FinTech Australia Spotlight Article: Verrency

Innovating in financial services is now more important than ever. Disruptive digital use cases are launched by consumer-facing fintechs everywhere and established financial institutions find it difficult to compete effectively. The global pandemic has changed consumer behaviour on a global scale, with the need to digitally differentiate now a ‘need to have’ baseline and no longer the ‘nice to have’ exception. In this week’s Member Spotlight we spoke to Jeroen van Son, Chief Commercial Officer at Verrency about their ability to help Financial Institutions innovate their payments services and infrastructures, their journey through the market, and their recent partnership with eftpos. “Customers are voting with their feet. Financial Institutions (FI) that do not differentiate are at clear risk of losing their stronghold on valuable customer relationships” says Mr van Son. “It is of course not easy for banks to innovate, differentiate and meet the changing consumer expectations. Cost, compliance, risk mitigation, culture, and especially complex legacy systems all contribute to the inability of many financial institutions to differentiate digitally at speed and low cost.”How it all startedVerrency was founded in 2016 by David Link, a 26-year veteran in financial services consulting. The idea was to develop a technology platform to help FI’s win the battle for customer relationships around the moment of payment. Until then, the massive cost and time required to modify or migrate away from legacy payments infrastructure had always far outweighed the immediate benefit of providing value-added services to customers. So, a highly secure, fully-automated, low latency, resilient API platform designed specifically for FI’s was the obvious solution. The platform needed to work for the largest card networks and processors, to the smallest neo-banks, and needed to be easy to buy, easy to implement, and risk-free while still being secure, resilient, and scalable.  The platform and the company needed to be a trusted low-risk decision for bankers – and so Verrency was born. Over 4+ years, the Verrency team has designed and developed a single codebase white-label PCI certified platform for financial institutions around the world.  The AWS-hosted platform runs a continuous testing regime and is also fully automated in deployment. Verrency also standardised the integration of global fintechs to the platform. V+, the fintech partnership ecosystem was established with more than 40 global fintechs contracted as partners. Verrency’s value-added services are provided via its innovation toolbox – which includes multiple discrete services such as real-time transaction roundups (i.e., to savings, investment, charity), redemption of merchant offers, earning & burning of non-fiat currency (i.e., loyalty points, digital currency) or use of buy-now-pay-later especially after a transaction has been made. More recently, ‘hyper-personalisation’ is gaining significant traction. With this Verrency enabled service, consumers can personalise the benefits of their payment product to their own desires and to their changing circumstances; a unique world first proposition. Hyper-personalisation of banking products will become the new global norm as customer expectations are evolving rapidly, inspired by the hyper-personalised services from companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix (to name but a few). Who does Verrency helpVerrency helps financial institutions (Issuing Banks, Payments Processors and Schemes) who issue or process payments credentials to innovate easily and rapidly without replacing or changing their existing legacy infrastructure. “Verrency’s global clients all want to increase customer engagement by delivering differentiated value-added services to their existing or new customers”, says Mr van Son. “Delivering these services at speed, at low cost and in a highly secure manner is mission critical.Taking the pain and cost away of modifying legacy IT systems is a unique advantage that Verrency brings. In addition, the Verrency platform allows for quick and efficient integration with third party FinTechs who can deliver innovative use-cases for Verrency’s clients.” We do not focus on the commoditised aspects of payments such as issuance of debit and credit cards (virtually or physically). Instead, we enable value-added services around the moment of payment that increase consumer engagement and drive much needed product & service differentiation.Verrency in MarketVerrency has offices in the US, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Australia with clients and prospects on each continent. “We serve FIS in the USA, one of the largest payment processors globally. We power the world’s first hyper-personalised credit card, issued by Liv bank (a wholly owned subsidiary of Emirates NBD, one of the largest banking groups in the Middle East),” explains Mr van Son. Here in Australia, Verrency has just announced the launch of a partnership with eftpos. Verrency provides the transaction data-publishing API service for eftpos, as well as the Card Linked Offer (CLO) gateway function and the commercial function for CLO’s (on-boarding and contracting of loyalty program providers). “Verrency now directly enables rewards-providing fintechs (Loyalty Program Providers) to access the eftpos transactional data of the more than 50 million eftpos enabled debit cards in Australia” explains Mr van Son. “This means that members of participating loyalty programs can now get rewarded with cash-back when paying with eftpos at a participating merchant. Merchants may have the added benefit of lower transaction processing costs if more transactions are routed over the eftpos network. A clear win for all parties involved!”How the Verrency solution works As an API platform, Verrency helps FI’s to innovate in 2 ways: 

1. Verrency’s white-label highly-secure API platform connects to an FI’s transaction processing systems, without requiring major changes to these payment switches and authorisation host systems. This one-time connection ensures that payments can be processed as per usual (with no impact on the payment authorisation flow) while enabling value-added services around the moment of payment.

2. The platform also acts as an integration layer for 3^rd party FinTechs so they can provide their services to Verrency’s clients. FI’s can consume 3^rd party services without the need to integrate each provider directly to their core infrastructure, creating major efficiencies.

 Once technically connected to Verrency (which includes mobile/ web layer connections, payment/ data connections, customer service layer), FI’s can easily and quickly launch, modify, and improve different services to their end-customers. What’s NextWe continue to scale here in Australia and globally. The Covid pandemic has accelerated the awareness of FIs to not just become ‘digitally enabled’ but more importantly to ‘digitally differentiate’. We’re actively working with data, analytics and content providers to enable the growing desire for hyper-personalisation of financial services & products. We see this as an area of strong company growth and expansion.  For more information, contact:Jeroen van SonChief Commercial OfficerJeroen.van.son@verrency.com