With economies emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, Destot took to the stage to explore how today, the payments industry cannot solely rely on a “compass,” or a short-sighted view of innovation. “You need a vision,” Destot added before stating that technology must be leveraged to innovate payments acceptance and foster a new, successful ecosystem.

Destot thanked his partners in the audience for the resilience they exhibited during the pandemic, as well as their ability to adapt and reinvent in real time. “During those challenges, you may have perceived that payments became as essential as food or water to our society. Even during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 crisis, we were identified as an essential service and we were able to keep running our services despite some countries being completely in lockdown. At the same time, we were able to innovate, see an acceleration in online commerce and the adoption of contactless in instore payments.”

This transformation can be defined as the ‘ecosystem economy’ - a concept that Destot called out as crucial because of the enduring complexity of payments. He continued to say that while payments have never been so complex and despite there being several new paths to purchase, the binary of online payment vs. instore payment no longer exists. Innovation must now go one step further; customers are expecting the same, digital level of service from their instore payment acceptance methods.

Destot says that this complexity must be embraced, but there must also be an awareness that with the proliferation of new form factors, and in turn, an increased number of touch points, “we’re entering a hardware agnostic world where the same software stack will run on different kinds of hardware.” Further to this, for the ecosystem economy to be a success, collaboration will be integral as “nobody will be able to own this ecosystem and win by itself,” Destot stated.

Ingenico’s core mission is to be the most trusted technology partner by creating a blueprint for the new world of commerce and removing business friction. In addition to enhancing payments acceptance, business operations and business enablement, Ingenico are also focusing on fostering ESG responsibility as part of the development of the ecosystem economy.

These are the core pillars of three of Ingenico’s initiatives being discussed at PayTech 2022:

Axium, a platform comprising innovative Android POS and an suite of payment and business services.

PPaaS, a cloud-based Payments Platform as a Service (PPaaS) that empowers an ecosystem of clients and partners to offer their merchant customers payment and commerce solutions.

PartnerIN, a co-innovation to develop unique solutions for clients and use open APIs to enable them to customise, integrate and extend Ingenico products and solutions.