Ingenico, the world leader in payment terminal manufacturing, has invited its partners to the PayTech Summit in Barcelona, dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the company. Over the years, Ingenico has gained worldwide recognition and has become a trendsetter in the fast-growing payment market. Long-term relationships with partners and customers allow the company to receive prompt feedback and monitor trends both in consumer markets and in international payment systems markets.

Recent global trends, internal changes in the company's structure, and plans for the coming years have become the main topics of the forum, ​​which was visited by company partners from around the world, including Executive Director of ASHBURN International Žoržas Šarafanovičius. We talked with him about the event and its most important accents.

What was the key topic of the forum?

Ingenico representatives spoke about creating a secure and flexible cloud platform for payment services that can be integrated into the existing client infrastructure. Ingenico is completely reoriented from product to solution. This is not an improvement of a product or service. The idea is to develop a system for implementing the full payment cycle, which can be used by partners and end-users, choosing the modules necessary for a specific business case.

What are the platform's features?

The new system should be safe, flexible and accessible to all customers through open APIs. Modularity implies the ability to select only the necessary functionality and quickly deploy it in the client's infrastructure. The system will provide omnichannel transactions routing and aggregated Data analytics. The pay-per-use model aims to reduce costs.

How relevant is the Ingenico transformation to your company?

We are glad that the philosophy we have been following for more than 15 years - Software as a Service, Terminal as a Service - is becoming the strategy of such global companies as Ingenico. The functionality of our TransLink.iQ system also implies centralized fleet management, comprehensive real-time monitoring, multi-banking, multi-merchant, multi-hosting, and multi-vendor capabilities. We seek synergies with Ingenico to provide fast payment services. We have big plans for further cooperation.

How do banks and financial companies perceive a new approach?

Some clients relate to such a model with a certain degree of skepticism since it assumes a new way of interaction from both the economic and organizational sides. However, the rapid development of technologies and constant updates of software components highlight a solution that includes a payment device, its maintenance, transaction delivery, and analytics.

Please tell us about other news and trends in the world of payment technologies presented there.

The modern world dictates new conditions for making payments. Today, the payment function itself is no longer a commodity. A combined multi-channel approach to customer service comes to the fore. It includes the choice of a product (or service), the purchase process, delivery, and payment. Chat and voice bots, acting as consultants, as well as face recognition, are used to speed up payment. The phone becomes a payment terminal in which the payment function is integrated into the business application.

The latest developments in the field of EFTPOS terminals were presented at the exhibition booths. Due to the introduction of special software, Android devices turn into multifunctional terminals that can serve, for example, as cash registers. Our company has already implemented such solutions in Georgia and Uzbekistan, which allowed us to feel trendy. As part of the global payment ecosystem, we strive to anticipate the customers' expectations.