The ‘Nuts And Bolts’ Of Enabling Payments

Whether it’s from the consumer, merchant or issuer perspective, streamlining the payment process lies at the core of any payment innovation.

But as David Butler, Creditcall’s new VP of Operations, summarized in an interview with MPD CEO Karen Webster on week two of his new role: innovation just for innovation’s sake isn’t true innovation.

That was the case at MasterCard, where Butler was a VP and Product Manager for MasterCard’s API platform on the emerging payments team. And he believes it should be true for any company. And as Butler knows, there isn’t one avenue to achieving innovation and new solutions. His background alone speaks to that.

Butler joined Creditcall in November 2015 to advance the company’s international growth as the demand for more secure payment solutions rise. Creditcall’s remit is to enable any payments method via any payments channel or device. EMV is a core competency.

Butler has 16 years under his belt as a senior engineer officer in the Royal Air Force in the U.K., and he also worked as a consultant for both the U.K. government and then for JPMorgan Chase. He founded Laborotech and then went on to be a mobile application and emerging technologies manager. He even worked with a small Silicon Valley startup.

And what he’s taken away from his many years in the tech/payments space is that innovation in payments is anything but simple.

“It’s difficult to innovate in payments. It requires a lot of specialist knowledge [and] a lot of patience,” he said in the interview.

Whether it’s self-service payments (Creditcall got its foray into the industry with unattended payments such as parking, vending and transportation), online, mobile, in-store or assisting with the U.S. EMV migration. Butler’s new company is about simplifying what the payments industry faces most today: taking the pain out of the process and procedures.

As reads its slogan, Creditcall’s payment solutions aim at making card acceptance simple, from any device, anywhere. Simpler said than done, of course. But that’s where Butler’s role comes into play: ensuring the “the nuts and bolts” of the company’s core is delivered to its customers.

Enabling card acceptance across any device, Webster noted, is becoming more and more important as commerce becomes more and more distributed. In the changing environment of payments and commerce, that also means a lot of moving parts for the new VP.

It means overseeing security and compliance, managing business processes and the management of operations to ensure infrastructure is up to date. It also means keeping up with certification of hardware. In his role of VP of Operations, removing some of the workload from the day-to-day management team can make all those important pieces flow smoother.

“The technology is breathtakingly complex,” Butler said. “Coupled with the intense regulations that are in place, it is designed so our credit cards are as safe as possible whenever we use them. The technology, although it delivers great benefits, can be very time-consuming to understand, very expensive to implement and very easy to get wrong.”

Creditcall has had a stake in the ground for almost 20 years [founded in 1996] and since then has followed the wave of technologies that have, according to Butler, “ended up firmly in the middle of the EMV technology space.” Its background has allowed the company to not only understand the necessary technology, but also leverage it. CreditCall had a jump in the U.S. EMV space because of its UK ties, which has provided it the benefit of being part of market that’s evolved the past 3-4 years.

But most importantly?

“Creditcall helps customers understand and overcome their pain points,” Butler said.

Bringing his big company perspective from IBM and MasterCard has helped Butler curtail his skillset into a smaller, more focused company that’s really honed in on solving one specific problem: simplifying payments. Still, his big company perspective matters to form the foundation he’s continuing to help Creditcall build. For the U.S., what that means right now is simplifying the process for developers and their merchants who want to start taking chip-and-PIN cards.

“[At MasterCard], innovation was the goal for our team. We were seeking to marry new technology to the payment space. Processes and procedures were built and followed. Watching how companies as large as MasterCard were not so much as taking side roads, but leveraging new technologies to deliver value was an education in itself. What it gave to me was a disciplined approach, matching new technology and approaches to delivering on strategic goals.”

As those in the industry know, leveraging new technologies has been the name of the game in 2015 — paving way for 2016. Webster recently wrote in her column that “in many ways, 2015 was the year in which everything – and nothing — about payments changed.” But what has happened has laid the breadcrumbs for the things to come, she noted.

Butler predicts the next few years will be all about minimizing time to market, and maximizing efficiencies. The development of The Internet of Things (IoT), will continue to evolve (Creditcall was an early adopter of IoT trends with its unattended payment machines). And then, of course, more specific focus on payments security.

“We think that that whole unattended payment space, coupled with tokenization, EMV, that whole point of encryption standards — those that are rapidly emerging can lead to some very exciting new products that boggle the imagination of what we can do if we get this right,” Butler said.