The following is a transcript of the podcast episode.
PaymentsJournal:
Welcome to the Payments Journal podcast. I’m your host Ryan Mac. On today’s episode, we are going to be talking about global payments acceptance standards, and to help me with that discussion I have Claude Brun, the Chairman of Nexo Standards.Claude, welcome to the show.
Claude:
Thanks to you.
PaymentsJournal:
Let’s give our audience a little bit of an introduction. Can you first tell us a little bit about yourself and then talk about Nexo Standards.
Claude:
I am Claude Brun, Chairman of the Board of Nexo Standards. In fact, I am a junior. I had a different position in the past. I was at the end of my career. I was running the payments strategy for the Credit Mutuel CIC Group. Maybe you don’t know, but Credit Mutuel CIC is considered as between the third and fifth acquirer in Europe. I am working in Europe, and we have to follow the new requirements, regulations, and so on. But nevertheless talking about standardization, the idea is to work for the world. Nexo Standards, the company, enables fast, interoperable, and borderless card payments by standardizing the exchange of payments acceptance data between merchants, acquirer, payment servicers or payment service providers, and other payment stakeholders. Nexo messaging protocols and specifications adhere to ISO 20022 standards and are universally applicable and truly available globally. That’s quite important to know. Nexo Standards is a not for profit organization.
PaymentsJournal:
Thank you very much for that. Let’s jump into the global payments acceptance part of things. The first question is: Why do we need global payments acceptance standards?
Claude:
I have a nice question to you. Why do you say “Why do WE need..?” I would say, “the market.” Why does the market need?” Do you agree with that?
PaymentsJournal:
Yes, I would agree with that statement.
Claude:
Thank you. That was a joke! First thing, today we have to think about cards payments. The first remark, cards remain the first priority, whether that be card-present transactions (face-to-face transactions), card stored on a digital wallet, or card on file, having one global card payment acceptance system which standardizes the exchange of payment information, literally we can realize huge benefits for all players in the ecosystem. We are using ISO standard 20022 as the language, the global language for the whole financial ecosystem, so Nexo Standards specs and protocols for card payments acceptance on the ISO 20022. Standardization puts the needs of the ecosystem on equal terms. So simplify, consolidate the market, removing complexity. Empowering the industry to tackle its challenges quickly and efficiently. In other words, time to market is very important and things are moving very fast today. And now I have to talk about interoperability and harmonization. Nexo enables a true plug-and-play approach to payments acceptance. All Nexo-compliant systems speak the same language of interoperability. That’s key. Protocols allow integration of innovative products and services reducing time to market and lowering implementation and deployment costs. And lowering integration deployment costs, benefiting the end users—by the way, the end users or customers. For international retailers, payments requests can also be consolidated globally, empowering them to associate volume-based deals with a smaller number of acquiring banks. So the reason why and the fact that Nexo is a standardization company, we are providing building blocks and we know that some of the blocks are being used all over the world. We will consolidate or try to consolidate that for a Nexo exhibition, a Nexo show in Paris in October. We will have a map of what’s used all over the world this summer. It’s quite interesting to know that in different parties, different countries,