What led you to specialize in payments and what keeps you interested?

When I started in payments 30 years ago, the industry was very early in its digital transformation journey. I’ve watched the industry evolve from paper, checks, and paper-based card transactions to the digital, interconnected world it is today. The speed of innovation is what makes this industry unique. From those early days to today, innovation hasn't slowed its pace and it's getting even faster and more sophisticated.

What keeps me interested is there's always something new: we’ve gone from paper credit card records to frictionless instant payments that don’t even require me to take my phone out of my pocket, and there is more change to come.

How will the payments industry evolve over the next 5–10 years with the use of AI?

The big shift is that global payments are becoming the norm. We've seen the evolution of payments go from just checking out at your local store to sourcing delivery from across the world with the touch of a button. Today, we can buy from anyone, anywhere, and payments are continually evolving to keep up with demand. One of the areas we are seeing innovation help this growth is embedded finance and embedded payments. It's a whole emerging infrastructure that is much bigger than what we’ve looked at in payments historically. It’s businesses utilizing tools to make not just payments but financial services part of their ecosystem.

AI is playing an increasingly important role at every stage of the payments lifecycle. We're already seeing onboarding solutions use digital identity and photograph technology to make it easier and smoother. We're now looking at how to analyze our client’s business records automatically. As we move into a world where payments happen almost instantaneously, AI can be an important tool in helping to detect fraud during these increasingly fast interactions.

How will Endava’s mission to re-imagine the relationship between people and technology come to fruition in global payments?

We’re committed to helping fintechs, financial services organisations, payments companies, and virtually all industry verticals stay ahead of the technology curve. We’ve worked side-by-side with some of the world’s leading brands to create real-time payments platforms, e-commerce gateways, tokenisation apps, and other from-scratch solutions to drive payments innovation forward.

By understanding our clients’ customers and their needs, we ensure a secure, consistent customer experience across environments, applications, and systems.

How is Endava building trust among its users and potential customers?

Since 2001, we’ve built trust working with global merchants, developing solutions specifically for their complex needs, and working with payment vendors to help them create products that keep pace with tech advancements. We're always innovating and often build industry-firsts for our clients. One example is the work we're doing with the automotive industry as it moves into the e-commerce payments and in-car payments landscape. For our clients, this equates to staying competitive, improving speed to market with new solutions, and building customer loyalty with great user experiences.

We currently have over 5,000 people working on financial services projects around the globe. We see what’s happening in Australia, Europe, APAC, or the US, and take what we learn in one region and apply those lessons either geographically or within a different market. For example, we're often talking to the automotive industry about lessons learned in retail. We take our questions from our retail partners and pose them to our automotive ones, like, how do you build a great customer experience? And how do you make it work? The results are astounding. Our clients don't need to make the same mistakes because we can share five years of history. We can lead our clients quickly to solutions and leapfrog into new technologies.

How do you balance convenience with security and compliance?

Technology is the simple answer. Getting the right solutions in place to ensure a great user experience. Making sure that the security methods and their capabilities are consumed as seamlessly as possible. We've all seen how clunky two-factor authentication can be. Logging out of one app and into another, the back and forth is not a great user experience. This is a breeze with Face ID, users don’t need to leave the screen they start on. You’re keeping the user experience front of mind without compromising security. It's an area that we work on with our clients to get right.

How has Stripe supported Endava’s goals?

Our clients use Stripe because of the innovative solutions, comprehensive embedded services, and off-the-shelf capabilities that aren't available elsewhere. This helps us to create solutions for our clients that are quick to market and easy to adopt. Stripe has been highly collaborative in our ongoing client relationships. In working groups and forums, we come together to discuss solutions, challenges, and what works best for everyone involved. This collaboration is elemental to our partnership.