The key to interoperability is being payment event driven

How did the idea behind ModoPayments start?

Modo started with a missed opportunity. Bruce Parker, a payments and business strategy expert for some of the largest financial companies in the world, was never called into a meeting to give a report to his former employer on the future impact of mobile payments. Bruce set out to use his findings to solve digital payments problems with a company of his own. Modo was officially founded in July 2010. After spending 5 years “chasing the mobile payments dragon”, our business has evolved to focus on facilitating the exchange of payment event data and helping our clients become payment event driven.

In what geographies and markets does Modo operate, and what are its flagship products and main business partners?

Modo is currently conducting payment event data for some of the most well-known and respected players in payments and commerce in the US and Europe, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Klarna, Verifone, Alliance Data, FIS, and Verifone.

Currently our service offering focuses on 3 types of payments events:

Payout events: Enable your corporate customers to send money globally using the ever growing number of digital wallets to accelerate the last mile of disbursements.

Loyalty events: Earn and burn loyalty in entirely new ways, in entirely new experiences. Combine multiple rewards and loyalty programmes to make a purchase or send a gift.

Checkout events: Checkout anywhere using any method of payment. Whether you are a merchant or a payment provider, offer consumers any way to pay.

Your company brings something new – instead of focusing on the transaction, you focus on its context (before, during and after a transaction). Can you give us more details about the payment event and the payment event data?

We think context is the missing piece of the payments puzzle and the most critical to creating better experiences for the consumer. Our goal is to track, store, and share everything that surrounds a payment before, during, or after the transaction. We call those things surrounding the transaction a payment event. We categorise payment event data in four ways: transaction states, accounting entries, credentials and associated commercial documents.

By segmenting the data, we can normalize communications between disconnected systems in order to more easily communicate and share information; this entire process is brokered by Modo.

We provide:

• Secure control over the access and use of your payment event data, even when exchanging it with partners;

• Single point of integration for payment event data exchange which accelerates time to market, scalability, and partner flexibility;

• Insulation from change in partner requirements as Modo handles it all;

• Increased partner choice as Modo integrates with more end points and becomes the broadest “utility conductor” for the exchange of payment event data.

You can learn more about how our technology works here.

What challenges do you face when securing payment data from malicious third parties?

Payments data is unique from other types of data as it has special security and compliance requirements. We understand that working with financial institutions there are additional examinations towards security, and we openly accept the challenge. Modo uses asymmetric encryption in flight, symmetric encryption at rest, and requires all our request to be signed. We have a no-fooling-around cryptographer on staff and all our cloud-based technology is locked up with HSMs.

Could you share with us some key takeaways from Money20/20 Las Vegas?

For the past five years, we’ve been sponsors of the Money20/20 Hackathon. We get to put our APIs and technology to the test with some of the brightest developers in the space. Seeing what the developers come up with is so exciting because these ideas could be a solution that we’re going to enable for our clients in the future.

These new digital technologies are whats pushing the industry forward, and we are proud to enable legacy companies to connect with the most cutting-edge solutions. Walking around the conference and going to sessions, we saw the impact that interoperability is going to have on the future of the financial industry. Bring on the new solutions because we’re ready to show off our payment event driven technology in even more use cases!

About Bruce Parker

Bruce Parker is a self-declared #paymentsgeek and has been a visionary for some of the largest and most innovative payments technology companies in the world. Bruce has created new products, built partnerships and shaped strategy that has moved the payments industry. Bruce founded Modo and he is the CEO of the company. Modo was granted a patent for its technology for connecting payments systems.

About ModoPayments

Modo securely and fairly conducts the exchange of payment event data on behalf of banks, payments networks and providers who are navigating the fintech frontier. Our cloud-based services are designed to accelerate innovation by enabling interoperability and making it easier to securely conduct payments with new, different and varied payments systems globally particularly in new digital channels.