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Location
London
Member since
2003
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Cards Security Payments Innovation

Alexander's blog archive

2016 (4) 2014 (1) 2011 (1) 2010 (4)
Alexander Mifsud

Alexander Mifsud

Co-Founder and CEO at Weavr.io
Message Message me Posts: 10 Comments: 8
Bio Alex Mifsud is currently Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Weavr.io, an open cloud-based platform enabling payment flows to be created, deployed and consumed by businesses that are increasingly digitizing their supply chains, back-offices as well as user experience. Career History Prior to Weavr, Alex founded and ran Ixaris, a leading innovator in global B2B payments, serving multinationals like Amadeus, Sabre, Axa and Airplus. Alex holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Blogs

 

Support non-acquired suppliers to shift the needle on card payments

09 Dec 2016

Commercial card payments have failed to take off, despite significant potential benefits for suppliers, buyers, and card providers. Today, only some 2% of global business spend is captured on card. Next generation virtual payments platforms will transform commercial card payments if they enable three winning strategies to counter today’s barriers t...

 

Are interchange economics the largest barrier to commercial card usage?

18 Nov 2016

The benefits of commercial card payments seem clear enough. Buyers can streamline their Procure to Pay process, drive working capital benefits and access rich transactional data. Suppliers can improve their Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and enhance customer relationships. Banks can grow transaction revenues while keeping their corporate clients hap...

 

The battle of three for banking supremacy

02 Feb 2016

Everyone knows that just a few years ago banks owned the financial sector. The only way to pay, transfer and save money was via a traditional bank. The reign of the banks was maintained principally due to the fact the industry was highly regulated and therefore an exclusive club of licence holders. As such, it was seemingly immune to the huge ch...

 

Payment predictions for 2016

22 Jan 2016

The payments industry is currently going through a period of rapid transition, driven by the pace of innovation, new forms of competition and weightier regulation. 1. Interchange fees will shake up the European card market One of the most immediate changes is the European Union regulation on interchange fees. Interchange is paid by merchants t...

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Alexander is Commenting on

5 Steps to Set Up Online Payments for Your Business

  This is a very good 'how to' post. There is more to payments, however, than card acceptance which is what this post is largely about.  What about issuing cards, or working with bank accounts, whether through open banking or even directly issuing payment accounts.  As the post states, it is all about anticipating and responding to pain points faced by online businesses.  With the increasing number of digital innovators, the payment industry is trying to address the pain points faced by new entrants who have an urgency to go to market as well as managing tight cash reserves.  There may be go-to solutions for card acceptance but it’s much harder to find solutions for any other payment process besides card acceptance.

15 Jan 2020 Reply Read article

ECB offers support to bank-backed alternative to Visa and Mastercard

  Perhaps a more viable approach would have been for PSD2 to stipulate robust interoperability and data standards available to all TPPs, plus minimum banking standards of conduct for disputed transactions with a body (EBA?) as arbiter.  That would have made it so mch easier for PoS providers to invest. PSD3 maybe? 

27 Nov 2019 Reply Read article

Ixaris create Open Payments Cloud

  Your point about timing is well made, Paul, but also note that PSD2 will only enable access to licensed third-party providers rather than the long tail of developers and innovators.  In addition to enabling acces for innovators with deeper pockets, OPC is also looking to support the long tail of developers by inviting an initial ‘founder members’ group of financial institutions and payments processing vendors to the OPC.

01 Dec 2017 Reply Read article

Is Lego building the new way of creating applications in the Financial Services sector?

  I couldn't agree more. One approach that the financial services industry seems to have overlooked up to now is Model-Driven Engineering which involves assembling models (in our case Payment Models) from such Lego blocks  (which are called Paylets). At the Open Payments Cloud hackathon in London this weekend, 9 teams of mostly non specialist developers were able to develop a range of applications that rely on complex payment flows simply by relying on a model-based approach.     

10 Apr 2017 Reply Read article