The Future of Digital Payments with Nexi Group’s Nabeel Moosa

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Nabeel Moosa – Transforming Digital Payments with Mobile Wallet Payment.

Nabeel Moosa is a prominent figure in the digital payments industry, currently serving as the Vice President of Strategy and Value Creation at Nexi Group. With a career spanning over a decade, Nabeel has held various strategic roles in leading financial institutions. He began his career at Deloitte, where he participated in a scholarship scheme before transitioning to Goldman Sachs as a Summer Analyst. His journey continued at Monitor Deloitte as a Strategy Consultant, where he honed his skills in market strategy and regulatory compliance. In 2015, he joined Visa as a Senior Strategy Manager, contributing to numerous projects that shaped the future of digital payments and market entry strategies​​​​.

At Nexi Group, Nabeel’s role involves steering the strategic direction and innovation within the eCommerce sector. Since joining Nexi, he has been instrumental in driving the growth and optimization of the company’s digital payment solutions across Europe. His work focuses on integrating advanced technologies and ensuring that Nexi remains at the forefront of the digital payments landscape. Under his leadership, Nexi has successfully navigated complex regulatory environments, particularly in the context of the European Payment Services Directive (PSD2 and PSD3), ensuring secure and efficient payment processes​​​​.

Nabeel’s educational background includes a Bachelor of Science in Economic History with Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He further specialized in Business Data & Analytics through a short course at Copenhagen Business School. His academic and professional experiences have equipped him with a robust understanding of both the technical and strategic aspects of the payments industry. Nabeel is known for his passion for consumer education and protection, advocating for innovations that enhance security and user experience in digital transactions​​.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenquist: COD delivery, Cash on delivery. It’s funny, I talked about that with someone else on the show once. I didn’t even know. Admittedly, it wasn’t even clear that was still a thing, because I remember when I was a kid, you see the commercials for the. Hey, welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Nabeel Moosa knows a thing or two about payments. He’s the vice president of strategy and value creation for Nexi Group, a giant in the digital payments space in Europe. He also spent time with Visa and Goldman Sachs. He has incredible insight into the future of digital payments and contactless payments, as well as what companies can do to educate and protect both consumers and merchants. He is passionate and knowledgeable about all things payments, and I know you’ll get a ton out of this interview. Please, welcome Nabeel Moosa. How close are we to a cashless society?

Nabeel Moosa: That’s an interesting question to start with. I always like to segment payments into two worlds, the real world, meaning the in-store or in-person world, and then the online world. If you take the offline world first and next year’s a European payments company, then we say there is no one answer that fits everywhere at the same time. So every country has a different set of cultures and habits and then there are different stages of development, from cash to digital. In Scandinavia, I would say we’re very close to, for example, being a cashless society or a fully digital society. I am from England, and when I moved across to Denmark, in Copenhagen, I realized that I hadn’t used cash for months at a time. Maybe the odd hairdresser visit, because it’s the textbook use case where you always need cash. But besides that, I’ve been using cards everywhere. I don’t just use digital things for payments, but from everything from my mail as well. It’s all digital here. So if you talk about Scandinavia, then we’re digital and there are even places where you can’t pay with cash. I think that that’s something on the regulator’s agenda right now where how much of a right is it to be able to hold and withdraw cash and use cash? But, in Scandinavia, we’re very close to being fully digital. As you move farther down in Europe. So Scandinavia is right at the top. Then as you move further down in Europe, the usage of cash increases. And here comes the distinction between the online and offline world. As you go further down in Europe, cash is also an online payment method, meaning you order online. But when you get delivered with your products, you pay with cash. It’s known as cash on delivery.

Kevin Rosenquist: COD delivery, Cash on delivery.

Nabeel Moosa: Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s funny, I talked about that with someone else on the show once. I didn’t even know. Admittedly, it wasn’t even clear that that was still a thing because I remember when I was a kid, you see the commercials for the anthology, music CD collection and it’d be like CODs accepted or something like that. I just didn’t even know he still did that.

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly. But, that still exists in Europe. And like an axis philosophy is quite unique in the sense that we see Europe and European markets as individual from each other. You could be in Switzerland and then go to one country across that way, and the culture and the way to pay is completely different. You go in the other direction. The culture and the way to pay is completely different. So, that holds true for cash and digital digitalization of money as well. So Scandinavia is very digital as you go to southern Europe it gets less digital. Germany is a textbook. It’s the textbook example of a very cash-based society. Still, if you go to Germany, you’ll often need cash to pay in certain places. So, my answer to you is, it depends.

Kevin Rosenquist: I had a feeling that would be the answer. I just wanted to see what your thoughts are.

Nabeel Moosa: Stop that. I ended that.

Kevin Rosenquist: To your point, other than the occasional poker night with my buddies, I just don’t use cash. There’s one bar restaurant here in my town that is cash only. You kind of go, what’s that? Why do they do that for? Is there something shady going on? You can’t help but think that. But I remember years ago when I first started using a credit card, it felt kind of like free money when you were swiping it. Now it’s the opposite. When I have cash in my wallet, I’m like, oh, I have cash. That’s not real money. I can just play with that. I can spend that on fun stuff. But I don’t know, it feels like it doesn’t count towards my bank balance.

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly. I guess what, in today’s world, you used to be like, you tap your credit card, you swipe your credit card, you get a pop-up on your phone straight away. This is how much you spent. Then right at the end of the month, if you have a cool digital bank, they tell you you spent like, I don’t know, $1,000 on restaurants, $1,000 on restaurants and things like that. So, it depends on what you’re used to.

Kevin Rosenquist: For sure. How far can we take digital payments, retinal scans, and brainwaves? How far can we go with this?

Nabeel Moosa: I think there’s been various types of experiments with, different ways to pay. I think, in Denmark, we had a trial of finger payments. At one of the universities here at Copenhagen Business School, I think it was. So you can go very far. There have been attempts to make payments invisible as much as possible. So the feeling of paying disappears. But there are challenges with that. So one is you have to adapt the customer mindset to be able to be comfortable with swapping from a piece of plastic or mobile phone to something that’s intrinsically them. And I think that can often be a cause of hesitation depending on the country. High-trust countries may not find that too troublesome. But countries where trust and security or security and privacy are much more of a concern for an individual. That’s going to be a lot difficult to achieve in the short term. It’s going to take time. So payments are getting more invisible. But I think that’s more being driven by shopping use cases online where you want to remove as much friction as possible in the real world. I think we’re still okay with, tapping a piece of plastic. The contactless has been quite revolutionary. In Europe and I guess, globally now as well, in terms of changing the behavior of consumers, now you can do it all on your phone. Even so, you don’t even need your plastic anymore. I think moving to the next stage where you don’t have any independent signifier of your money or independent, storage of your money is going to be the next step. I’m not sure if we’re there yet.

Kevin Rosenquist: Even the fingerprint technology on my phone, sometimes I’m just like, come on, I have a fingerprint. Why isn’t this working? Why won’t it open? So I think it’s got a little ways to go for sure.

Nabeel Moosa: I think the way people view their devices these days is high trust, like you have everything based, you have all of your life basically on that device. Therefore you’re willing to protect it as well with biometrics, face ID, and touch ID, when it comes to giving that to someone else, though, that something that doesn’t come home with you at the end of the day, a terminal, a screen, somewhere else out in the outside world. I think people might still be hesitant to do that.

Kevin Rosenquist: I agree. How confident are you in the successful development of a standard platform for European payments and digital currencies, a European digital wallet?

Nabeel Moosa: That’s a good question. There are many initiatives. I’d like to break down the problem into three layers. So there’s an infrastructure layer, that’s like a scheme layer, which is like the rules that sit on top of the infrastructure. Then there’s like the mode, like the instrument you use to execute the payment, dysplastic or mobile app, or something else. At the infrastructure level, there have been a lot of initiatives in Europe over the last ten or so years, 10 to 15 years, driven by regulation to unify, at least specifically in the eurozone. Then, of course, there are other markets in Europe that aren’t part of the euro currency, as well, who are being brought in. At the infrastructure level, I think we’re almost there. I think earlier in the year we had the introduction or the confirmation of the instant payments regulation. So not only are we creating a unified way to transfer money between people and banks across Europe, but we’re also saying at the next level, up the scheme level, how quickly that should be done, what sort of security requirements are required? how many days a week should that be available? 24 over seven 365 is regulation. Then payments, instant payments, for example, should be executed within 10s. So we’re heading to infrastructure and the rules on top of that, being unified, being widely implemented across Europe by banks, the key to payments always is convincing the consumer to do something different, that’s actually what changes the game at the end of the day.

Nabeel Moosa: You can have many types of regulation. You can have as many incentives as you want. But if the consumer decides, for example, to pay a particular way, then change is going to be very hard. From a European level, there is an initiative called EPI. They have again a sub-initiative called zero, which is the brand that they will use to go to market with. That’s an attempt at leveraging the infrastructure and the schemes by creating the consumer layer on top of it. I think with enough cooperation between different banks and the right incentive models, it has every chance for success. It’s a crowded space payment methods. There are more and more payment methods every year. Absolutely. But you have a chance. Cooperation is the most important thing. If banks are on board, you can make anything happen because they ultimately are the closest relationship to the consumer. Consumers trust them. I give you an example. So, national wallets in Scandinavia are quite popular. In Denmark. We have mobile pay. The success of mobile pay was the fact that all the banks cooperated with each other to say, hey, we put all of our force behind this mobile wallet that people will use initially as a peer-to-peer payment method, but then ultimately as an online and offline payment method. And online, we’re seeing incredible growth in local mobile wallets.

Nabeel Moosa: Scandinavia, I think, was leading in that front mobile pay. There are bips in Norway and swish in Sweden. Twins, for example, is another mobile wallet growing in Switzerland. There’s an opportunity now, given that those are so proliferated or there to be a pan-European wallet. The key, I always say is, of course, you can have the bank side covered with regulation and the type of business model that supports them, somewhat akin to the card for Corona model. You need something like that to make payments work. Then you need to convince merchants to accept it. Merchants usually follow the consumer, so if there are enough consumers using it, merchants will want it because it has an impact on their conversion. Otherwise, merchants, care most about the consumer. Then you have intermediaries like payment service providers like us. They are also affected by the business model. They need a driver to do it. And a driver can be a merchant wanting something so popular. Another driver could be a business model and an incentive that enables them to create high margins on their payment mix. But the consumer is the hardest to convince. To do something. There has to be a compelling reason not to pick up something, but to switch from something else. So it’s often like you don’t just pick a new thing in isolation. You have to decide not to use something else and then decide to use it.

Nabeel Moosa: That switching is quite difficult to do unless you have really good incentives. Also, on the consumer side, and consumers are mostly motivated by convenience. So you need to make the user experience good. And if a European wallet is to succeed, you need to have a really good user experience, that competes with everything else that is around today. So, mobile pay works with your phone number as an identifier. Once you enter your phone number, you get a pop-up on your phone, you sell your face ID, you swipe across and the payment is done. No typing out 16 digits, expiry date, and CVC code. So that’s a step up from card payments, pure card payments, like plastic. Getting that out of your wallet. What’s the next level up to make the consumer decide not to switch away from that to something else? I think that remains to be seen. The instantness of it is good in peer-to-peer use cases, I think. And it’s an important regulation. But from a consumer perspective, paying a merchant quicker is not necessarily alike it’s not an incentive for them. It’s not a motivating factor for the base of the merchant. They would like their money quicker than they do today. But from a consumer perspective, it’s quite different. I’m willing to let time play out and see what happens.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think about here in the US and some people use Apple Pay or Google Pay or I just started using my phone you know for payments. It seems like the ones who use the platforms are either more techie or younger or most people here still use cards occasionally you see people with cash. Sure, there are some people out there still writing checks. It’s been a while since I’ve been behind someone at the grocery store right now to check if it is the same in Europe. Is it more the younger generations that are adopting us? Is it harder to get older generations to kind of come on board?

Nabeel Moosa: It’s interesting. The younger generation is more digital natives, so they’re just used to paying like that. So I say, they are driving the change. That’s where we see, at least if you think about as a percentage of a single person’s payment, how much of it is digital versus other forms of payment. I think the younger you go, the more digital it is always. Touching on your point about checks, for example, now in Europe, check processing fees are quite high. So if you have a bank that would give you a checkbook when you want to use that, you will also be quiet. I wouldn’t say prohibitively expensive, but it will be expensive to use it or to accept it. So you can have a consumer motivation to use it. But again, business model matters too. So if the business model is not good for a bank, they may charge you more fees or something like that. Sure. So I think habits from the older generations are, of course, a lot more difficult to change. They used to pay for different things, but I don’t think age is a factor. I think paying with Apple Pay, I’ve seen all age spectrums using Apple Pay and Store to pay when it’s possible to do so. Contactless-enabled terminal. Sure, it will be slower, but I think we’re getting to a stage where it’s universal.

Kevin Rosenquist: I agree. What can companies in the digital payment space do to convince the skeptics that it’s safe and it’s better?

Nabeel Moosa: I think if I use contactless as an example in the UK, one of the most important drivers of its proliferation was its ability to be used on underground transport. That was one of the use cases that made it super popular. So showing the convenience of it and the fact that it’s available everywhere definitely makes it more likely to be adopted, because I think not only is user experience good, but the ubiquity of availability of something has like a compounding effect on how much you trust it. So if I see it everywhere, then I think it’s trust. That’s why payment schemes spend a lot on their branding. They put marketing everywhere. Because as a consumer, you’re innately convinced that something is trustworthy the more you see the brand available. So I think branding is super important, the proliferation of it. So if something is available to be used everywhere, a brand acceptance mark, for example, for new types of payment methods is going to be super important to put the seed in the consumer’s mind that this is something just new, but something trustworthy and accepted by all of my favorite shops or accepted by all of my favorites. No one has a favorite payment service provider, to be honest.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sadly, no.

Nabeel Moosa: No, I agree. Maybe it’s just a new coat. But as you go through the checkout process, you see trustworthy brands that you recognize. In Denmark, I would say, the Nets brand, which is part of the Nexi Group, what is a popular brand? It is because we do so much consumers recognize it. So Nets doing something is seen as trustworthy like innately. So payment service providers have a role to play in proliferating. I think that the brands or the payment instruments themselves have a role to play in making it as widely available and visible as possible, and that over time has a trust-compounding effect.

Kevin Rosenquist: Good point. It’s like marketing and branding. It’s kind of not dissimilar from any other product you’re trying to market, right?

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly.

Kevin Rosenquist: So speaking of Nexi, you guys are quite the player in the payment space. You’re often referred to as the Italian pay tech giant. I saw out there that. You merged with Sia and took over Nets. Both of these mergers took place in 20. He was the pandemic, a catalyst for acquiring these companies and expanding with the contact contactless payments becoming such a prominent thing then.

Nabeel Moosa: I wouldn’t link the two actually, myself. I would say, in the European landscape, in particular, there are different things happening. So of course, the way payments are being regulated is pushing for more unification across countries. So like, everything is becoming more seamless. It doesn’t matter which country you operate in within the eurozone. You can passport your licenses across different places. So that innately opens up the possibility for there not to be just an Italian player and a Danish player and a Swedish player, but to be truly pan-European payment service providers like those obstacles are out of the way. Think of the importance of licensing. Like if a European company wants to move to the US it’s a big hurdle in your way, even though the market might be lucrative, it’s a big step. You don’t understand the regulatory landscape. You need to apply for a license so that can be costly. There are different capital requirements, etc., etc.. So like that barrier has been removed. Then I think payments is a scale business. At the end of the day, we are like a technology that we process payments.

Nabeel Moosa: So the number of transactions you process, the more improved your unit economics are. So like scale is an important factor. Why is scale an important factor? There’s a financial aspect to it, of course, but you want to be able to invest in your technology, and investing in technology is quite significant. You need to spend a lot of money, a lot of capital on that. So as payments change week to week, month to month, and year to year, you need to be able to invest more and more in your technology, and in your people as well. The only way to do that effectively and economically is to grow to a scale where you can do that. So not only is the financial aspect of it, like innovation requires you to be operating at a certain scale as well. That’s true, for us. So of course, we’ve grown both organically and inorganically over the, over the last few years. That’s true about other players in the market too.

Kevin Rosenquist: Consumers are so different in how they handle their finances and financial transactions, as we’ve kind of been talking about, even when you’re in the same country. But how difficult is it to develop new technology for the digital payments space when considering cross-border transactions? It’s got to make it quite the challenge.

Nabeel Moosa: It’s challenging. One of the philosophies we have, and it’s a mindful philosophy, is that we don’t see each European market as interchangeable with the other. So, even when we’ve grown by acquisition, we’ve tried to select the company that’s well positioned in that market because it understands its local consumers. It understands the habits and culture of the people there. It makes sense. The local sales team and local support team speak the language and offer the different currencies that are important to those consumers and merchants. So, it’s the most important thing when you’re growing is to be able to say you’ve adapted to each market in Europe. So in the Nexi group portfolio, SP 24, which is the most popular payment method in Poland, and also a very popular payment service provider. They have a very unique set of capabilities that apply to Poland. That’s intentional. It’s different. So you can’t just collapse into something that’s bigger and more advanced. It needs to stay the way it is in that market. But then where there are opportunities to invest that are consistent across different markets. So the way we process card payments, for example, is more and more frictionless over time. There are things we can do to support merchants in risk and fraud management. We do that over time, but at the same time, we do things consistently across all of our markets, and there are things we keep intentionally, and uniquely local, and we develop local solutions for those merchants in those countries. And so we have to do both. We do things at scale for things that are consistent across markets. But at the same time, some things need to stay local, and we invest locally in those things as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, that’s a good way to do it. More efficient. I saw Nexi help the first Cashierless store get off the ground in Italy. That’s basically like my dad’s nightmare. He hates self-checkout so much. Like I could see him being all crotchety there. But is this a trend that you see might gain significant steam?

Nabeel Moosa: I think so. I mean that we mentioned bingo payments before. This is a step further. Like you don’t have to do anything at all. You just take your product and, and, and, and leave the market, I think, or leave the store. I think we’re in a stage of payments where you need to try these things. You need to try them. Amazon has done the same as well. You need to be able to experiment and understand and see how consumers react to different things in different countries. As I mentioned before, like contactless didn’t just take off overnight. There was a particular use case, a particular type of usage that helped it expand exponentially in the UK. I think that’s going to be the same for what for like invisible payments? They’re going to have to be certain types of use cases. It may be like an in-store-like retail environment, where it may be another type of use case where a consumer goes, oh, actually, I don’t I don’t hate this, I like it, I trust it, like it has value to me. So we’re in its infancy days of like cashierless stores and like invisible payments where you just have to check in and do an action but don’t pay for anything but the payments happen behind the scenes.

Nabeel Moosa: I mean, if you think about it, automatic number plate recognition in car parks or car lots, that’s a cashier-less store in a sense, but just for parking it’s like a service. You that’s true. Your number plate is recognized. You go in, you park and then you leave. But that’s the same as picking up a product off the shelf. Except you’re just using a service. You’re using a space.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s true. That’s a good analogy.

Nabeel Moosa: So we’re already doing it again. It’s like it’s the use case and how you perceive it. So in the retail use case, people might still be a little bit skeptical or might not be as popular as other other ways to shop. But actually, we’re already doing very similar things in different use cases. So, I think we’ll see more use-case experiments. And it may stick in some and it may not stick in others.

Kevin Rosenquist: We’ll also have humanoid robots stocking shelves and robo-dogs handling security.

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly. Think about like, drone delivery. It’s in the same type of experiment where, like, you’re shopping You get delivery in a different way, for example. And so paying a different way, it’ll work and it won’t work in some places.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sure. Well, I’m glad you brought up the Amazon thing because I was curious to get your take on that because it was the Amazon grab-and-go. Just walk out, store the store. for those listening who aren’t aware, essentially, you scanned your phone on the way into the store, I believe, and then I tracked what you took. Theoretically, you would be billed later via your Amazon account, but it didn’t work very well, from what I understand. Can you lend any insight into why, and where it went wrong?

Speaker3: I don’t like to comment too specifically on another player.

Sure, I understand. Very general. Like where.

Nabeel Moosa: I think I think like, I don’t know too much of the specifics of the Amazon case, but I think culture and habits play a role again, like, I think it’s important to know, like how consumers want to shop. And if people see it as an experiment, which sometimes can be perceived as, they may not want to participate in the experiment, and they may want to just see how successful it is and then decide. So like, not everyone is an early adopter for new things. And I think that that played a role for sure in it. Then of course, like, how you execute it, like how you execute the shopping journey. I’m sure like plays a role. So like, you always have to check in with an Amazon account. So there are things that never change. You always have to be able to identify yourself as a consumer. So that’s that’s an important step. If you think about it, it’s identifying yourself with an app or what something else, is going to be something that persists whatever happens in the retail space, that’s cashierless or invisible payments. So that’s just one way of proving that people are willing to experiment with identifying themselves via their phone with a store. Then, of course, the experience of shopping. Maybe they didn’t resonate with them so well, but there are other ways that that could play out again in the future. I think consumer habits are often the hardest part to change, and some people like going into the store and paying. and that could also play a role like in Maine. We may not be ready for that type of payment experience, that type of shopping. Interesting.

Kevin Rosenquist: Being in being ready for it. I kind of didn’t think about that. Like just I mean you think about, the dopamine hit when you go out and buy stuff, right? Like you, everybody loves that feeling of going out and purchasing. Exactly.

Nabeel Moosa: And most of us, strangely enough, there are some markets in Europe where extra friction in the payment process is a good thing. So it’s like a, it’s a mark of trust. Like, oh, a cool like I had to do this on my phone. That means it’s not fraud, if that makes sense or not. It’s a trustworthy merchant. So, there are things that may work in the American market that don’t work in Europe and vice versa because of those payment experiences. But I think grab and go is a proof of concept and what we’re doing in Italy is a proof of concept, I am just part of a journey to somewhere. And it will take many experiments like that, to get to the right place.

Kevin Rosenquist:  It’s kind of one of those things where we probably can’t even wrap our heads around what it’s going to look the way in the future because it’s going to be so different than what we’ve imagined thus far.

Nabeel Moosa:  And in my head, I tried to break it down into its constituent parts of payments. So it’s always about identifying. So like using a phone to identify using another form, your finger, your retina, your face, even as a way to identify yourself or something you do afterward is quite popular these days. So that part of the grab-and-go was like perfectly fine. I think experience counts for a lot when you pay and when you shop, You can’t discount the fact that consumers like to do certain things, even though they may be inefficient.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s very true. Like that person still trying to write the check, right>

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly. And if you win a prize, I think they still give you a big check. Right. So like it means something like. You are in the lottery, it’s really.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hard to do the mobile deposit with those though because they’re so big. You have to stand on a ladder You can actually.

Nabeel Moosa: So like if you’re like in your head, it still counts for something like, oh, I want to win where the lottery is like a million, but like I didn’t just get a small check, I got a big check.

Kevin Rosenquist: I got a big check.

Nabeel Moosa: And it’s still a check. And they didn’t just say, oh, we’ll transfer you the money and.

Kevin Rosenquist: Right. minus taxes. It’s that’s a funny thought. That’s a funny thought. But it’s an interesting thought about, like how people’s old habits die hard and the way people feel a connection. It’s even like there’s a part of me in a weird sort of way that sort of misses going out shopping for things. And I know a lot of people’s worst nightmare is going out shopping. So they love Amazon and they love online shopping and all that. But there’s something I don’t know in a weirdly romantic way about going out and buying something like, and physically going out shopping and so like when you try to take things away, the more things we take away from people that they’re used to, the, the maybe the less comfortable they get.

Nabeel Moosa: And we especially saw that during the pandemic. So, the pandemic forced us all to shop online more than we had ever done. And so the payments industry and online commerce, in general, saw this like, boom, like we’re here in 2020. Then all of a sudden like into 2021, we’ve seen this tremendous growth of online shopping. And of course, that trend is here to stay, but maybe not at the rate that we thought it would change. So like when the pandemic was over and everything, for example, in Europe was open again, you could shop during normal hours with fewer restrictions. People actually did return back to shopping in-store, so it wasn’t like everything went online and stayed online at the same rate. I think we did see a step change and some of that step change is persistent, so it’s not like we dropped back down to pre-COVID. We’re at a higher rate than we ever were before, but there are people who switch back to shopping in-store for clothes and other items. And and that was a noticeable trend. So not everything stayed online just because it was like that during Covid.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good point. I think that a lot of people I’ve heard people say and this is. Just to take this is their opinion, but they could see things like print media coming back and that there are people out there that say in time retail will come back. here, here in the US, I’m in Colorado and like there are so many empty retail spots, maybe not as many as empty office spots, but there are a lot of empty retail spots right now. But there’s a lot of people who think that kind of stuff is going to come back. And because people sort of will, will crave that, that to some degree, and it’ll be interesting to see. I gotta believe that with something like payments, though, convenience is everything. And even if as long as it’s it, as long as it’s easy to go out You can still do your shopping physically, as long as the payment process is easy, I would think that people would, would, would get on board.

Nabeel Moosa:  And as a payment provider, of course, there’s a big trend in like unified commerce or omnichannel payments. So from a payment service provider perspective, we’re trying to bridge the two channels. So we believe that both going to be strong and they’re both going to continue, to grow. We’re just trying to bridge the gap because the consumer expects different things. If they shop online, they may want to pick up in-store, or they may be in the store and they want something that’s not in the store. Well, then we can execute the payment, afterward once they’ve been delivered with the product. So, retailers are increasingly looking at unified or omnichannel solutions. And, and that’s going to be a trend that continues. So there will still be retail stores. Maybe they operate in different ways than they did before. It’s not about having unlimited stuff on the shelf there, but maybe a more experiential, environment for the consumer to come browse, and see a more showroom-type environment for lots of different items that we know.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s interesting thought.

Nabeel Moosa: So you blend the online and offline. So like online offline has a use case, and the type of experience, then online of course is just online shopping.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s just online. I’ll you know people worry about data security safety obviously when it comes to things like adopting phones and anything new, people are like, well we see it a lot with AI and stuff. We all joke that our phones are listening to us but people overall seem to ignore the concerns and embrace the digital world for the most part how much does data security do you think factors into people being resistant to what companies like Nexi are trying to do and move forward in a digital way?

Nabeel Moosa: I think the at least payments while this like heavily regulated. So, data security and GDPR like it’s high on the agenda always for any new payment method, even if they will operate with different data deals, for example. And of course, in Europe, and even for card schemes in general, there are EMV code rules that you need to, conform to. And this PCI, DSS rules, like how much card data can you collect, how do you store it, for example? So as a payment service provider, we can’t store the security code like that. That’s always with the consumer that’s on the back of their card or their digital version of the card. And we don’t have access to that. We can’t store that. We can store the card number and expiry and a few other bits of information. So in the payments industry, we’re like heavily, heavily focused on data security, not, for example, from a GDPR perspective, linking payments together so that you could backtrack and figure out, oh, this is that person who has shopped here and here and here and here. That’s an important thing that we have. So I think it’s always front and center of anything we do in payments. Then it’s almost just treated like a given. So like we have this high threshold and whatever we do that’s new has to meet this threshold. This Pro limit, that’s set quite high already for us. Then any solution on top of that has to comply with that. Then that’s the starting point for what we do next. So it’s like European ness plays a role in quite strict regulations in Europe, but then in the payments industry themselves, according to each payment instrument and card scheme rules, for example, we also have strict requirements on what we can store and how we process the information.

Kevin Rosenquist: I wonder if a lot of consumers don’t realize the regulations because I do think that so many people are talking about someone’s money and they’re going to get maybe paranoids a bit excessive, but sometimes and just cognizant of it maybe it is education, something that we need to work on to get people to in, my example earlier of maybe older, people who are more resistant to the change of digital payments.

Nabeel Moosa: Yeah, I think so. I think education takes a lot. I think banks have a big role, card issuers, if you want to call them that to have a big role to play in educating the customer on what they can do, and then the more they see it around them, I think the more they will become. They will come to some sense of ease around the fact that this is a trustworthy payment. Gimmick, for example. Right. This is something that they can use in a safe way. I mentioned culture plays a lot. So like sometimes you can have a new payment method that you add a particular step in the journey to that adds confidence, even though you may want to remove that step from a pure conversion perspective, you might want to put that in. So we do, of course, like understanding the consumer environment and merchant environment we spend a lot of time on. We have an insights team that speaks to customers, consumers, and merchants to understand what is it that gives people comfort. I’m simplifying, of course, but is a blue button better than a red button? that type of thinking is quite significant. how you structure the payment page where you put a piece of information as well as the payment method people used, I think has a lot of, has a lot of impact, having a logo that they recognize through the journey is an important factor, for example. So education for sure. I think intermediaries have a role to play in designing an experience that feels trustworthy as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s interesting, the user experience, is just.

Nabeel Moosa: Having pop-ups You’re like, go to a URL that looks weird, and then you don’t see any of that. You were on a merchant website and now you’re on another website of a payment service provider that you don’t recognize. The URL looks weird. So even though you’re paying with something that you thought was fine, the experience of the payment journey makes you feel like it’s not. So I think that everyone has a role to play in this.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s a very good point about the user experience. Very good point. Because that can add to mistrust.

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly. I sometimes shopping and then I pay with a credit card even. Then I click okay like go to checkout and then pop up comes up and it’s like, okay, I’ve never seen this payment service provider before. Like, what is this? The design isn’t great. Now you’re like, oh, okay. Maybe then I like I’m a geek. So like, I open up the inspect the page, like to see a good payment service provider.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh, There you go.

Nabeel Moosa: But that, that’s just a me thing. I don’t think everyone would do that. I think most people would just close again. And so, like, you don’t want those dropouts, you don’t want abandoned carts. So, that’s a role for a merchant. Of course, everything is up to the payment part. But then the payment service provider has a big role to play in ensuring people don’t drop out at the paying stage.

Kevin Rosenquist: Is there anything that you’re able to talk about that Nexi he has on the horizon? That’s what’s exciting.

Nabeel Moosa: I think one of the things that we are super interested in is leveraging as much data as possible to do risk scoring on transactions, that’s an important part. So it’s always a fine balance between having payments that are quick and fast, versus having trust that the person who is paying is the person who they say they are, and they’re buying goods, and it’s not going to be turned into a chargeback later on. I think those are big concerns of merchants. So it’s good to have high conversion, but at what cost? so we’re constantly on the lookout and like, ways to optimize conversion fraud and risk management at the same time. I would say that’s a really big topic for us. And of course, chargebacks aren’t good if you’re using a credit card. So merchants want to minimize those as much as possible.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s a good, and interesting point too because we’ve talked a lot about the consumer side. However, the merchants need their safety and security as well.

Nabeel Moosa: Exactly, exactly. So we’re always focused on ensuring the merchant also gets the best experience that they have.

Kevin Rosenquist: For sure. Well, Nabeel, thank you so much for being here. I had a great conversation and I very enlightening. I think you helped a lot of people because you know what you’re talking about when it comes to payments.

Nabeel Moosa: Thank you very much. That’s very kind. But it’s been great talking to you as well, Kevin. Always happy to talk payments.

Kevin Rosenquist: All right, well, thanks for being here. We’ll talk to you again sometime.

Nabeel Moosa: Great. Thanks. Speak to you soon.