 Europe in Copenhagen
we sat down with Arnaud Crouzet, General Secretary at
nexo Standards and Global Head of Payments Means at
Auchan Group to talk about how the nexo standards
community is continuously growing and to learn more about
the association’s efforts to establish global standards for
seamless payment card acceptance.
PCM: Tell us more about yourself. What is your story behind
Auchan joining nexo Standards and what excites you so
much about it?
Arnaud: I’m in charge of payments for the different countries
in which Auchan operates. A few years ago, it became clear that
it is increasingly complicated to organise anything regarding
payments when operating across so many different geographies.
Each country has its own domestic payment system, which is
usually provided by a vendor, PSP or bank. Increasingly, even
different entities in the same country have different payment
systems, which can cause a major administration headache
when managing payment transactions across borders.
At Auchan, we wanted to find a way to harmonise these
disparate payment systems and processes, at least at a European
level. We looked at a number of different possibilities and
then we discovered the OSCar Consortium. We used the EPAS
protocols and SEPA-Fast Specifications to realise our objective
of a common set of implementations in the SEPA zone. In 2012,
Auchan was the first merchant to join the consortium; I was
proving that it was already the type of solution that could fit
and solve our problems.
In 2014, three organisations - EPASOrg, the OSCar consortium
and the CIR SEPA-Fast technical working group - merged to
become nexo standards.
In June 2013, Auchan was the first merchant to implement the
nexo standards specifications and messaging protocols in the
field in France, which was followed by Portugal in September.
This was the start of our strategy to implement a new multicountry
payment infrastructure, using the messaging protocols
and specifications developed by nexo standards.
What excites me is that we already have 128 hypermarkets
using the protocols and they work perfectly. We now have a
new payment infrastructure that is 100% based on the nexo
standards protocols, with the nexo Retailer protocol for the
connection between the cash system and the POS, using the
nexo Fast POI Payment Application Specifications which is a
multi-scheme, multi-language application.
The nexo standards protocols fit with exactly what we wanted,
which was to not have to rely on the domestic protocols of
each country, but really to have a new type of payment system
independent of country. Since deploying the protocols, we have
also seen an improved time for payment by 7% per transaction.
PCM: What kind of markets does Auchan operate in?
Arnaud: Auchan is present in different parts of the world
including Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa. We started our
deployment of nexo standards in France. The existing payment
infrastructure in France is very complicated due to the existing
legacy systems still in place. Auchan’s activities in France cover
a lot of different areas, such as loyalty, prepaid, bonus, coupons
and cheques for example, therefore there were a lot of different
elements for us to consider when implementing nexo standards
protocols.
Our objective is to deploy across all European countries in
which Auchan is present.
28

M20/20 Special
PCM: On what scale are nexo Standards specifications
adopted today?
Arnaud: Adoption is growing and as with any evolution in the
market, there are some players that start out first and others
that follow. Today, nexo standards has almost 80 members,
with many deployments now live across the global payments
market. I can see how impressive the growth is by the businesses
who have implemented the specifications and protocols. We get
all kinds of requests for proposals from merchants and other
businesses who want to add nexo standards to their payments
infrastructures.
nexo standards is changing and evolving the market. Some
players say the legacy protocols can stay for a few years,
especially if there is no real need to add a new international
protocol, but at the same time, nexo standards can add
extra value for the domestic market. There are additional
functionalities in the nexo standards protocols. They can
provide the capability to implement all types of functionalities,
which is not always the case in different markets, because all
domestic products have been built for their domestic market
in response to local demands.
It’s therefore not possible to take the domestic protocols and
export them to other countries as they would be missing
required functionalities. nexo standards is already there, so
you can decide to implement it or not. I know that it’s already
deployed across many countries in Europe such as France,
Spain, Belgium and Germany, and it’s also deployed in Canada
and Africa. I know that China and Asia are looking into it and
a Japanese scheme is already a member of nexo standards.
PCM: If there are three things that you would like people
to know about nexo Standards, what would they be?
Arnaud: nexo standards is a collaboration bringing all the
different stakeholders in the payments industry together.
Processors, PSPs, card schemes, vendors and merchants are
all working together to ensure we fully incorporate all the
requirements coming from different parts of the payment
chain. It’s the first time all the sectors involved in the payment
chain are working together to create a new standard. nexo
standards is a non-profit association, with the objective to
create messaging protocols and specifications that can be
employed universally to remove the barriers present in today’s
fragmented global card payment acceptance ecosystem The
protocols and specifications are flexible, international and
already in place, so anyone can start using them. Interested
companies can decide to use the protocols as they are
published or they can join nexo standards and contribute to
their development. Companies are also welcome to provide
their feedback and knowledge of the market.
PCM: Who can join your community and what are the
benefits?
Arnaud: Really, anyone in the payment chain from merchant
to PSP can join. We have a wide spectrum of representatives
in our community including retailers, processors, banks,
PSPs, card schemes and vendors (such as manufacturers of
POS equipment). They are all welcome to participate in nexo
standards and contribute to the different working groups and
the development of the specifications and protocols. One of
the many benefits is that our members receive insight into
the industry’s evolution and they can provide their input and
feedback on the direction of the association. The aim of nexo
standards is not just to use the protocols, but also to utilize and
benefit from each other’s industry knowledge and expertise.
A merchant does not see a payment in the same way as a bank
or a scheme does for instance. The same goes for a vendor or
processor, we all have different views depending on where we
are in the payment chain. This is what makes nexo standards
so interesting: we can merge all these different views to ensure
that our progress benefits all players in the industry.
PCM: Any announcements or anything exciting that you
would like to share with the readers of the magazine?
Arnaud: nexo standards protocols and specifications are live
with many of our members. They are also already deployed by
many businesses, working perfectly whilst remaining flexible.
For a merchant to implement a new payment system, the use
of the nexo standards specifications and protocols can solve
many challenges. We are convinced that this is the future. In
fact, it’s not the future, it’s now. It’s a real open standard based
on the new evolution of ISO20022, and we can do so much with
it compared to the previous fixed protocol. standard based on
the new evolution of ISO20022, and we can do so much with it
compared to the previous fixed protocol.
nexo Standards. Enabling interoperability in global
payment acceptance.
nexo standards enables fast, interoperable and borderless
payments acceptance by standardising the exchange of payment
acceptance data between merchants, acquirers, payment service
providers and other payment stakeholders. nexo’s messaging
protocols and specifications adhere to ISO20022 standards, are
universally applicable and are freely available globally.
nexo standards is an open, global association dedicated to removing
the barriers present in today’s fragmented global card payment
acceptance ecosystem. Headquartered in Brussels, its members
represent the full spectrum of card payments stakeholders,
including acceptors, processors, card schemes, payment service
providers and vendors.
nexo was established in 2014, when three historical contributors of
card payment standards and specifications were merged: EPASOrg,
the OSCar consortium and the CIR SEPA-Fast technical working
group.
Keen to find out more about the payment acceptance standards
revolution? Interested to become part of nexo’s global community?
Contact us today. www.nexo-standards.org
29

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events
Events
Boston, U.S.
ETE17PCN = 25% Discount
eTail East is where the top minds at America’s most successful retailers
meet and learn. Find the most disruptive content, designed to help you
optimize the profits. No commercials. No egos. Talk is cheap - so we cut
out the fluff to give you hundreds of strategic takeaways. Guaranteed.
Transformative. Inspiring. Actionable Insights. That’s eTail.
14-17
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
12-14
Attending this conference will let you be part of an advanced, inspiring,
open, and P2P-passionate peer environment of experienced peers
with quite mature P2P functions from number of industries and with
typically a global responsibility span. This event should give a very
good benchmarking point for what to aim for as world-class P2P
function with limited resources we all have, and definitely should leave
everyone with a good range of fresh, interesting and implementable
ideas to benefit from.
Bangkok, Thailand
The 3rd edition of RetailEX ASEAN is an annual trade show and
conference that caters to retailers in ASEAN. RetailEX ASEAN 2017 is
committed to bring success to the retail industry, with focusing on
two exhibit profiles; Retail Shop Fitting and Retail Shop Technology.
RetailEX ASEAN 2017 is the hub where all retail owners come together
to share ideas, explore the retail market trend and meet new buyers.
14-16
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19-20
Between 19 and 21 September 2017, Paris Retail Week will once again
showcase French Expertise and will be the only event in Europe which
addresses the omni-channel problems associated with 360° retail. For
three days, Paris will be the capital of connected commerce by bringing
together 600 participating companies and 30,000 professionals.
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