Simone Ranucci Brandimarte is Chief Executive Officer for goSwiff, a leader in mobile commerce and marketing services, since Q1 2014. He leads the company providing advanced technologies, products and services. With his strong track record in driving revenue and profit growth in mobile services and web technologies, he has helped various companies to succeed. At goSwiff, Simone is focusing on new offerings to benefit the global payment ecosystem.
How did you get into the Mobile Point of Sale industry?
The mobile payment space is fascinating and the fastest moving industry currently. I have over twenty years of expertise in mobile services and I have designed and launched multiple mobile payment initiatives. mPOS is one of the solutions that is changing the way how people can pay, and it is making a difference in people’s lives especially in the emerging markets.
I realized some years ago that the main issue to succeed in mobile payments was not in consumer adoption, but in merchant acceptance network development. It is not enough to distribute new mobile payment services, if the merchants are not ready to accept them. I strongly believe mobile point of sale is solving that problem. We can see with the groundbreaking initiatives that our bank and mobile operator clients are working on in different countries, that when you get merchants on board and actively using mPOS, everyone benefits.
What are some of the difficulties your company faces in the industry?
As all the young and innovative industries, there are multiple challenges in mobile payments: Technology challenges due to newborn hardware & software that demand testing, trial and error before finding the optimal solution; adoption challenges for new technology that require merchant and consumer education and usability of the applications and devices; and speed challenges due to the slow pace the financial institutions react on the new technologies and ideas.
Those market players that are able to overcome these challenges with enough resources and talent will be the market leaders in the future.
Also as the market is quite young, the regulations are still in process to match the market needs and firms have to respond to various regulatory requirements. Being EMV and PCI compliant are the necessity for any company providing technologies in this space, but there are also various local and regional regulations that a global player needs to take into account. goSwiff works closely with the government agencies and regulators to make sure our offering is suitable for each country where we operate in.
Where do you see the m-POS industry heading in the next 5 years?
Mobile POS is evolving to a “Smart POS”, that is from one side representing the central payment aggregator tool for merchants enabling them to accept any digital payments, and from the other side, Smart POS is the main channel for value added services that are able to support consumer loyalty, rewarding and data analytics. We focus on merchants as they are the key in adoption and usage of new payment opportunities to benefit their businesses and growth in the economy. Once the merchant is on board to start accepting card payments, everyone benefits: banks, card schemes, merchants and consumers.
With fraud being a large concern with Issuers, Users, and Merchants in the m-POS industry what is goSwiff doing to help elevate some of those concerns?
The mobile POS as a technology is secure. Not only does the multi-factor authentication encrypt the card and transaction data for the banks to settle, blocking any fraud attempts, but also additional features like geo-localisation and identification of the user make it a very safe tool for electronic transactions. At goSwiff, every transaction is authenticated through our secure platform and patented authentication process, and as the technology evolves our developers are adding new functionality to guarantee safe transactions and protecting cardholder data.
The industry is heavily investing in tools and mechanisms to further improve security, leveraging on services and functionality of the mobile devices. The payment ecosystem is also working with regulators and central banks to make sure that both the consumers and merchants have a protected channel to process their payments.
Security standard compliance requirements reduce the risk of fraud in every step of the process, and when using mobile POS both the consumer and merchant can be assured that the transaction data is safe. However, with new entrants in the payment market can increase the risk, and the merchants should always ask the end-to-end encryption before accepting a new solution.
How does goSwiff attempt to stand out from competitors?
Our core focus is on the emerging markets. We have operations in more than 25 countries in Africa, Middle East, CIS and South East Asia, and we have hands on knowledge on how to implement and roll out mPOS solutions even in challenging regulatory and infrastructure environments. goSwiff is not only a mobile payment technology provider, we offer also services and consulting for our clients to guarantee successful roll out and increase in the quality and quantity of transactions. We have a very experienced management team with wide payment and mobile industry knowledge, and our research and development team is continuously innovating in new functionality to serve our clients better, in any market or country they are. We drive to deliver easy to use, safe and flexible solutions to our clients, and the breadth of our offering and global market expertise allows us to develop long-term partnerships to add value to our clients.