Goodbye Complexity, Hello Simplicity

Set to be launched in January 2016, Hello Payment aims to become a key player in the sphere of mobile payments. Dominic Melo, Director of Hello Payment, says the time is ripe for safer card acceptance models.

How has the mobile point-of-sale business evolved in recent years, and what is the vision behind Hello Payment?

While there have been several market entrants into the mobile point-of-sale, or MPOS, arena, there is still room for growth in areas that are underserved or inadequately served. From my point of view, there is still something missing, and it is in that space where we hope to grow Hello Payment into a leading European financial services company.

Accepting cards has traditionally been a cumbersome process involving multiple parties. By consolidating technology and the merchant account application process within one unified company, we hope to eliminate bottlenecks and ensure a smooth on-boarding process for our clients. Our competition certainly has a first-mover advantage but the entire MPOS sector seems to have stalled or locked itself into a single-channel revenue model while waiting to see if consumers will move away from physical cards and into more token-based or virtual card products. It is our intention to start with MPOS and expand into additional acceptance channels to provide solutions for a merchant client’s complete business and not just a fragment of it.

Security matters are crucial in both online and mobile payment industries. What opportunities do recent developments offer you to fight fraud and abuses?

In terms of risk management and security, it is always preferable to have a transaction where the card is deemed physically “present” versus “not-present”. Our customer, the business owner, has traditionally had access to several methods to accept a card payment. For example, a business owner could process the card manually, either over the telephone or with a paper form, or online through e-commerce. As you can see, both of these methods provide for “not-present” transactions.

Now, with MPOS, we can bring the card reader to the location of the customer to avoid the inherent risks of card- not-present transactions which can expose a business owner to the risk of a forced refund, also known as a chargeback. When a business processes their customer’s payments in this way, it eliminates several reasons a customer could claim that their card was processed without their knowledge, consent or in a fraudulent manner.

Our entire ecosystem is built with security as a core component. Our technical infrastructure is certified to the highest level. We hold PCI Level 1 certification for our technical systems, and our card readers are certified for both EMV (chip and PIN cards) for Level 1 and Level 2 as well as PIN transaction security, which ensures that the cardholders PIN code is kept encrypted throughout the entire transaction process.

Could you comment on the new geographical areas undergoing a strategic expansion and that you wish to consolidate?

Our licence allows us to accept customers inside the European from an acquiring standpoint Union, and we are licensing our technology and infrastructure to e-commerce banks and payment companies outside of Europe that have not developed an MPOS strategy. We provide a turnkey platform that allows our platform clients to rapidly expand their service offerings to existing merchants, and do so under their own brand. This opens up new revenue opportunities in a rapidly commoditizing payments landscape.

We are consolidating around a two pronged approach for the launch. We will be developing our channel partner sales strategy in conjunction with several large brands in Europe who wish to offer MPOS devices to their captive SME customer base. In addition, our direct-to-merchant marketing plan will be underway in test markets across the Eurozone during the first part of 2016. We are focusing on direct sales organisations and service providers who could benefit the most from the reduction in fraud risk and cost savings by a transition away from a card-not-present transaction to a card-present transaction.

What do you believe are the hottest trends going forward for the payments industry?

I see significant potential in the relatively undeveloped area of Customer-Point-of-Sale (CPOS). CPOS will shift the device away from the merchant, put the power back in the hands of the cardholder and open the door to many potential new methods of payment acceptance. By turning the traditional model around, you could enable direct incentives to the cardholder to use a CPOS method because many types of risk would be eliminated from the merchant’s perspective. In addition, by empowering the cardholder in this way, it could pave the way for new types of marketing incentives and discounts for consumers who take responsibility and control of their payment card transactions.

”With mobile point of sale, we can bring the card reader to the location of the customer to avoid the inherent risks of a card- not-present transaction which can expose a business owner to the risk of a forced refund, also known as a chargeback,” says Dominic Melo Director of Hello Payments.

What are your main objectives and ambitions for Hello Payments in the next two to three years?

I would like to see Hello positioned at the forefront of CPOS expansion and will carefully watch the growth of near-filed communication enabled consumer devices as a payment mechanism. There are a lot of potential benefits to this technology, however, from a security perspective, Chip and PIN still provide the best combination of convenience and security. As long as we do not become too focused on a device or box and remain focused on ease of use for our business customers and their card- holder clients, we should go from strength to strength. Say Goodbye to complexity and say “Hello” to safer card acceptance.

“I see significant potential in the relatively undeveloped area of Customer-Point- of- Sale (CPOS). CPOS will shift the device away from the merchant, put the power back in the hands of the cardholder and open the door to many potential new methods of payment acceptance.”

Dominic Melo, Director of Hello Payment