Christian Deger, payworks: "In order to be successful you want to focus on the product itself, on how the merchant and the shopper are using it"

Christian Deger is a Co-Founder and CEO of payworks, a provider of a mobile Point of Sale processing platform. Prior to founding payworks, Mr. Deger worked as Venture Manager at Barikuta Partners where he was responsible for building the South East Asian business of PAYRETO, a managed services company for payment providers. Having studied in Munich and Atlanta, Christian holds a Diploma Degree in Business Administration from the Technical University of Munich as well as an Honors Degree in Technology Management from Center for Digital Technology and Management. He is a scholar of the German National Merit Foundation and Member of the Advisory Board of MPE.

First of all, could you share with our readers more about payworks and how do you see your role in the development of mPOS market?

Christian Deger: Imagine you are a company that wants to launch its own mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) solution. This could be a Chip & PIN payment application for micro-merchants, a mobile ordering solution for bars or a completely integrated cashier system for a retailer. In order to be successful you want to focus on the product itself, on how the merchant and the shopper are using it and on the overall experience your clients have if they use your product. The last thing you want to worry about is the compliance and scalability of your payment infrastructure. And this is exactly where payworks comes in.

At payworks we help companies to launch mPOS solutions quickly and cost-efficiently. In order to do this, we run a fully certified mobile Point of Sale payment infrastructure in the cloud which we make available in a Software-as-a-Service model. To enable developers to focus 100% on making their product great, we provide easy to use SDKs to enable quick and compliant integration of Chip & PIN card readers for merchant applications as well as in-app payment functionality for shopper wallets. The platform is connected to all major Acquirers in Europe. On top of our products for developers, we provide a complete white labeled mPOS product, which enables companies to launch a micro-merchant Chip & PIN payment solution, including mobile apps for iOS and Android, a Chip & PIN card reader, a merchant dashboard and a fully integrated boarding process. This way, companies can launch their own, branded mPOS solution even without any development efforts on their side.

What are the opportunities for acquirers in the mPOS market?

Christian Deger: Especially Acquirers with an existing Point of Sale business have a very strong position to leverage mPOS technology. They have well-established operational processes, powerful distribution channels and an existing merchant base, which is hungry for innovation.

mPOS technology gives these companies not only the opportunity to expand their merchant portfolio but also to help their existing merchants to grow further. This can be achieved by launching an own, proprietary solution, by allowing merchants to implement their custom mPOS solutions or by letting innovative merchant service providers into the Acquirers existing infrastructures.

At payworks we are working successfully with a number of both medium sized and large Acquirers to reach those goals and we are seeing exciting success stories with both existing and new merchants once an organisation has committed to pursue a sound mPOS strategy.

Your latest development focuses on wearable technology, namely the smart watch. Could you tell us how this works?

Christian Deger: With payworks’ technology everybody can built mPOS solutions extremely quickly - this is the beauty of our developer focused approach. From time to time we invite developers to our office to experiment with the payworks APIs and build the checkout process of the future. That’s where the Smartwatch payment project was born. The team built a solution which lets a shopper order his or her products and pay by a simple push of a button on his or her watch. The watch used for this development was a Pebble Smartwatch and in order to identify the shopper in the store, we used Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. The result was an extremely seamless checkout process, in which the payment itself happened very much in the background. The full story can be seen here: http://bit.ly/J5Hkuo

During your mPOS Hackathon at the MPE conference in Berlin several teams of 4-5 programmers and designers have built mobile POS prototypes, using payworks’ and indoo.rs’ SDKs as a basis. What was the outcome of the Hackathon?

Christian Deger: This was a similar event as the one in which the Smartwatch payment was developed. We had more than 20 developers working with the payworks and indoo.rs APIs in order to build innovative mPOS solutions in only 24 hours. The results were really exciting.

Among others, we had one team building a payment solution with Google Glass: You would basically look at an invoice and it is automatically paid via a SEPA transfer. Another team built a Bitcoin ATM using our mPOS SDK and a third team developed a self-checkout solution that incorporated both our mCommerce SDK and Bluetooth Low Energy technology by indoo.rs. We are introducing all solutions in greater detail on the payworks blog. Make sure to have a look: www.payworksmobile.com/blog

Company description

payworks provides a mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) platform that lets merchant service providers quickly build payment functionality into their applications. The software development tools of payworks make it easy for developers to build mobile solutions for face-to-face payments with Chip & PIN card readers as well as solutions for shoppers to pay directly with their phones via in-app payments and wallets. Besides the software development tools, the company offers a white label payment acceptance solution for micro-merchants, enabling Acquirers to quickly launch their own, branded mPOS product. payworks provides its platform in a Software-as-a-Service model, enabling their clients to enter the market much faster and run their mPOS solution much more cost-efficiently.