FinTech2012 Symposium: Gathering At The Epicenter Of Payments

Nearly 300 payment luminaries, corporate executives, entrepreneurs and service providers gathered in Atlanta on November 14, 2012 to discuss critical issues in the emerging payments and financial services landscape. The third annual TAG FinTech event, brought speakers from Google, The Home Depot, Delta Airlines, VeriFone, Ingenico, NCR and a range of industry thought leaders to share perspectives of the future of the payments industry. Sean Banks, a partner at TTV Capital and Chairman of TAG FinTech said, “This event shows an ever increasing awareness of Georgia’s Financial Technology industry and its place as the global leader in transaction processing.” Lifetime achievement award winner, Paul Garcia, Chairman and CEO of Global Payments, reinforced the payments value created in Georgia saying, “More than 70% of payments in the US process via Georgia.”

The event brought together a mix of traditional payments players from Georgia-based FinTech companies, like Elavon, First Data, Global Payments, Ingenico, NCR, TSYS and VeriFone, and mixed them in with startups, technology companies and payments industry thought leaders for an interesting dialogue. The Industry showcase including a range of traditional and upstart companies, including Cachet, Cardlytics, Chargeback Guardian, CorFire, eDeposit, Elavon, IVR Technology, Kabbage, MyCheck, NCR/Radiant, OneID, Pindrop Security, Revo Payments, Rigor, ShopKeep POS and TSYS.

One of my favorite panels was the Future of the POS, moderated by Jason Richelson of ShopKeep. Panelists represented Verifone, Ingenico, NCR Silver, Acculynk and Interwov. Talk in the session focused on the promise of cloud-technology to simplify the POS even while adding functionality around security, merchant-rewards, analytics and mobile payments. Jason Richelson used his own retail experience to put a real customer lens on the cloud discussion saying, “Why the cloud? Because no one should have a server in the basement of their grocery store.”

Another great panel was led by Marianne Johnson, EVP of Product and Innovation, at Elavon. Her “Merchant Hour” panel included payments experts from Delta Airlines, The Home Depot and Heidelberg, USA (a B2B company). Some of the key takeaways from the merchant side were not surprising. Card interchange costs are a huge issue for players like Delta and Home Depot where they represent a major (top 3) expense. Similarly, costs associated with network-led security and technology initiatives like EMV and NFC raised skepticism from the merchants. For example, Malcolm Nunnes of The Home Depot said, “EMV requires retailers to incur big investments to keep my costs the same. I don’t see the value.” He added, “Mobile payments are not a differentiator for a retailer right now. It doesn’t cause someone to turn into my stores and not go to Lowe’s.”

Both Home Depot and Delta were PayPal/BillMeLater fans. Brian Ficek of Delta said, “In Germany 60% of customers want to pay online with PayPal. We also want to partner with alternative players like BillMeLater.” Mobile payments was another interesting topic area, where Delta indicated they had more thinking to do about how to address the plethora of mobile wallets, while The Home Depot expressed skepticism about mobile payments overall. Home Depot’s Nunnes said, “Mobile payments at the POS? I don’t get it. Cards work fine in the store.”

Another interesting presentation included a presentation by Frank T. Young of Google Wallet on its move to the cloud. Particularly interesting was Young’s coverage of the changes since the first iteration of Google Wallet. He shared that, “Our initial theory about NFC was wrong. We learned over time that we needed to be open and had to move to the cloud. The first version of Google Wallet didn’t scale. We learned that we needed to reduce complexity and cost to banks.”