In the seventh episode of our new podcast “Voices In Payments” our host, Diederik Klopper discusses the importance of a true omnichannel experience, POS developments, and what the future of payments will look like with Eddie Johnson, Head of Product Marketing at AEVI.
AEVI lays the foundation for next-generation acquiring by empowering merchant solution providers to move and manage their classic payments proposition into a new value-added world of apps, payments, and smart devices.
Listen to this Voices In Payments Podcast Episode to find out:
If you’re curious to find out more about how AEVI simplifies the complex payment landscape with a single integration for merchant solution providers Please reach out to Eddie Johnson if there are any topics covered in the podcast that you want to explore further.
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.
PaymentGenes Empowers Business growth by providing expertise-driven Recruitment, Contracting, Business Strategy Consult, and Data Strategy Services. These services all resolve and intersect around payments. Learn more about how we can help your business here.
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Hi, everybody. Welcome to the payment genes podcast series voices in payments. I'm your host Diederik Klopper. In this podcast series, we'll talk all about recent developments in the payment industry. Today we're joined by Eddie Johnson. Eddie is the head of product marketing at Avi. Avi has found some work around steward. Some of the limitations that point of sale devices have with Eddie. We'll talk about only channel and flow and the future of point of sale. Eddie, a very warm welcome to the show. Thank you. Happy to have you here, Eddie. I always start with the same question. I never met anybody who woke up one day said I'm going to be a payment expert. How did you stumble into payments? Well, what happened is I woke up one day and said, I'm going to be a payments expert. Finally. I, no.
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00:56
Like I think everybody that's come on your podcast. I, I came into payments by accident. I actually started off as a teacher. I taught high school kids how to use computers for five years. From there I, took a slightly strange path via, being a developer to being a product manager and project manager for websites for a web agency. From there moved over to payments via the Android space because that's the right. So I was, Android first payment second. And and that's how I joined Davy. I was actually the product manager for a lot of, Android device tools. From there, I've now moved to being the head of product marketing.
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01:47
The guy that talks about the product a lot, here at Avi, and we also like to talk product, speaking of which is a massive company and a broad portfolio of services that you offer, just talk us through it. What are you guys do? Yeah, super high level. We have a, a platform that allows our customers who are typically large acquirers or people that are mentioned facing themselves, to simplify their face to face payments. In many ways, obviously I've mentioned very briefly, the work that we do with smart posit devices, in fact, many people who know Avi know that we had, one of the first smart post devices out on the market, in the, in a device called the Albert. We don't make devices anymore. We just make the platforms that run the things.
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02:37
We do a lot of stuff with face to face payments, device management, and generally unifying simplifying the payments. Well yeah, exactly. Of course, everybody in payment industry is talk about only channel, which is connecting offline to online. 50% of that is in store face-to-face payments of the transition.
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03:00
How would you define a true omnichannel experience and how does Avi fit into that?
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03:05
Yeah, it's a good question. It tends to be one of those buzzwords, right? People want omnichannel, everything, and, exactly. You say, well, what does that mean? for me, omni-channel, essentially means that I should never have to tell someone something twice. If I've told you who I am installed, then you should know who I am online. If I've told you who I am online, and you should know who I am in store, if I've bought something off you in one place, then I should be able to return it to another place. I should be able to get support on the things that I've purchased, no matter which channel that I go through. Right. It's all about that centralization of the information and the centralization of the data, to give me the customer. I always look at it from the customer side of things, right.
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03:51
I want the best experience possible, no matter how I decide to engage with your store, the amount of times I've seen, a shop and I've gone on there and I've gone on to that shop website, and I've seen a better deal, on that shop's website. I can't physically buy it now for the same price that I could buy it from their own online store from is pretty ridiculous. So, you know, it's solving those challenges. It's solving that disconnect between the different ways of shopping. Yeah.
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04:20
As well as the examples that you can see in here. There's a store where I bought trousers online, never just one size, too big, went into the store and was able to change to swap them out for the size that fit. That's already miles ahead, of many of the competition. Why is it such a difficult thing to achieve for companies?
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04:43
There are lots of reasons. Again, coming from the web world, I'm well aware of, any of them, but the main reason is because the two universities as it were the online and the payments, and the in person payments world, grew up completely separately. The website was often an afterthought that was created a few years ago off of the back of the need for a website. It was never seen as a serious sales channel when it was first launched. Whereas the instore has always been a serious sales channel. That's been heavily regulated and hard to change. You've got these two worlds, one, which was never really created with serious sales in mind, and one which obviously was created with serious sales in mind, but has been hugely heavily regulated, making it very hard to adapt it.
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05:34
Bringing those two worlds together is a real challenge. The, the biggest thing that you'll find is when you say to a company, right, we're gonna, we're going to make a change to make things better. You've got to go through a lot of pain to get to the good at the end, right. I remember working for a large retail store, when I was at university and that large retail store at the time implemented a new point of sale system. The new point of sale system was better in every way, right? When you looked at it objectively, it was better in every way. It was big holler screens with touchscreens. We'd been using this old school text-based interface before. Every single member of staff hated the new system for the old one. Right. So it was disruptive. We all hated it.
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06:24
We all, we all had to be retrained on it. It was a huge upheaval, but once it was in, the benefits were obvious because we had that connection online and all of these sorts of things. So it's just getting over that hump.
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06:36
Yeah. That's as well, a, I'm not sure if you've seen the meme where there's a leader setting in front of a large audience and asking who wants change and everybody screams from the top of her lungs. He asked, who wants to change? And then everybody's dead silent. It gets as well to transition that you talk about here. Yeah. It's halfway between that. The, the main, which is the caveman dragging along his large bundle of things. The other guy comes up and says, Hey, here's the wheel. The caveman says, Hey, I'm too busy for your new invention. Exactly exactly. How does Avi fit into that picture? Because like you said, you facilitated the first phase payments. How does it transition into alumni.
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07:21
Gentlemen show? So you're absolutely right. We we very much focus on solving face to face challenges. That doesn't mean that we don't keep our eye on everything else. Right. We are not an online payments provider. What we are is a, a channel through which these things can be connected. Everything that we do in online payments is designed to open the Gates and to open the doors to proper data sharing. You, perform a transaction on an AAV run terminal, that transaction rather than just going straight to the acquire and back again, can be notified through other places. For example, we can integrate with an online commerce platform. As soon as a transaction is made in store, the online commerce platform can receive a notification of that transaction, but not just the full transaction itself.
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08:13
Our platform allows us to collect all of the data around that transaction as well, and pass that through to the relevant channels. We in ourselves and not an Omni channel solution, right. We are a face to face payment solution, but we have been architected from the ground up to be able to implement that Omni channel experience, to be able to share the data in the right way, in a way that the main data repositories are going to be expecting it, and importantly in real time. Right. You don't have to wait for a day or two days when you've done your transaction to be able to go online and see it. Everything that we do try and do in real time. Yeah. And I think a massive.
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08:56
Part of that as well as his app flow, what you guys designed it, I think you're as well, mainly responsible for that. I've seen it already some presentation, but for the listeners who don't know it yet, talk us through it.
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09:09
So, so that flow, and I do like the, I come across as responsible for it. It's actually the development.
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09:14
Responsible for it. I just take all the credit.
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09:21
Right. It's the rightful, app flow is an interesting part of that. Actually we've got a new product coming up called cloud flow as well, which extends the concept. The idea of app flow is, essentially to remove all of the barriers for two things, right? And when we look at these point of sale experiences and you take the restrictions off the point of sale, and we can make it so that any apps can run on any devices and all of these, this good stuff, we found two major challenges. One was making these apps talk to each other, and that was a big challenge. That's a big challenge for anyone that's been in the development world, getting two companies to talk and integrate with each other is hard. Secondly, making multiple apps feel like a unified checkout experience on the device.
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10:09
We have this problem of communication, and we have this problem of orchestration, and app flow solves both of those challenges on the point of sale devices that it runs on. It allows, a seamless checkout experience. Coming back to your point about omnichannel and data sharing, it allows the data to be shared between those applications in a seamless and unified way. The app developers don't have to talk to each other to integrate anymore. They all talk to app flow, and they can all receive the data about the transaction in a way that they're going to be expecting it. We've taken that and solved loads of challenges on smart, positive vices, which is crazy. We already look at SmartPost devices as being, the thing with challenges to overcome, not just the big opportunity. So we solved all of those challenges.
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10:59
Now what we're doing with cloud flow is we're taking that orchestration idea and saying, well, look, our transaction, doesn't just live on the device. We've solved that we've got that on the device. We know that these apps can flow together, hence app flow, and share the data seamlessly. What happens when that transaction comes off the device and goes into the cloud either to talk back to a, a cash register or to talk to the acquirer or to do whatever it needs to do, how can we pull in extra services at that point as well? And that's where we're going.
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11:31
Yeah. I have the unique opportunity to speak somebody who's got experience on the development side, but as well, talks to business side. Everybody speaks about it, and it's super difficult to get different platforms to speak to each other. You as a developer, why is it so difficult? And what is the solution? Because obviously you found them,
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11:54
Yeah. The, the difficulty is actually not a development challenge. The difficulty is often a political challenge. You look at these big platforms and everybody says, okay, cool. We you want to talk to us here is how you talk to us right here is the language that you need to speak to talk to us. You have the other company on the other side saying, no. Here is the language you need to speak to us, right? So you have these, often big companies who, just play a political game of no. You integrate to me. The, the thing that we found with app flows is two things.
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12:31
One because we are helping smaller developers have a bigger platform, right? One of the things with the point of sale is traditionally, unless you do everything, you can do nothing because unless you cover all of the bases, then you're not relevant in that market. Whereas we're saying, because we can make lots of smaller applications work together to cover all that functionality. We can work with smaller developers. We can work with developers who are more agile, more responsive to change, more responsive to being able to put out new features. Because we're working with these smaller developers, they're much more receptive to make those changes, right. Importantly, where we have a need to, for example, go out to another standard, another language we need to work with a big company.
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13:19
Who's not going to change, we've built app flow from the ground up to be flexible, to be responsive to these alternative methods of communication. For example, with everything that we do, we standardize the way that we talk only in documentation, we don't hard coded into the devices. We don't hard-code it into the app. If someone comes along and says, actually for basket data, we need it to look like this, then that's fine. We can just update our documentation and all of our systems we'll still work with it. We've deliberately built everything to be flexible and to be responsive to these needs.
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13:58
That when we inevitably come across the large company, the large accounting software company that say either we won't change, or we will change, but it will take us three years and then we can respond to that and we can make, the middleware or the piece of translation equipment, very quickly. Yeah.
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14:18
You make it sound really easy, but why hasn't anybody else on it so far? Because the only reason I can think of it's far more complicated than.
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14:27
Yeah. One of the biggest reasons is not because it's more complicated than it sounds, although it is more complicated than it's. One of the biggest reasons is because, there's a big question around who would have done it. Everyone outside of, the Avery universe, has a reason not to. If you talk to a large application developer, they have a reason not to make this interchange easy because they want to be the only app on the device. They want to have that piece of the pie to themselves. You talk to the device manufacturers, they don't want you to write to an open standard. They want you to write to their device because that ties you to them. Again, every player that you look at in this realm has a reason to not make it easy.
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15:15
Whereas Avi come along and say, look, guys, actually one of our core tenets, one of the core things that we're trying to achieve is more openness in the payment space. We're trying to break vendor lock in for acquirers to say to acquirers, look, guys, you don't need to use, the systems from the device vendor that tie you to that device vendor forever. You can use systems that can work with any device. So, we come along and trying to break down these barriers and that puts us in a prime position to actually be able to put the technology in the middle that allows this agnosticity.
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15:48
Yeah. Did it as well, offer some difficulties in selecting a hardware supplier?
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15:54
I know, for instance, well, again, we don't select hardware suppliers. We work with multiple hardware vendors. Yeah,
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16:02
You need the access to their platform right. In order to build a product for them.
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16:07
Yeah. That was a big challenge to start with. We're not going to lie, especially coming from the place where we said, no, were a hardware vendor. When we started down this path, we had our own piece of hardware. A lot of these guys saw us as competitor.
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16:22
The competitor,
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16:24
Why would we give our competitors, our access to our platform or access to our device? and actually, as we explained, look, we're hardware agnostic, we're moving away from our own hardware. We had two types of device manufacturers, the ended up working with us, one of the ones that are really receptive to wanting to work with us that believe in our goals, that wants to move forwards with that. We've got four or five partners who are like that, who will say, look, guys, we're a hundred percent behind you. We know that your management platform is better than ours. We know that your management platform has huge advantages. Actually we believe that together we can do more. We have the hardware manufacturers that are still trying with the old world to wrap the acquirers and to say to the, to our customers, no.
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17:12
You need to use our solutions. What we found with those, we call them situational partners rather than proactive partners. Because what happens is when, the large customer comes along, they see the benefits of our open platform, but they still want to use the hardware from one of these traditional players. We have found that every single time when we've gone and spoken to them about these big opportunities, they've said, okay, yeah, fine, no problem at all, you can play in our swimming pool now. It just takes that deal to get over the line. Again, we work with people proactively. We work with people situationally, but every single time when there's been, an acquire on the table, it's been no problem.
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17:54
Nice, great. To hear. Great to hear. I think you mentioned app flow, but as well, the coming up cloud flow, what's the step there that you're going to take?
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18:03
Yeah. The main driver behind, the first release of cloud flow, which is coming up before the end of the year, is to allow, more, integration between multiple fists of dry app flow souls integration between systems on a device. If you've got a smart posit device, you've got lots of apps running on the spot positivise app flow, solds that challenge.
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18:30
From loyalty to split payments. Yeah.
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18:33
Exactly. Yeah. From the paws to the payment app, with everything in between, that's where app flow really sets, with cloud flow. The first challenge that we've gone to solve is to say, look, initiating a payment on a device from another device is sometimes complicated, right? So if you need to have, your point of sale on a tablet or on a windows PC or on something else, that's not the payment device, and then take the payment on the payment device that can often be challenging, right. And having that interchange. That's the first challenge of the cloud flow goes to solve. It allows you to start a payment remotely on any payment terminal, whether it's a smart terminal, or whether it's a traditional terminal from wherever you are. It can be an online point of sale system. It could even be a website, right.
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19:20
Again, when we're talking about omni-channel tying, all of those systems together is really important. So being able to start.
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19:27
Imagination doesn't mean that I'm standing in store on my phone, I'm going to a website or on the tablet that is in store. I'm going to the website, select all the items that I want to purchase. That then connects to the terminal to facilitate my payment.
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19:41
Absolutely. That's that's the use case that we're looking at with cloud flow right. Is, is breaking down those barriers between, what lives, where does it have to live on a payment device? And, we're always future looking. We know at some point in the future payments are going to be moved away from traditional secured payments devices and onto consumer style devices.
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20:07
Oh, let's see. Need of course, but the Apple acquisition of mobi wife, which is her the first step in that direction. Of course she has android has been there already for some time.
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20:16
Yeah, exactly. So, we've always got, one eye on, okay, well, what other payment devices of the future? We already look at, Android smart pots devices, although they have a, a long path ahead of them. We're already looking at those as still in the traditional world of payment devices that are specialists payment hardware. We're looking at what's coming next. What what is going to replace the specialist payment hardware? And at some point in the future, there's going to be no hardware at all, right. It's going to move even consumer device to consumer device. It's going to move to, we don't even need a piece of hardware to make payments happen. We're always looking at how we can keep those systems connected, how we can keep those payments, because at the end of the day, there's always going to be a backend to that payment.
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21:01
There's always going to need to be rooting. Somehow. There's always going to need to be some communication and data flow. We're always looking at how our systems can enable those next steps and cloud flow is one of those solutions. Yeah. You mentioned no hardware involved in the payment. How do you see that, hypothetically? How could it work? Well, you say that's for other people to invest money, to work out how we make work, how to implement it. Yeah. You can easily see a way even with, you look at some emerging markets you look at, in the, in the APAC region. The rise of things like we chat, pay, right with Weechat pay with a QR code based payments. I as a merchant, I, as the vendor, don't have to have any physical piece of hardware. I can print out a QR code, right.
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21:54
And put it on my wall. Someone can walk in, scan the QR code, make a payment to me, and then I can check it off on my phone or on my smart watch or on my PC or whatever it is and make sure I have received that payment. That's the first step to this hardware, less payment world. That is only going to grow the more people want frictionless payments. The more people want, I don't want to have to queue, I don't want to have to tap a thing anymore. I don't even want to take a device with me. That's going to, that is going to some of the downsides of Moby way. For instance, you have to enter your pin on a other hardware device owned by somebody else. It's much more convenient to own your opinion and your own device.
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22:37
For instance, those are already breaking down barriers. Yeah. Yeah. And, with the rise of, pinless payments. On my Android device, where the payment terminal supports it, I can do higher value transactions without having to enter my pin anywhere because I've identified myself to my device and my device has said yet, I know Maya metric. Exactly. Right. So, so were things like that, I shouldn't have to identify myself to you for my payment. I should have to identify myself to me to prove using my device. Right. And, and it's about that shift in mindset and obviously security, mindsets change slowly. They really do. But, but actually, if you look into the U S region, right, they've actually, while American payments look so behind and slow for so many people in the West end in the Western world in here, outside the U S right.
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23:34
Where they're still using signature, they're still using old school methods of payment as far as we're concerned. Cause we've been chipping pin for so long and we've now been NFC for so long. The the actual concept in America is much more about, proof and identification. I am, I am proving to you that I'm allowed to use my card. I'm not proving to you that I'm allowed to use my card. Right. And, and the signature is actually security for me, not security for you. It's, the U S has always been built on that the way round security,
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24:08
The U S mindset about it, charged brag, et cetera. It's totally different here than in Europe. I remember that I first held a mischarge on my credit card and I called my bank said, listen, I want a charge back. They said, Oh, well, you have to talk to the store saying, no, I don't.
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24:27
Yeah. Obviously with AAV being a global company, you learn some of these, foibles and little uniquenesses, quite quickly when I did my first project working with a U S payments company. I learned how payments work in us restaurants, where actually when you're paying, you're not paying, you're authorizing an amount. When they bring you the bill and you put your tip on it, they don't actually take that money at any point until the end of the day. At the end of the day, they go through all of this stack of checks and actually, settle the authorizations, which to me is completely crazy, especially when I've been taught, for the last 10 years, never to let my cart out of sight, always to have the carpeting. It's still just not like that.
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25:11
It's, it's a real challenge for it for a global company like Avery, where there are such individual mindsets in different companies about what is, and isn't secure, what is, and isn't the way to do things,
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25:24
Even not a general consensus under the regulators. So that's a.
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25:28
Yeah, well, the regulators are often half the problem.
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25:33
I think, I think we could fill an entire podcast talking about that.
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25:37
Yeah. Yeah. That's, what's really interesting for me is coming from, not in the payments world. As I said, my background is not payments. My background is usability, accessibility. I was a front end web developer to start with. I had all of these things in mind, for so many years, actually payments is often the usability and the accessibility are obscured by the security. Right. And, and I can understand why, but what's really interesting for me is coming from the outside is being able to look in and say, but why do we do that? Right. Why is that always the way that's, how we've always had to do it? Yeah. Why have we always had to do it that way? Because it always reminds me of the old fable where, someone's putting a roast dinner in the oven. Right.
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26:23
They take a lamb and they cut the end off the lamb and they put it in the oven and they cook the lamb and the daughter says, why do you always cut the end of the lamb? And she says, Oh, that's because that's what my mother always used to do. They go to the grandmother and they say, well, why do you cut the end off of the lamb? And they said, well, because my oven was too small. It's like, well, we've carried on things even though they don't make any sense anymore. There's so much of that in this industry that they're trying to break down. Those norms is really important.
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26:53
That's a funny story. You also sort mentioned once again, the global reach that Avi has, of course now we're living in quite absurd times here with the COVID-19 situation. How do you see any, changes in payment behavior in face to face payment, world, vary across regions? And do you see massive influence on COVID besides the head of people are less willing or less open to go to stores, but is there a shift in the way they want to pay or the flows that are taking on your devices?
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27:32
Yes. The short answer, payment has become more and more of a necessary evil in the store, right. You're seeing more and more, the rise of contactless payment. This has really pushed cash down, which is good for the card payment, people, but it's driven the rise even more than it already was of contactless payment and device-based payment rather than card-based payment, you're moving away from the situation where you even want to put your card into a machine anymore, and you just want to tap it and walk away. So it's all about speed. It's all about efficiency. It's about minimizing the impact of the interactions that you have to have also on top of that, more than ever, people who were traditionally in-person customers are becoming online customers and seeing the benefits of it.
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28:25
My, personal story of that is I have a, a local micro pub, which I have a picture of right here called the Dodo micro pub, which is my local micro pub. Obviously they were shut through that through the whole pandemic, but they opened up an online store where they, where I could go and I could order my four pints of locally sourced beer. I do have the beard to go with this, by the way. They're in the bed to go hand in hand. I could order that online and I could just walk down to their store and collect it. So, I, in that situation, traditionally, an in person customer for that retailer, it was important that I received the same, not just the same product, the product is only half the deal, right?
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29:08
It's the service, it's the friendliness, it's the neighborhood vibe that I got from that particular pub that makes me like it. It was important for them to be able to carry across that ethos that feel onto their online presence. That's really important for these stores that are picking up online retail from traditionally in-person, customers. They need to know what makes those customers in-person customers. What makes those customers keep coming back and be able to translate that across the different mechanisms of working. Yeah.
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29:44
At the same time as well, find a way in order to accept payments on locations, perhaps that they were not used to, and of course, a mPulse devices are a massive part of it.
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29:57
Yeah. Yeah. Being able to walk up to someone's front door, deliver them something and take the payment there, and then would be a huge boon for it, for a lot of these companies. Right. And, and, some of the modern SmartPost devices where you can do everything on the device, you don't need another device to be able to deal with. That would be a huge solver for some of these things. Yeah.
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30:16
Excellent. That looking, has, perhaps towards more micro merchants, I know you're mostly tending towards the requires, but I could also see a situation where micro merchants, misuses or whatever. A practitioner, use your solution in order to facilitate payments to their clientele as well.
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30:38
Yeah. For a micro merchant space, they've, for so long been very well served by basic payment solutions so they can take basic payments, that's it that, and that bit's easy yet. There's cost associated with it in percentages of that transaction. But there's two problems with that. With the sort of impulse solutions. One is I have to use my own device, right? People look at an mPulse solution as a cheap way of taking payments, but actually if I'm a micro merchant, but I'm running a store every single day, then either I'm using my own personal device to take all of those payments to connect up to the end device. That means my device is basically out of service while I'm busy, or I buy a dedicated device to take those payments and to connect to my imposs solution.
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31:26
All of a sudden that impulse solution isn't so cheap anymore. Yes. It was a, a 50 Euro dongle to actually take the payments, but I'm connecting it to a $600 or a 600 year ROI fired. All of a sudden I've got a 650 old solution, whereas an integrated smart post device. Yes it has a higher cost than just a single end post device, but it's an all in one unit, right. I can do potentially my point of sale on there. My loyalty on there, I've got this integrated unit, which I can leave with my stand. I don't need to worry about taking it home and de sinking it and deep hiring it. It takes a lot of the security worries out of it for people, because it looks like a dedicated piece of payment hardware.
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32:08
It takes a lot of the support challenges out because I'm not connecting a device to another device. These smart, positive vices almost as the next step up, right. You've proven that you need to take card payments. Let's look at what the next thing is for you. An integrated smart post devices is good for so many people.
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32:27
I could as well. I imagine that people are quite hesitant to enter personal data on a, be a POS device, but perhaps indeed, a cash register system is something that they're already more familiarized with. So I'm making the connection. Dara is more natural to them.
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32:41
Yeah, absolutely. Where it looks like, that's the one advantage of dedicated payment hardware, right? Is people trust it, you look at it looks like a dedicated piece of payment hardware. It comes with all of those years of built trust where you go, okay, well, this must be a secure device.
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32:58
Yeah, indeed. Looking towards the future, had we already touched upon it a few times, but how do you see the point of sill transitioning in the coming two to three years, or perhaps four to five years, and then as well, if we're looking at 20, 25 years down the line, what are some of the developments that we can see?
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33:19
Yeah, flexible, I think is the short answer. I think, if we look at the next two to three years, there are definitely going to be lots of point of sales that look like point of sales today, right? They're not, we're not at the point where in three years time, everyone's going to be making payments in different ways, but we are at the point where in two to three years, some people will be making payments in different ways. Some retailers will want to accept those payments in different ways. Things like peer to peer payments, QR code payments, non tradition.
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33:48
Offering, offering all the payments that you have online in store makes total sense.
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33:55
Being able to pay with crypto currency is in person is one of those things that has been a, a dream for a while. It's been a vision of people for a while and it's had issues and it's had problems, but if people want to do it, people will want to accept it. Right. I'm not saying that it's about offering that choice and flexibility.
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34:15
I've always said that once you can buy with a pay with cryptocurrencies in store, it gets when the coin will stabilize as well. Because at the moment it's too volatile because it's not generally accepted as a payment method, but if you have that, then it's automatically, I think will stabilize as well.
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34:31
Absolutely. Yeah. There are, there are wider challenges around all of that, time to time for payment is a huge issue, right? Time to make a payment. If I go into a, a retail shop and I've got a queue of people behind me and I tap my card, whatever it is, and it says, okay, cool, I'm going to authorize that payment in five minutes, then that's no good for me. Right. I'm not, I'm not going to stand there. So, there are challenges around that, but it is something that people need to be looking. It's something that people need to be aware of.
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35:02
In general, I think it's a weird concept that online, I have all these alternative payment methods to my choosing and in store. I can't choose a buy now pay later solution, not easily.
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35:12
Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's yet another thing that drives people out of stores, right. If I can, if I can go online and pay with even something big, like, my online, PayPal account, for example, if I can go online and pay with that, but I can't pay with it in store, then I might be more likely to make my transaction online. Even if I do it on my phone while I'm standing in the store. Right. We had, a large conversation about this concept of web rooming and showrooming, where, you look online and buy in store or you look in store and you buy online. And it's not that simple, right.
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35:51
I came up with the concept of boomer rooming, because what often happens is, I'll look at something in a store I'll see it online because it's been targeted adverted to me, and then I'll go into a different store and they'll have a different version of it. I'll look at it on my phone. It's never as clear cut as I look in one place and buying another it's all about as a consumer when the time is right to buy it. Is it easy?
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36:14
Yeah, exactly. That's old tying into the user experience of the consumers. The first step now, a lot of companies have been pushed onto online, but still have a strong in store face-to-face, payment ecosystem, looking at those companies who still have a very clear division between the two, they are not integrated at all. What are some of the steps that they can make to increase, entered, optimize their user experience for in store payments? What are the first steps they should be looking at, should be taking in order to improve that the first step.
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36:53
You say, I, I always, I user experience with accessibility, right? And whenever you've got a touch point for a customer, you need to make sure that touch point is accessible for whoever it is that's going to be accessing it. That can mean a lot of things, right? It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Whether it's, you need it to be accessible because you have, some disability or impairment, whether you just need it to be accessible for your particular type of device. That's really what people need to focus on when it comes to these systems. If they want people to interact with their system, they need that system to be easy to use at the point that it's going to be used.
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37:36
That can take so many different forms that obviously we can't cover them all here, but, one example when it comes to this, the omnichannel world is I need to collect data, right. If I need to collect data about you, to be able to make omni-channel happen, then that data collection needs to not be a hindrance. Right. The best example of this I've seen recently is, one of the stores that I frequent, wants to gather my email address, right? They clearly want to gather my email address because they asked me for my email address. Every time I make a payment and there's no benefit to me. I'm never going to give them my email address.
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38:14
Another store I go into says, Oh, instead of me giving you a physical receipt, would you like me to email that to you? And I go, I will gladly at that point hand over my email address, because then I don't have a physical piece of paper that I need to walk out of the store with. I feel good because I'm not wasting another piece of paper. It means that I've got my transaction receipt in my email. For them, they have the benefit that they've now collected my email address. Right. So, so having that seamless hookup and the accessibility in both directions really makes a difference. Yeah.
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38:48
I couldn't agree more indeed, gathering data should as well be a transaction. There should be a benefit for the consumer for him to share his or her data before it really makes sense to do. All right. Well Eddie, I think we covered a lot of ground. Anything that we didn't discuss yet that we think you think we should touch on?
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39:10
Not from my side. No. I think as he said, I think we've covered quite a lot there. We, we should maybe have a second conversation at some point and talk about completely differently.
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39:19
I'm all for that. I'm all for that. No I definitely think we could fill another podcast with, or the shortly touched upon rules regulations. I think that's an interesting one, but, let's leave that for the future, but, thank you very much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I think definitely were we learned a lot and, yeah, a massive thing.
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39:40
See you, thank you. You can see why I stopped developing how I talked to him.
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39:46
Indeed. Indeed. Were you the ones who had a paper on this back saying, don't talk to me. I'm working.
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39:54
No, I was the one who that paper was aimed at.
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39:59
I can imagine. No thanks a lot. It's it's been enlightenment and, yeah. Thanks. Thanks very much for participant.
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40:05
Thank you for having me guys. All right. The voices in payments podcast is an initiative launched by payment genes, aimed at positively impacting the payments community by educating and connecting the market with vertical specific industry expertise. We as payment genes empower to industry by focusing on the fundaments for business growth. We achieved this by providing industry leading famous recruitment business and data strategy consulting services, checkout payment, jeans.com for more info.
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40:35
And please follow us on social media,
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40:37
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