OmniPayments’ innovation for payments processors!

It has been a very active period for OmniPayments when it comes to presentations at user events. Following a strong presence in London for the pan-European NonStop user event hosted by BITUG where OmniPayments Marketing VP, Jessica Nieves, and Business Development VP, Craig Lawrance, waived the flag for OmniPayments, CEO Yash Kapadia has been on stage providing very strong support of all things NonStop.

OmniPayments was the first vendor to take delivery of a NonStop X system for internal use but liking it as much as they did, they ordered more before turning select NonStop X systems into the equivalent of a cloud before offering OmniCloudX on the basis of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Fresh-off presenting to the ATUG community in Atlanta, Yash will be providing a keynote presentation at CTUG later this month (October) and will be the exclusive Diamond sponsor of the NonStop Technical Boot Camp next month (November). Expectations are high that we will hear even more about what the OmniPayments team has been up to!

There is no question that OmniPayments is bringing to market some very exciting products and features and essentially rising to the challenge of how best to equip traditional payments processors to compete with up and coming FinTechs. There has been a lot written about the prospect of FinTechs pushing aside banks and other institutions providing payments solutions solely on the basis of investments being made in new technology together with new approaches to payments. But is the work being done by FinTechs being ignored or are FinTechs simply poking a very sharp stick into the eyes of some very big bears as one blogger recently suggested?

In his forward to the report, Innovation in Payments: The Future is Fintech, Dominic Broom, Head of Treasury Services EMEA, BNY Mellon, said, “Without a doubt, the “era of fintech” is upon us and banks can’t merely be mindful of this; they must also have a clear plan in place in order to adapt to and benefit from fintech-fuelled changes.” According to Broom, “In order to position themselves at the center of the payments industry of tomorrow, banks must act today to understand, interact with, and cherry-pick from the full smorgasbord of fintech developments.”

Interestingly enough, Broom also concludes that, “The range of options to choose from is broad and diverse. As the number and type of fintech players, developments and offshoots gather pace, the emergence of new tools and solutions (such as digital currencies and biometric security) are in turn gaining traction and reaching the market with ever-greater speed.” Followed a little later with the caution that, “It is important to remember that the corporate and wholesale payments industry isn’t static, and that technology is already being leveraged to drive industry-wide improvements with regard to harmonisation, standardisation, centralisation and the development and application of increasingly sophisticated solutions.” In other words, given the right mix of software products from vendors keeping pace with what FinTechs are providing, there is no reason at all as to why traditional payments processors cannot keep up with consumer demands.

It is interesting too to see the references to both digital currencies and biometric security as these have become very topical items for OmniPayments. The company has invested a considerable amount of time and energy into bringing biometrics to reality in emerging markets and the most discussed implementation of OmniPayments biometric support has been in the choice of OmniPayments by Colombia to ensure funds for needy mothers do indeed make it into the hands of the very poor. This success in Colombia has been the subject of many presentations as well as commentaries to digital publications – see the white paper, Investments in Products pay off for OmniPayments! Available from the OmniPayments web site and page through to the section, Diverse markets – From having options, innovation prevails.

From that white paper (and quoting OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia) –

“Funded in part by the World Bank, Columbia’s social program makes cash distribution to eligible mothers twice monthly.” He then told me that the “OmniPayments solution was chosen as being a very competitive, feature-rich, cost effective solution – it’s not based on reoccurring transaction fees or dependent of increased volume over time providing the Columbian government with considerable savings compared to alternate product offerings.” Yash then talked about how mothers that qualified were given the equivalent of debit cards. “When a mother enrolls, she registers her personal information. It includes her national ID number and her ten fingerprints, which are digitally encoded by Wave Scalar Quantization (WSQ) technology. This information is sent by the enrollment POS terminal to OmniPayments, where it is stored in the OmniPayments Biometric Image server.”

When it comes to digital currencies perhaps it is the underlying distributed immutable ledger, blockchain, which is really the big story here. As author and Co-founder and Executive Director at Blockchain Research Institute, Don Tapscott, recently posted to LinkedIn, “The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” In all likelihood, at the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp to be held in November at the Airport Hyatt Hotel, San Francisco, there will be a lot more coverage of blockchain on NonStop (and supported by NonStop SQL/MX) following demonstrations provided to attendees at this year’s HPE Discover event in Las Vegas.

There will be many attendees at Boot Camp who will likely be very interested to hear from Yash about plans for OmniPayments and maybe even for blockchain but to date, Yash has kept his cards very close to his chest. However, given that expectations will be high and given too Yash’s propensity to embrace new technologies and architectures coming directly from HPE – OmniPayments was the first vendor to build out a cloud offering based on the latest NonStop X technology and is among the pioneers when it comes to testing virtualized NonStop (vNS), adding something like blockchain to the work OmniPayments has done in support of biometrics, wouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed OmniPayments for the last couple of decades.

Of course, FinTech is a lot more than just supporting digital currencies and biometric security but all the same, it sets a precedent for those payments processors who may be curious about what is available from major payments solutions’ vendors that helps them compete with FinTechs. And then there is the movement in support of microservices to be considered as well. However, in the closing remarks by BNY Mellon’s Broom, he suggests that, “what these advances mean for banks, and the strategies they should now adopt (in particular, far closer engagement with the fintech community) in order to understand and access these exciting developments, and thereby future-proof their long-held position at the heart of global payments.” And that is exactly where OmniPayments is headed as it is increasingly providing products and features for payments providers but has components of interest to FinTechs, too!

If you would like to know a lot more about the work OmniPayments is doing to bring innovative products to market to better equip payments processors to compete on a level playing field with FinTech, then please reach out to us and let us know. Feel free to contact me – Jessica@OmniPayments.com or call us at +1 787 918 0025

Jessica Nieves | Vice President Marketing
Jessica@OmniPayments.com | tel +1 787 918 0025
http://www.omnipayments.com