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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

CEO at Ixaris Systems Ltd
Message Message me Posts: 10 Comments: 6
Bio Alex Mifsud is Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ixaris Systems, Ltd. Under its EntroPay brand, Ixaris offers one of the most cost-effective, convenient and rapid means for businesses and consumers to make safe online purchases and to send instant payments around the world. Career History Prior to Ixaris, Alex worked as a senior consultant within the Cambridge-based technology practice of Arthur D Little, a global management consultancy. His clients included blue-chip companies such as Telia, VW Group, Granville Baird and 3i. Alex holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from th

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

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

Making sense of the government’s banking API initiative

  I don't buy the bottom up approach because it is simply too hard for most banks and is unlikely to happen any time soon.  Banks are better off doing two things first: use a cloud based approach to new services so they can be nimble and not shackled by the legacy architecture, and create middleware overlays over their legacy systems.  Both these approaches will enable them to publish APIs in a practical and cost-effective way.  Once front end services (whether delivered via APIs or via user interfaces) are established, banks can then take the time (and pace their expenditure) to gut out their legacy systems and replace them with the kind of structured architecture that Hans is advocating.  

23 Jul 2015 Reply Read article

UK payments regulator calls for 'pipes and wires' innovation

  I welcome Hannah Nixon’s comments and share the view that more needs to be done to create the environment for payments innovation. As a technology provider to banks and financial institutions, my company Ixaris has a direct role to play in enabling that change. A few weeks ago, I shared a platform with leading payments industry experts at PayExpo in London, where the audience’s appetite for open payments access was unequivocal, but there was no clear view on how this might come about. That thinking is, in part, why Ixaris has launched the ‘Open Payments Ecosystem’ project, with funding from the EU. The project will deliver the technology platform that allows banks to collaborate with developers, small and large, to provide access to their infrastructure in a safe environment to enable an explosion in the development of payment applications addressing the diversity of customer needs. We believe such a platform, an exchange in essence, is fundamental to the success of open payments.  

29 Jun 2015 Reply Read article