Interview with HPS on invisible payments, omnichannel experiences, and innovations

What is the HPS story, market needs of the industries you are servicing and where do you position yourself in the payments value chain?

Founded in 1995, HPS’ mission from the start has been to provide clients with cutting-edge technology solutions that transcend the entire payments value chain. This enables clients to innovate rapidly and bring new products to market with ease and efficiency, using HPS’ PowerCARD software – increasingly seen as the future of the payments industry. HPS continues to gain the trust of clients around the world and enter new markets.

To date, HPS provides payments solutions to issuers, acquirers, card processors, independent sales organisations (ISOs), retailers, mobile network operators (MNOs), and national/regional switches around the world.

HPS positions itself as a Payment Software Provider, with the aim to facilitate payments innovation. PowerCARD was created with the vision of offering payment solutions that meet ever-changing needs of our clients.

In your opinion, what should an invisible payment strategy look like? How is your company helping clients to implement these strategies?

An invisible payment strategy should have the consumer at the centre. It means putting payments in the background, so the consumer focuses on the experience. This trend has already been adopted by consumers seeking smoother payments.

Retailers understand the importance of this and want to create an experience that is as smooth as possible. This is why we create technologies that enable invisible payments.

When thinking of an omnichannel payments experience, how is HPS making it possible to achieve a seamless payments experience across multiple channels for its clients?

Retailers are facing numerous challenges in a rapidly changing payments landscape and world. To adapt, overcome and take advantage of these challenges, they need to build central payment platforms. HPS has created the Retailer Open Payment Platform, which allows our clients to embrace these challenges and create a global and omnichannel payment strategy.

The Retailer Open Payment Platform manages and consolidates omnichannel payments, optimises the routing of authorisations and transactions, is PCI-DSS certified and runs on a high availability platform.

By implementing such platforms, retailers are able to create a seamless payment experience and stay ahead of the innovation curve.

We are already pushing further ahead with omnichannel by creating opti-channel platforms, which focus on specific use cases.

What payment innovations trends and developments should we expect in the next three years?

Expansion of biometrics. This technology opens the door to nearinfinite possibilities. Today, we are seeing payments disappear. Tomorrow, we’ll see payments seamlessly integrated into our day-to-day lives, without us even noticing. I believe that biometrics will truly take the user experience to the next level.

Human augmentation is also big trend to watch out for along with Blockchain, but this technology is still in the early stages of development. Blockchain is already the technology behind cryptocurrencies, but it could be applied in other areas such as transactions or data security. Lastly, artificial intelligence is another hot trend, with so many use cases on the horizon.

We strongly believe that all of these innovations, and the ones yet to come, will not only have an impact on the user experience, but will reinforce security, protection and trust within the payments ecosystem. This is what we want for our customers and what we are working on creating.

What is next on HPS’ agenda? How do you plan to keep pace with a constantly evolving industry?

HPS keeps evolving and expanding. We recently opened in South Africa and will be announcing another office shortly. As we grow rapidly, we remain close to our fundamental values of offering
innovative solutions and quality services to our clients. We do this by investing a significant amount of our revenue in R&D.

For over 20 years, we have constantly evolved PowerCARD. Our ability to listen and understand the ever-evolving market allows us create payment innovations rapidly (tokenization, wallet, instant payments, opti-channel, pen Payment Platform etc).

To strengthen this commitment, we have launched the HPS Academy, in order to ensure that our collaborators and customers are offered the best training possible on our products and solutions.

The industry is constantly evolving, and so are we. We are shaping the future, together with our customers and partners, to achieve what we do best: enabling innovative payments.

This interview was first published in the Payments and Commerce Market Guide 2018-2019, which addresses the most recent and discussed trends in the global payments and commerce industry.

About Sebastien Slim

Sebastien Slim is the Director of Europe & Americas at HPS. He joined HPS in 2011 as Head of Marketing, where he led several successful marketing and innovation initiatives, before being promoted to Director of Europe and Americas. He now oversees all commercial and operation activities within these regions.

About HPS

HPS is a multinational company and a leading provider of payment solutions for issuers, acquirers, card processors, independent sales organisations (ISOs), retailers, mobile network operators (MNOs), and national and regional switches around the world.