The following is a transcript of the podcast episode
Ryan McEndarfer Editor-in-chief at PaymentsJournal.com
Welcome to the payment journal podcast. I’m your host Ryan Mac and on today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about payment processing and to help me with that conversation, I have the CEO and Founder of Galileo Processing Clay Wilkes. Clay, Welcome to the podcast.
Clay Wilkes CEO and Founder of Galileo Processing
Thank you. Nice to be here.
Ryan McEndarfer Editor-in-chief at PaymentsJournal.com
To get things started, can you give us a little bit of a background about Galileo processing?
Clay Wilkes CEO and Founder of Galileo Processing
Certainly. Galileo is based in Salt Lake City. We were founded in 2000, and we have grown to become one of North America’s largest payments companies and processors, and program management are services that we provide. We have roughly 20 years of experience. We support debit, credit, prepaid, commercial, and virtual card products, and we have more than 87 million accounts that have been instituted on our platform. We have a very strong culture that is centered on humanitarian work and philanthropy as well as a number of other attributes such as the environment. I would love to have folks come and learn more about who Galileo is. We primarily differentiate ourselves based on the innovation – technological innovation – that we provide. We’ve been an innovator. We’re known as an innovator in the industry, and our platform and underlying capabilities are really significantly different than many other providers of processing services. That’s key, and it’s really what has allowed us to be very, very successful in a very diverse payments ecosystem.
Ryan McEndarfer Editor-in-chief at PaymentsJournal.com
Excellent. Now there’s a lot of buzz around APIs (application programming interfaces) nowadays and for good reason. And recently Galileo Processing opened up its APIs. So can you walk me through why this is significant?
Clay Wilkes CEO and Founder of Galileo Processing
Yes, the APIs are absolutely critical in today’s environment, the open network type environment that we live in. Technology is key and integrating that technology with other providers is a big part of that. While Galileo has had an API for 15-plus years, providing an open API where really anybody can come to an environment – we’ve created an environment that we refer to as our sandbox – people can come whether they have a formal relationship with Galileo or not, they can come and authenticate and begin, just dive right in and begin developing and coding. And on that site we have our APIs fully published. It’s a nice environment because you can see not only the request but also the responses that come back. All of that is delivered in a content managed way, but the nice thing is that there’s code fragments there that are generated and personalized to your authentication so that you can really just copy and paste and begin, as a programmer, being very productive within a few minutes of coming to the site. So that’s been very powerful. There’s another perhaps more important reason that we’ve provided an open API. An API is really just a thin veneer over the functionality that exists below that layer, and we believe that Galileo services are really the best in the industry and an API which delivers these services back to our partner are important. Those services have been, again, key to our success.
Ryan McEndarfer Editor-in-chief at PaymentsJournal.com
Now, fraud is really another hot topic. It continuously goes on, especially within the payments industry. I’m interested to get your specific take on how fraud is affecting issuers and fintechs today, and also what you see is next within the fraud detection space?