EXCLUSIVE: "The Grandfather of Payments" - Philippe Serres, G+D in The Paytech Magazine

Securitech company Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) has been moving money in all its forms for 170 years. There’s a lot little fintechs can learn from it

Fintech is an industry in thrall to youth. Its heroes are the disruptors: ambitious founders who believed they could rebuild finance from the ground up.They move quickly, challenge incumbents and promise to replace legacy systems with something leaner, smarter and entirely digital.

For a while, that was enough, but every ambitious youngster eventually discovers they need someone older and wiser in the room. Someone who understands regulation, knows where complexity hides and can tell the difference between a passing fad and the next big thing.

As payments become more fragmented and digital identity converges with financial services, that’s exactly the role Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) has come to occupy. With more than 170 years behind it, G+D is something of a mentor of modern payments.

But don’t picture an institution dwelling on the past. Think instead of the cool grandad every fintech would choose: endlessly curious, well-connected and still rolling up his sleeves when someone arrives with another impossible idea.

Because while fintechs excel at imagining what’s next, somebody still has to help those ideas navigate regulation, security, infrastructure and global scale. Innovation, ultimately, is only half the story. Philippe Serres, Chief Sales Officer at ePayments, G+D, has spent years working alongside fast-growing fintechs, processors, banks and payment providers. As such, he has learned that success isn’t about slowing innovators down, but rather moving at their pace while bringing the experience needed to help ambitious ideas become a commercial reality.

“Today, we have hundreds of fintechs working with us,” he says. “What really stands out is that they require two things – agility and the ability to adapt to the way they are organised. Sometimes they’ll work with processors. Sometimes they’ll work directly.

“At the same time, fintechs are the ones that come up with crazy ideas. What we need at G+D is the ability to be very agile in our answers because some of those ideas will work, some won’t, but we need to be in a position where we’re always able to support them on those journeys.”

Rather than dismissing bold notions and ambitious concepts, G+D brings decades of experience to making the best of them work. That attitude has helped forge long-term partnerships and relationships that extend far beyond an initial product launch.

“What comes out of that in the end is a very good sense of partnership and loyalty,” says Serres. “We started working with some fintechs that were extremely small at the beginning and have now grown to really substantial numbers.

“I think it’s because we were there from day one that we’re still able to support them today as they’ve continued to grow.”

Consumers now move effortlessly between physical cards, mobile wallets, QR codes, account-to-account payments and wearable devices, rarely stopping to think about the technology making those transactions possible. For providers, however, every additional payment method introduces another layer of complexity.

“What we’ve seen is really two things,” says Serres. “The first is acceleration – acceleration in the forms of payments that people use and, secondly, the multiple payment rails that now exist.

“I was in Asia last week, and you see QR codes, aggregators of QR codes and all these different funding sources. There’s a very strong development of different payment methods. The result of all that is a real need for integration between those different rails and different forms of payment.”

Real-time payments, digital wallets, stablecoins and CBDCs only add complexity. Success will belong to providers capable of connecting them seamlessly. That is where experience starts to matter because it helps innovators avoid spending months solving problems somebody else encountered years ago.

Supremely well-connected

Everyone’s grandad seems to know somebody useful. G+D’s equivalent is a network that stretches across almost every corner of the financial ecosystem. Those relationships provide an unusually broad perspective on where the industry is heading. Increasingly, payments are becoming intertwined with digital identity, authentication and trust, and behind every frictionless experience sits an increasingly sophisticated combination of identity verification, authentication, compliance and infrastructure.

“We’re seeing quite a strong convergence between identities and payments,” says Serres. “There is new regulation, for example, coming through around the European Digital Identity Wallet, where digital identities become part of the payment journey.

“G+D works with more than 100 central banks. We issue money for them. We work with governments issuing biometric passports and identity documents. Then we work with more than 5,000 banks. The convergence of those means we’re really well-placed to capture that journey.”

A grown-up approach

Fintech once defined itself by rejecting legacy, but as the industry matures, experience has become a competitive advantage. The companies building tomorrow’s financial services need partners that understand both where payments have come from and where they’re heading.

G+D’s own journey reflects that evolution. From securing physical cash to manufacturing payment cards, enabling tokenised credentials, supporting digital wallets and helping shape digital identity, the company has repeatedly reinvented itself while remaining rooted in trust.

“I think one of the things that makes G+D pretty unique is the ability to have a foot in both the manufacturing world and in the digital world,” says Serres. “The combination has become absolutely critical today. I’ve worked for 20 years in purely digital companies, and having the ability to deliver real products is an absolutely key asset.

“If you think about areas like the Internet of Things, which is developing very fast, how do you combine the ability to deliver something physical with something that’s digital? Those are the things becoming increasingly important.”

Having decades of experience means recognising patterns, understanding where complexity hides and knowing which ambitious ideas are worth pursuing. That perspective is increasingly valuable when today’s startup can become tomorrow’s global payments brand almost overnight. Because G+D operates in more than 40 countries, it helps fintechs understand not only the technology required to scale, but also the commercial and regulatory realities of different markets. 

The company even invests directly inpromising young businesses through G+D Ventures, as Serres explains.

“We have a venture arm which invests in startups. That helps us take very early ideas and bring them to market through our distribution channels in more than 40 countries. It helps us develop those ideas,” he says. It’s another example of G+D playing a role beyond technology supplier – helping young companies turn promising ideas into global businesses. Perhaps his most thought-provoking observation, though, isn’t about technology at all. It’s about people.

“We talk a lot about premium as being related to wealth,” says Serres. “That a premium client simply means a wealthy client. I think that definition has evolved over the past 18 months.

“Premium is becoming much more about lifestyle and the values a customer chooses and how a provider can support those customers on their particular journey.

“That’s what we’re trying to do at G+D, whether it’s through digital or physical experiences – helping our clients create something for customers that genuinely differentiates them from the competition.”

The industry’s boldest ideas continue to come from entrepreneurs prepared to question convention, invent new customer experiences and imagine entirely new ways of moving money. But ideas alone rarely change an industry.

Making them secure enough for regulators, robust enough for banks, scalable enough for millions of customers, and trusted enough that people are willing to move their money through them every day – that takes a different kind of expertise.

Having evolved through every major chapter of modern payments (from cash and cards to tokenisation, digital identity and the next generation of secure financial infrastructure), G+D has developed something that cannot be built overnight: perspective.

Every family has someone who stays calm, never dismisses ambitious ideas and encourages the next generation to succeed. In an industry obsessed with what’s next, G+D has become the grandad every fintech wishes it had.