In the first episode of PaymentGenes’ ‘Voices in Payments” podcast series season 2, our host Diederik Klopper is joined by Sylvia Mensdorff, head of Banking Solutions, Europe at FIS. Listen to this episode to learn all about core banking systems, modernization, blockchain, artificial Intelligence and Data.
FIS is at the heart of the commerce and financial transactions that power the world’s economy. They are passionate about helping businesses and communities thrive by advancing the way the world pays, banks, and invests, serving more than 20,000 clients and more than one million merchant locations in over 130 countries.
Listen to the podcast to find out:
If you’re curious to know more about how FIS helped more than 20,000 clients thrive in the disruptive FinTech world, feel free to reach out to Sylvia Mensdorff for a conversation..
About PaymentGenes's "Voices In Payments" - The Future of Payments podcast:
The “Voices in Payments” Podcast, is an initiative launched by PaymentGenes to positively impact the payments community, by educating and connecting the market with vertical-specific industry expertise.
Growth by providing expertise-driven Recruitment, Contracting, Greenfield Consultancy. These services all resolve and intersect around payments. Learn more about how we can help your business here.
00:00:00
Speaker 0
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the payment GS podcast series. Voices in payments today, we're joined by Sylvia men's store and Sophia. Senior vice president sales for bank in Europe. It's FIS Sylvia, a variable and welcome to the show.
00:00:12
Speaker 1
Thanks. Wonderful to be here and thank you for having me.
00:00:15
Speaker 0
It's great to have you, the Sylvia, you've heard our first series of the podcast. You know how to, Oh, it starts. How do you stumble into payments?
00:00:24
Speaker 1
Well, I can say honestly say I did stumble completely in the payments. My background is in organic chemistry, nothing to do with payments. I, I did a master in business administration and while I was doing that, the sky from I then the touch telecom company came to present about chipper. This is the, mid nineties and, no, and towards the end of the nineties, and he started talking about putting a chip on magnetic Stripe cards and all the endless possibilities and the customer journeys and what that would have been. And I got really enthusiastic about that. When I was finished with my studies and started looking for a job, there was a job for a junior product manager there, and I thought, Hey, so I did an interview to this day. I don't know why my then boss hired me, but he did. I started in close loop wallet persists and days long gone our, that, and that's how we got into,
00:01:34
Speaker 0
I did use it back in the days, quite a lot to chip.
00:01:38
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. So, so it, they finally found the nook for it, which was really in canteens.
00:01:48
Speaker 0
In restaurants and things like that.
00:01:50
Speaker 1
Yeah. The functionality, if you think about is now completely replaced, but by what is open loop contactless NFC payments. But, but the idea was I think great. And, and to say what attracted me to it is on the one hand side it's technology. On the other hand, it's something, payments is something that touches all of our lives all the time. And it's something that improves our lives. It's something that I can experience that my kids can experience. It's it, I, I feel like I can make life better with technology and can contribute to that. And that's, what's kept me fascinated.
00:02:30
Speaker 0
Yeah. Payments is indeed fully incorporated in all of our lives. You've been working in the industry, like you said already from the mid nineties, how did it from cheaper, how did your career progress onwards?
00:02:43
Speaker 1
Funnily enough, after three months, the company got acquired by ACI. I, I worked there for quite a long time and, got further fascinated and moved into a sales position and really enjoyed working in the industry, getting to know everybody in the industry and understanding this. And, I, I always explain to people I love to pay, which is kind of weird, but I, it was like my husband, my kids laugh about, and one of my favorite stories is going to, skiing. Yeah. So, so, I have three kids. We go to ski in Austria, unfortunately, not this year, but every year we got to ski in Austria. So, what it's like when you get into your car with your kids on a trip, right? You get into the car, it's a long trip. You turn the corner from the house. The first person says, are we there already? Like, duh, no, we're not.
00:03:43
Speaker 1
The next person says I got to pee. We used to have to pack this jar of coins to pay for all the kids to go and be able to pee until a couple of years ago, we'd get to Germany, the German alphabet and very clean toilets. And, and we get, we stop and I take the three kids to be, and lo and behold, you can pay with you NFC card to P to charm. And I was so enthusiastic about it. I got back to the car, that's 12 pay with my card. My husband's like, you really.
00:04:20
Speaker 0
Have a problem.
00:04:22
Speaker 1
Since then we call it Pete Bay. But, anyway, it's like, it makes a big difference. We always struggled to find the coins.
00:04:30
Speaker 0
Yeah. Yeah. I never carry cash around anymore. It's, it's funny that I still carry my cards around, everywhere I go, just on a small sticker behind my phone. I hardly ever use the Bissell Apple pay that I use, but still it's embedded in my system and every now and then when my battery dies, I'm glad I do, but it's once in a quarter or something like that, I would sooner,
00:04:57
Speaker 1
Sorry. I'm currently finding the problem with paying with Apple pay is that if it's face recognition, your boss gone.
00:05:04
Speaker 0
Yeah. Luckily, luckily I have an old phone that doesn't work on face recognition, so, but then you have to take off your gloves,
00:05:11
Speaker 1
Mobile phones versions, just to enable the pandemic version of it.
00:05:18
Speaker 0
I can't imagine. I can imagine. You spent 20 years at ACI, which is a rare feat. It's not a given these days that people spend so long at a certain employer. That does mean that you enjoyed it there, but then made the step to FIS. Okay. Tell me a bit more about the challenge that you found here that you wanted to explore.
00:05:39
Speaker 1
Yeah, so I, I joined FIS now six months ago, and there are a couple of things that attracted me to FIS, right? That the size of the company is incredible. When you look at the FinTech space, these days then size matters, the bigger, getting bigger. That was one of the things and FIS, we've just been in fortune 500, one of the most admired companies. Know clearly Fs FIS is doing something right, but what really attracted me to it was the combination of assets that FIS has, which now, which brings together on the one hand side, a future pedigree on the payment side, both on the retail and, on the wholesale side, as well as core banking, where there is a huge amount of development going into what we call the modern banking platform, which is very much taking core banking into what it needs to be in open banking and bringing both of those two together, I think is a really exciting space.
00:06:47
Speaker 1
It enabled me to pursue my passion, which is payments and Europe at a bigger scale. So, so that's, what's what, haven't regretted a single day. So it's great company to work.
00:07:02
Speaker 0
Happy to hear that perhaps for those who are familiar with FIS, personally, I became more familiar with SAS with the acquisition of Worldpay, but for those who are familiar with the company, but not familiar in which aspects of the payment value chain you are operating, can you just highlight some of the services that you provide because they are extensive?
00:07:23
Speaker 1
I think the best way of starting that discussion is to highlight the tagline that FIS has, which is to improve the way the world banks invest in pace. If you think about it's really those three things. If we start with investments, there's a whole branch of FIS around capital markets, which is very well-established and has continued to grow and originates from the signboard acquisition. I worked very closely with those colleagues, especially at some of the banks I service. Yeah. There is, that was even before the acquisition of Worldpay, a very big, merchant, business. We're now the world's biggest acquirer with that acquisition of Worldpay and we're solidifying and expanding that. Obviously there is the banking space. If you look at specifically my remit, it's really around four course things, core banking, or the modern banking platform, is going to help our customers bring core banking systems into the modern world and connect them and bring all those customer journeys and connectivity and functionality that people are looking for.
00:08:49
Speaker 1
It is around, developing and for the bring to market, OPF, which is through the clear to pay acquisition, our payment engine that serves tier one banks, but that we're also making available as a payment, as a service. When you can see that's really an interesting part where you're looking at some customers really enjoy the license model and want to bring that to life in their data center, all the cloud, other banks prefer to outsource that as a service. Then, if we look at the card side, it's very complimentary to the merchant business where FIS Sosi acquirers. We have a lot of processing that enables issuers, to issue credit, debit, and prepaid cards. And it's very exciting space. We, I suggest we talk more about that space and how some of the fintechs that we serve in that space. The fourth is around something that's called platform securities, which is, something, a, a service that we have in the UK.
00:10:02
Speaker 1
That's very much, around, security trading and supporting that and underlying all of that. We provide, BPO services. It's quite a, a white offer that we bring to the table.
00:10:18
Speaker 0
Yeah. For those who have not, maybe BPO is short for business process outsourcing. Right.
00:10:22
Speaker 1
Exactly. It's just supporting, really bundling up, not just providing the processing, but actually taking on the call center and, even statement printing, all sorts of things. So that,
00:10:35
Speaker 0
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Do this we mentioned for, service lines basically, the first one was core banking. You mentioned, Hey, we're now bringing it to the modern age, but what is the main gap that needs to be covered in modernizing the core banking services,
00:10:54
Speaker 1
It's really making the engines API available and modularizing it in such a way that every bank and every part of the bank can construct the customer journeys that they're looking for. Really linking that into all the other systems that the banks have. When you think about kind of more legacy, core banking systems, then they're very monolithic. And, and oftentimes, unfortunately still not 24 seven, which if you think about open banking, if you think about real-time payments that banks have to actually put a system in front of their core banking, authentication, and authorization in real time versus the monolithic banking, engine that they have in the back. And, and today still a lot of banks, build those core banking and engines. I would say in the seventies and have kept them alive. And that is it's a huge burden. It's standing in the way of some of the modernization that is required.
00:12:13
Speaker 1
It's obviously, replacements and building up core, but, replacing a core banking, Asian, you can equate that to open heart surgery and it's very lengthy, so you get, have to get it right.
00:12:29
Speaker 0
So the risks are, of course, significant. You have to migrate from one platform to another. If that doesn't work well, then the implications are massive, but I've always been baffled with how extremely complex it is and why by even major companies like FSR are struggling, or at least taking longer than I thought it would take. But, the more I dive into it, the more complex it became becomes an a then I start to see, okay, this is one of the reasons why it's a it's so complicated.
00:12:59
Speaker 1
Well, there's huge risks and what you see. I think that is oftentimes the right approach is that things are phased and you kind of find a business case. Oftentimes it's really the hurdle, do we find the investment? Where do we spend our time as a company from the bank's perspective? I would say that the advantage of a company like FIS is we don't walk away from products, projects, and products. Yeah. It was really important when you're taking on a project like that. You want a partner that is financially stable, that, is going to see it to the end. And, it's, if you look at the investment that we're putting into modern banking platform yeah. Huge experience over more than 40 years, and then the type of investment that a company like FIS can put into a system like that, it's incredible. It's really exciting to bring that to Europe.
00:13:58
Speaker 0
Yeah. We're excited as well. Let's talk a bit, you mentioned, Hey, cart issuing had debit credits and prepaid cards, and at the most likable make a massive impact in the FinTech industry, but are some of the projects you're currently working on and some of the developments that you're most interested.
00:14:16
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, so that space is so exciting. Because when you think about the kind of FinTech revolution, originally a lot of thinking was that a lot of fintechs would start on the banking side. They would bring a core engine, to the market and some have done that, but you've got other fintechs who kind of thought, It's really about the customer journey. How do I enable those customers was something new that I'm bringing to the market. We've actually seen a different cycle where we're a company start on the card side and they think, Oh, let me bring out a prepaid card. With a prepaid card, you can really hone it in to serve a particular, market. We have some customers that are, for example, focused on how can we enable parents to help their children.
00:15:17
Speaker 0
Become more aware of their spending patterns,
00:15:20
Speaker 1
Be more aware of their spending patterns. And I I'm really enthusiastic about that. Being a parent myself, there's, that's one of the things I hate cash, never caring. When you think about it, paying is a trade and it's money was invented to help us trade more effectively. We had that discussion, when we met the first time. Help us trade more effectively for children. When you say, I want an ice cream heroes, five-year-olds that is a physical trade. It's much easier to understand. Then, when you have small children, you always find when they get really enthusiastic, when they give a five-year-old note and they get coins back and they kind of go,
00:16:04
Speaker 0
Well, that's a massive trade.
00:16:07
Speaker 1
So, but with that physical nature of cash, teaching your children the value of man money, and that you're having to give something to get something is easy, not being in a world where this is digital. It's much harder to explain to children that, it's not an endless well where this comes from. Yeah,
00:16:33
Speaker 0
It's still a two way transaction. Indeed. Normally you give something which you don't have after giving it, or you receive something which you now have been happy for. If you are tapping, using NFC with your car, you still have your cart and you get to the product. And so there's a discrepancy there that.
00:16:51
Speaker 1
Discrepancy there and, companies that are in that space that are helping parents educate what I've found is one of the best tools to educate as my, teenagers are now working and that they can suddenly go, Oh, so I need to work for five hours to make 25 euros. That means if I want to buy this a hundred year old thing, it's going to be for working, like that's kind of how they put it.
00:17:23
Speaker 0
Nope. That was the way that I really got acquainted with that idea as well.
00:17:28
Speaker 1
But, but in that, so it's great that you can define these customer journeys. So, so that's one part that's really exciting. As you can, as you think about some of these they're developing, also, they potentially started with a card product, but you can see them move and think about, okay, what can I enable on the payments side? What more can I enable on the banking side? So, you can kind of bring the circle together of all of these things and helping people be more financially savvy. The other thing that is really exciting, and, we had the news yesterday on Tesla and,
00:18:13
Speaker 0
Investigate running half billion in Bitcoin. Yeah.
00:18:16
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, so that's interesting that a company puts their assets there. The other pieces can I pay with Bitcoin now, there's a lot going on that at some point you will actually be able to pay with your Bitcoin. Yeah.
00:18:33
Speaker 0
Yeah. This was one of the reasons by to invest it's one and a half billion, right. They want to allow their consumers to make purchases on Tesla platforms with Bitcoin. And that's of course, the first step. I really hope that this will continue because this is of course the major downside. One of the main reasons why Bitcoin is so volatile is that there's no actual means except trading that you cannot pay for anything, in store or an app.
00:18:58
Speaker 1
What you see now is if you look at, someone's, crypto exchanges, what they've done is they're enabling their customers to have a payment card that they linked to their crypto assets and in the transaction translate from the crypto asset into Fiat currency. While they're not directly paying with their crypto assets,
00:19:24
Speaker 0
It's an instant transition from crypto to, yeah.
00:19:29
Speaker 1
And, and so that's a way to get it into real life, because if you think about it, Elon Musk is quite comfortable with Bitcoin. You can imagine that a lot of other businesses will not be that comfortable with Bitcoin, because we all need to understand. And, that's one of the advantages and veins of payments and banking is regulation. We all understand that fear currency is a very regulated and have the bucket backing of a government. You think about the volatility of Bitcoin, it's almost going back to the crisis of the thirties where, you don't know whether your exchange is actually know solid. And, and, it's, is it how many percentages of a Bitcoin is a Tesla worth? And that changes every day. Whereas, if I go out and buy my bread at the Baker, it's, ,
00:20:34
Speaker 0
You can expect what the price will be.
00:20:36
Speaker 1
Exactly. So, so, but providing these alternative payments methods is really interesting. I think just making that bridge by enabling that transition of crypto into FIA currency and just letting people pay, that's already a great step of making that asset, accessible. You can imagine that these companies can go into a similar they're already kind of in the investment business then are going into the payments business by making it, and then you can think about, Hey, maybe I expand that into banking. Maybe I want to enable people to get a mortgage against the crypto assets. So, so it's going to be quite interesting how that develops still. I think the challenge, the crypto space has a similar activity, which I think governments and regulators spend a great deal of effort taking volatility out of the market. We all need to remember that volatility can be very painful if it goes into a real economy.
00:21:54
Speaker 1
Yeah.
00:21:54
Speaker 0
Well, most of the news that you see about crypto, volatility, R and D the highs, but you very rarely see the lows, really clear about what the consequences are. I think at are ample examples of people who lost their and everything, by making a gamble into a Bitcoin, for instance, and came out a loser in that essence.
00:22:17
Speaker 1
I would say it's at the moment, it's still like a lottery, right? So if you're happy to go and play the lottery, great, go for it. Don't worry about if you're not worried about potentially losing that money, you can make a great deal.
00:22:33
Speaker 0
Yeah. There's the catch if you're not worried about,
00:22:36
Speaker 1
Again, it's all about consumer protection, and this is maybe kind of goes, if you think about other alternative payment methods. So, the, at the moment we have instant payments and card payments, there's a huge amount of debate about, okay, why are card payments so expensive in parenthesis? Because it's been very regulated, by government. Actually debit card payments, for example, in the Netherlands ridiculously inexpensive, they're very safe. They're very efficient. They always work it. And, and, the Dutch government actually did research a couple of years ago that proved that digital payments were cheaper to society than cash on the back of that the whole, the banks merchants, and a lot of other parts came together and made the ecosystem even more efficient. So, and now we're saying, okay, Hey, we're too hung up on these two monopolies, MasterCard and visa. We've got instant payments. Can we bring payments to the shops, the whole European payment initiative, for example, which is extremely interesting, the one thing that is required to really enable that is to build up the rules on the instant payments side to really cover cross schemes and in a full fourth party model, is that the Pope at this point in time, if something goes wrong with your instant payment yeah.
00:24:19
Speaker 1
The liability and the resolution lies with the individual or the company, whereas in these other payments schemes, there are very clear rules, and there are whole schemes that sort out what happens when things go wrong and that has taken 40 years to build out, but it's made it very efficient and it's provided most consumers don't realize that, but there was a huge amount of consumer protection built into that card system.
00:24:49
Speaker 0
Yep. It's indeed the liability shift, which one hand, explain some of the costs, but as well, we could use the lessons of Lillard overdose 40 years and implement that now in the European payments initiative need. I've had a very interesting discussion with the aging of, on deck of the Dutch central bank. Far in this podcast, guest services will be published. And, we talk a bit more about that, but it's a very interesting dynamic.
00:25:15
Speaker 1
She brings it, she brings that experience and I've always thought, we've had that 40 year experience, let's simplify, but take some of the lessons learned, but when people talk about, Oh, this is going to be so much cheaper, let's all remember that if you have to build up, some type of protection. Now having said that, some of the methods work really well, and because you've got mobile phones that are in the hands of the consumer, and a lot more technology at shops, it doesn't have to be as complicated as what was 40 years ago.
00:25:59
Speaker 0
No, Andy there's technology developments, make it, offered the possibility to make it a lot more frictionless and seamless. Indeed. And, talk a bit about going back to cards because there has been, of course, if any interesting developments will be already mentioned, debit credits and prepaid, but as well, the difference between a virtual card and fiscal cards, how do you see that from a perspective of FIS? Is there still a solid future for the physical card, or are we all going to transition to virtual card issuing in near future?
00:26:34
Speaker 1
From our perspective, we'll support both. It's really the business model of our customer. That depends on that. You can see now starting to go out and say, Hey, we won't even start issuing physical cards. We'll go directly to virtual cards anyway, because people will be able to pay on their phone. They, they will be able to pay with those virtual cards online, not takes cost out. We'll enable boats until such time that is no longer required. It it's a means of communication as well. If you think about it, right. If I need to call my bank, I can look at my mobile phone. I can pull out my card and I look at the back and it says my number. Funnily enough, I I've actually recently just started taking my card with me, which I had left at home because of the whole thing. It's just easier to tap and pay them.
00:27:33
Speaker 0
To take off. Yeah, exactly.
00:27:36
Speaker 1
So, so, I think the physical card as a token of the connection between the issuing instance and the consumer is something that remains, I think this whole pandemic is proving to us that while the technology is great, we are physical beings. Having that thing that shows ownership is still something that is deeply emotionally ingrained in us. So, so I think that option will be there for a long time.
00:28:13
Speaker 0
Yeah, I agree. I think even though that the virtual card offers a lot more flexibility, there are still some limitations, like for instance, battery life of the phones, or, accessibility, but okay.
00:28:26
Speaker 1
Do you don't have to choose it's really about what is the journey that you will want to enable? Who is your customer base? I think though the really interesting thing, kind of switching to the pandemic, if we can think about all the horrible things that pandemic has caused, but it's really exploded us into this digital world. If you think about what if this pandemic had happened 10 years ago, it would have been so much harder for all of us to connect. W w we'd found a way, because that's what we, humans are good at it, but the technology that was available to us, it's made this a more, an easier transition, but it's also brought all of this technology to people that were normally used, like my mom didn't do Sue meetings. She does Sue meetings with all them friends now.
00:29:26
Speaker 0
Yeah. It was just thinking about the amount of shops that were online 10 years ago, and that were online at the start, Ben and Mick and his bell, the ease of, opening up a web shop, for merchants, has drastically changed over the last 10 years. Indeed its consequences. Would it be massively disparate 10 years ago?
00:29:46
Speaker 1
All the shops that didn't have a online presence now has an online presence and all the consumers that never thought they would actually buy online. I've all learned about it online. The, and once you, once we, as humans overcome our fear of technology and actually had a forced to it, we suddenly go, Oh, that wasn't that difficult. Oh, that wasn't that scary. As I thought it was, it's actually easy. Once you have experienced the journey and actually feel like the comfort and the things, you're not going to abandon that. As I'm hoping the pandemic will end, I think some of the good things that it's brought to us will stay with us and we'll actually bring ring, bring us even further into digitally.
00:30:44
Speaker 0
Yeah. One of the things that accepts give is I used to travel to Berlin quite often, a few times a year, and was always surprised with how dominant the cash still is there and how even bars and restaurants that have stickers of MasterCard or visa on the window, don't accept card payments at all. I'm still super excited for the first time, walking back into Berlin, walking into a shop and just being able to pay with cards anywhere I want. I, I hear the stories I hear from people there are that it's already happening. And, yeah, I'm super excited. It's, it's a development that is forced upon us, but I think it's a war. That's part of the welcome developments. That's a double hat.
00:31:24
Speaker 1
For me, I have a German passport I used to live in Germany. It's always been quite interesting to see the cultural difference between the way that people pay in different European countries and in Germany cash. Also by the way, cash was still so prevalent that ATM payments were really high. The interesting thing, in the first wave of the pandemic all over the place, car payments crashed because people were paying less in shops versus in Germany or car payments actually Rose, which is weird. If you think about it, people were being told, don't use cash. Every time you go to an ATM, you take out cash, you can use that hundred Europe to pay for five to seven purchases. Now you're not doing one transaction, but you're pricing that one transaction with seven digital transactions. You can imagine that while ATM transactions plummeted in Germany, the actual volume of heart transactions Rose because of that.
00:32:32
Speaker 1
In, and again, and I think once people get used to that, it does stay. But, it's one of the things that why this is fascinating to be in payments and be in Europe.
00:32:42
Speaker 0
Exactly. Right. We're in the right industry.
00:32:45
Speaker 1
Absolutely. You have to pay always, you've got to eat it up. Hey.
00:32:49
Speaker 0
Yup. Exactly. And sleep every now and then.
00:32:53
Speaker 1
And he paid for it.
00:32:57
Speaker 0
Exactly. In the series that we're talking about, the ABCD of pavements, artificial intelligence, blockchain cloud, and data. Well, before we talked about blockchain quite a bit, but within a company like Fs, where does artificial intelligence, how dominant is that within your daily operations?
00:33:16
Speaker 1
Yeah. Quite dominant. There is a lot of, there's a link between artificial intelligence and kind of go a D yeah. Artificial intelligence. We talked about the BPO services that we bring. We've recently brought a new product, to the market called Epic, which is taking artificial intelligence into a BPO services and combining that with data so that we can bring a lot more informed decisioning into our conversations in call centers, for example, and then artificial intelligence plays, a huge role, when it comes to decisioning. For example, when it comes to fraud detection, when it comes to launching money laundering, pieces so everywhere where decisioning is playing a role, artificial intelligence and technology has been embedded into the solutions that FIS brings tomorrow.
00:34:18
Speaker 0
I can just, well, imagine that specifically with the size, that FIS has there are so many operational procedures that used to require manual input that the game that you can receive retrieved from, ultimating and artificial intelligence is significantly higher than for a smaller company. This is as well, why it's so embedded in your core strategy.
00:34:41
Speaker 1
Absolutely. If you think about the business, that FIS is in, ultimately it's the business of data and understanding that data effectively, it, artificial intelligence provides a huge lever on that. You think about the pool of data that we have across the globe. It's actually quite fascinating. Some of the interesting conclusions that you can draw from that. So, so we're really bringing that out. So, so think about the impact that artificial intelligence can have on how we bring our solutions to market and customer journeys. You think, but, we talked about crypto, we haven't talked about blockchain. It's really interesting to see how, for example, the technology of blockchain can be used in trading transactions. I do have questions and I get into huge debates about this all the time. I don't think today the computing power is efficient enough to make blockchain truly viable for high volume transactions.
00:35:49
Speaker 1
When it comes about to ownership and being able to prove ownership, there is a lot of interesting uses of blockchain.
00:35:57
Speaker 0
The distributed ledger is a key, aspect of that.
00:36:00
Speaker 1
Absolutely. That is very much, being, looked at in what we call our gross office. We have a whole separate, unit that is very much looked at, okay, what are our next products? What's our innovation. There's a lot of investment going into that piece. When you take that computing power to the cloud, I think I always find it funny when people talk about the cloud. The cloud is just another day to say, right. I don't know whether they think, but just another data center, but when you think about the public cloud and some of the investments that the big tech is bringing to those, then that is really taking some of the responsibility of, for example, banks away from, investing into that underlying technology to be able to invest into that technology. Now, the very interesting discussion when it comes to cloud is initially it was thought that the cloud would bring a huge cost reduction purely on the infrastructure side.
00:37:17
Speaker 1
When you look at it's not so much that it will only bring that when customers embrace the fact that the cloud enables them to deliver functionality a lot more quickly. It's a combination about what's your technology strategy on the one hand, and what is your development, stretch strategy on the other hand, and you really need to bring those together to really bring out the value of the cloud and being able to deliver these solutions a lot.
00:37:51
Speaker 0
Yeah. For a company like Fs, like you said, yeah. I think one of the biggest sets of data in the payment industry, you are the banking industry, all over the globe. Need having that data stored in data centers that are cloud-based is key in order to gain access to the data. As well, I can imagine that some parts of the business are so sensitive and need to run social security that for you choose to run them on premise instead of in cloud, how do you design a data strategy or a cloud strategy around that to identify, okay, first of all, to adhere to all the rules and regulations, because for instance, a Moscow, you need to have it stored within the country, borders, Turkey, India, I think same as well. And for other countries it's more open. How such enormous global skill can you conduct a cloud strategy to adhere to all the rules and regulations, but as well, make use of the possibilities that cloud offers?
00:38:50
Speaker 1
Yeah. So it's really a triple C strategy. It's, on-premise, it's a private cloud and then it's public cloud and you make that decision piece by piece, as you can imagine, in, the type of company that FIS is, it's like security first. Yeah. And, and I think everybody would want us to function that way. It really depends on what is the service that we're providing, where are we providing that service? What are the rules and regulations and having that security embedded. And, and, when I think about payments, it's, availability,
00:39:38
Speaker 0
Security,
00:39:40
Speaker 1
Everything else on top, right? Because we're dealing with people's money. Sometimes, we forget that when we're thinking about all the bells and whistles, but it's, paying other than payment geeks like me paying doesn't actually make people happy,
00:39:58
Speaker 0
It's like getting paid on the other end.
00:40:02
Speaker 1
It is like lightened water. Right. We expect the light to go on. When we flip the switch, we expect hot water to come up. When we step out into the shop, it, we only get extremely unhappy when it's not there.
00:40:16
Speaker 0
Yet.
00:40:17
Speaker 1
So, so security, absolutely availability absolutely. As well, everything that we do, that is the basis that enables us to even be part of the industry.
00:40:30
Speaker 0
Yeah. Looking towards the future, indeed availability and security is key. There are so many initiatives with alternative payment methods with the development of virtual card issuing with cryptocurrency. What are you most excited about in the next two to three years? What are the developments that you're looking forward to?
00:40:49
Speaker 1
I think it's really a lot of these things coming together and enabling new customer journeys that I'm most excited about. I think we're just at that point where, a lot of things that we've talked about in the industry for years are going to become real to everyday businesses and everyday people. I think that's where the proof of the pudding is. Can we bring instant payment to point of sale effectively in a way that people actually understand it because most people really don't get it. Right. They don't care. They just want it to work.
00:41:29
Speaker 0
Yeah, exactly. I do see an interesting dynamic that people are getting more interested in the payment itself. At least in the background payment companies are becoming more out open in the public. Like I can, like if I S you name it, that people are more aware that there's a lot behind the payment methods, and especially with alternative payments, like Klarna, like Afterpay, they are more concerned with it. Perhaps indeed, it's right now the right melting pot to really make that transition. And, yeah. And, and take the next leap.
00:42:01
Speaker 1
I think so. I think the pandemic has driven a lot of that, and I always find it interesting. You look at the newspaper and there's always a story about payments. It's not an industry that people don't understand or don't relate to. It's something that we do with everyday life, which is again, why it's exciting to be a part of it. You can't, you cannot learn to be a payment expert. You kind of end up with it, but once you're in it's a wonderful industry.
00:42:30
Speaker 0
Exactly. I fully agree. I fully agree. And, yeah, within this industry, we always have interesting conversations like we had today. Sophie, I want to thank you a lot for being on this podcast. I had an absolute blast. It was really fun. And, I think we covered some interesting topics as well.
00:42:47
Speaker 1
Thank you so much. And, you know, hope we speak again. It's been a really great time to spend speak soon. Bye.