Barry Stearn, Director, Brand Partnership Success, talks to our Senior Vice President, Marketing Communications, Liesl Smith, at RetailEXPO19 in London. They talk about the current payments landscape and pain point for services in the retail industry.

How important is it for FreedomPay to be here [at RetailEXPO] today?

It’s crucial that FreedomPay have a presence here today for RetailEXPO. Our whole organization is built around delivering success and revenues through our partner channel, and that obviously spans our product set of eCommerce, card present, moto and mobile as well. So, for us to be here in our own right and supporting our partners such as Oracle, Agilysys, Omnico in their journey and joining us on our journey across different territories such as Europe, it’s absolutely crucial.

Have you had good feedback already at the show?

Absolutely! It’s been quite a whirlwind of engagement so far, our building blocks are leveraging our relationships in our US organizations and our established integrations and taking advantage of them across different territories as well, so it’s been a very collaborative and an exciting journey so far and I’m sure over the course of the two days it’s going to get even more in depth and intense.

And when working with these partners, what are you seeing as the pain points for merchants today?

Again, you could verticalize that question and you could look at supportive different functionality across different verticals. Again, as we’re speaking at a retail event that’s not to say that FreedomPay aren’t very successful in other verticals such as hospitality, F&B and lodging. If we bring it back down to the retail point of view it’s about a general acceptance, and ubiquitous of integrations, so being able to accept card payments across a full omnichannel experience and ensuring that you support all local card brands in different territories.  Also, the standard processes of reliability, speed of transaction and obviously compliance and security are very relevant today.

Chris Kronenthal, President and CTO, talks to our Senior Vice President, Marketing Communications, Liesl Smith, at RetailEXPO19 in London. They talk about the advancements in payment infrastructure and the main recurring themes of the event.

So this is your first time to RetailEXPO in London, it’s exciting for the company – give me an idea of why FreedomPay, why now? Why are we coming to Europe?

I think we see a pretty substantial change in the eco system here, where originally maybe five years ago, perhaps even up until three years ago, a lot of the focus was on satisfying four chip and pin requirements, merchants were starting to become more educated about how security works in a PCI validated point-to-point encrypted state and now that that’s been embraced by the merchant demographic, they’re wanting the next stage of evolution here. They’re wanting to understand okay I have the payment infrastructure and we understand now the concepts of contactless, of PCI validated security; how do we take that the next step further and integrate that fully into our systems. How do we drive solutions around identity? How do we drive solutions around loyalty? And I think we see a tremendous opportunity to bring a payments platform to market that solves a lot of those merchants needs in a very standardised fashion.

So you talk about integration – how easy it for a merchant to make that change?

That’s really one of FreedomPay’s very strong offerings in the market – the strength of our integration libraries. When we engage an enterprise merchant or a large-scale ISV partner, we have both the methodology and the toolkits to make that integration very quickly. For example, if you’re an enterprise point of sale, even operating in industries as complex as lodging, we can get you up on our platform and utilising a large percentage of our capabilities in as little as four to six weeks.

At RetailEXPO, what are you seeing as the main themes? Are you seeing that FreedomPay is actually offering something unique to the marketplace?

I think a lot of the merchants here are still trying to understand how to implement things like omnichannel concepts, where from a North American market perspective most of our solutions have been fully integrated and essentially omnichannel capable for the past decade. The new addition to the North American market was layering in chip and pin and contactless solutions into those already fully integrated offerings. So, when you apply that to the European market, we find a lot of the merchants here are really looking for that Next Level of platform approach and how they can fully integrate their business to seamlessly tie together identity, loyalty, payments and really use that to drive business intelligence and get to that holy grail proposition a lot of merchants are looking for.

Tom Durovsik, CEO, talks to our Senior Vice President, Marketing Communications, Liesl Smith, at RetailEXPO19 in London. They talk about the main themes of the event and visions for the future.

Tom, exciting to be here. What do you make of [RetailEXPO] so far?

The show is fantastic and thank you for having me here in London. It’s one of the most fabulous cities in the world and as FreedomPay grows globally it’s an important financial centre for us to be not only for our customers but for the consumers

You’ve walked around the floor and looked at various exhibitors. What do you make of the themes coming out?

I think it’s all about innovation. That’s certainly what FreedomPay’s theme is. We’re bringing some of the most innovative products to Europe.

If you’re a merchant walking around RetailEXPO it can be really daunting and very complex. How does FreedomPay fit into that conundrum?

We’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of educating an industry on why they need to be on a commerce platform. To protect their brand, to innovate going into the future. One of the things we take pride in is we don’t sell, we solution. And everybody else is out there trying to sell merchant services or little black boxes, we’re trying to solve the merchants move into the future and how they are going to outwit their competition.

What do you think the team back in Philadelphia, the HQ of FreedomPay, would make of this show and why is it important to you?

We’ve got to be out in the marketplace. We’ve got to be understanding our partners, merchants and consumers. They are the ones who are really informing our product development. So, we’re spending tens of millions of dollars every year on our software development and it’s shows like this that inform us what we need to be competitive around the world.

What’s your vision for the future?

It’s very clear, actually. When I look around the world, there’s very little investment going in to new products, innovation, and certainly technology. A lot of companies in the eco system are busy selling other things, other black boxes, other merchant services. We’re focused, 100% on technology. When you want water, and you turn on the faucet you go to a water company. When you want electricity and you turn on the light, you go to the electric company. When you need enablement for consumer and merchant payments around the globe, you’ll go to FreedomPay.