EXCLUSIVE: “Setting Payments Free” – Nadim Ghafoor, Aevi in ‘Discover Money20/20’

Aevi believes it holds the key to releasing merchants from the ‘walled garden’ built by providers who tie them down to inflexible contracts and outdated solutions

Payment processing has gone from necessary bugbear to potentially big business, driven by consumers who demand an increasing range of options for gaining access to products and services. A new report from Grand View Research estimates the size of the prize, predicting the global payment processing solutions market – valued at $47.61billion in 2022 – will achieve a compound annual growth rate of 14.5 per cent from 2023 to 2030.

The merchants facilitating this growth need to satisfy their customers by offering an increasingly broad number of payment choices that blend the physical and the digital – from card to cash, contactless, e-wallet and account-to-account.

Nadim Ghafoor, Senior Product Manager at in-person payment orchestrator Aevi, says in order to provide that choice, merchants need help escaping the ‘walled garden’ imposed by an old-style monopoly characterised by high fees, lengthy contract tie-ins and the kind of monoline legacy point-of-sale solutions that are no longer up to the task.

Aevi is innovating to ensure its integrated, Cloud-based platform does just that by working with ‘any payment type, anywhere in the world’. Its white-labelled offering gives merchants the means to integrate with a raft of physical and digital payment solutions – as well as independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent sales organisations (ISOs). It collaborates with fintech providers to bolt on new solutions, including a recent strategic partnership with payments orchestration platform Paydock last October, enabling it to offer omnichannel payment orchestration for financial institutions, merchants and ISVs.

Combining Paydock’s digital payments expertise with Aevi’s in-store payment solutions and processing via multiple acquirers has enabled it to offer payment methods like open banking, PayPal and buy now, pay later in face-to-face settings. And, in April, Aevi partnered with another payment orchestrator, IXOPAY, again to bridge in-person and digital payment orchestration for merchants and businesses by blending Aevi’s card-present payment orchestration solution with IXOPAY’s card-not-present service.

We asked Ghafoor what the emerging challenges and opportunities are for merchants and how Aevi is helping tackle them.

THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: How has the point of sale (POS) changed over the past few years?

NADIM GHAFOOR: Payments was always seen as a kind of necessary evil and the point of interaction was very, very simple. Customers just inserted or swiped their card. But now, with SmartPOS and other smart solutions, there’s an opportunity to do way more at the point of sale. Merchants want more flexibility. They want to be able to put other applications and different payment methods on those terminals. Our expertise is in creating really compelling customer journeys at the point of interaction for consumers. For example, in certain markets, Visa and Mastercard are the preferred payment methods, but we might see account-to-account payments too, or
alternative payments, direct currency conversion – all of those things are starting to be offered to consumers in the retail landscape, and we can facilitate that.

Openness, and the ability to work with whoever is providing a solution running on those POS terminals, to not lock merchants in, is important, as many are telling us they feel trapped with their legacy payment solutions. Payment terminals that run on applications connected to a single acquirer are like a walled garden, whereas our solutions allow merchants to work with different third-party independent software vendors (ISVs) and software providers that can create compelling solutions that will change the customer journey.

“Merchants really do not have control over their payment ecosystems… with our platform, they can connect to any acquirer at the back end and have any payment terminal at the front end”

TFM: What is Aevi doing to try to open up the options for merchants?

NG: Retailers and merchants really do not have control over their payment ecosystems, so introducing new payment methods or other fresh features into the payment flow – for example, a loyalty scheme – or connecting to a different acquirer, has been just impossible.

We’re breaking down those walls and showing them that, with our platform, they can connect to any acquirer at the back end and have any payment terminal at the front end. They can then chop and change as they desire, and introduce new types of payment methods or terminal types without having to be restricted. We can make that possible because we work with third-party providers to offer things like loyalty solutions at the point of interaction, and manage the entire flow for that merchant customer.

We offer different ways to use our platform. Our Smart point-of-sale (SmartPOS) offerings are a simple and easy way for merchants to take payments, with an interactive user interface that our customers absolutely love, and big, bright screens, allowing them to simply enter an amount and then take the payment. We call that our starter pack and it’s perfect for, say, a hairdresser who doesn’t always need a complex point of sale. But, through our platform, we’re also able to address specific challenges, like the unattended space – at a petrol filling station or a vending machine, for example, where the user interface needs to be driven by the customer because there’s no merchant there, handing them the terminal.

Our platform and software make that type of journey easy.

TFM: How does your gateway fit into the wider payments ecosystem?

NG: Our payment orchestration platform is the heart of what we do. It is our crown jewel. It enables us and our customers to connect any terminal at the front end to any acquirer at the back end. And what makes us unique is that by offering it as a white-label platform, our customers can brand it as their own. We don’t see anyone else in the market doing that. And by any payment terminal I mean it could even be SoftPOS. It could be an MPOC (Mobile Payment on Commercial Off-the-Shelf, or consumer mobile or tablet)-type device, like an Android smartphone or iPhone. They can all connect into our gateway and then utilise all the different acquirer connections we have at the back end.

For example, one of our customers has access to 24 different acquirers through the capability we offer. They’re working with nine different terminals and we completely orchestrate all those points of interaction, through our platform, to all those acquirers at the back end. We can connect a terminal in such a way that it could process transactions for Visa to one acquirer and Mastercard to another, for example, just by configuring the terminal. With our platform also, ISVs can have their own POS, either running on the terminal and connected to our payment application, or running off the terminal and initiating a payment on it.

So, our single platform offers the ability to serve the small and medium-sized business market, where they’re just entering a number and taking payment, or as part of a more complex offering where the ISV is leading the solution. They’re providing the POS and we give them a single point of integration. We have a very close relationship with our customers, working with them from the early sales phase to deployment. Often, the customers aren’t payment experts, but love that we can take all the pain away.

This article was published in Discover Money20/20 2025, Page 16-17