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.