By Hendrik van der Watt, Head Payment Architecture, Danske Bank
Interview ahead of Payments Forum 2019 (Get 15% discount on the Forum using presenter code: PAYMENTS88)
Can you please tell the Risk Insights readers a little bit about yourself, your experiences and what your current professional focus is?
I am currently the Head of Payment Architecture for Danske Bank, located in Copenhagen. My passion is Payments and the opportunities that new innovation in this sphere brings to the consumer. We are living in extraordinary times, where everything is driven by immediate consumption, this is driving a fundamental shift in how we are paying for goods and services and creates a multitude of opportunities for traditional and non-traditional providers in the market place. I have been working in the financial services sector for the last 20 years’, across the IT value chain and have led a number of core IT and Payment portfolios, projects and teams across Africa, the UK and Europe. I have spearheaded key transformation programmes centered around best practices, innovation and the optimization of Payment Solutions. One of the programmes stretched across 10 Banks in 8 countries. Currently I am part of the team made up from members of all the major banks across the Nordic countries who are venturing to establish the first integrated region for domestic and cross-border payments in multiple currencies.
What, for you, are the benefits of attending a conference like the Payments Forum and what can attendees expect to learn from your session?
For me the biggest benefit of events such as these, are the opportunities it presents to gain different perspectives to the same challenges that we all face, sharing insights and gaining an understanding of what new opportunities may arise from these.
Attendees for the Project 27 session can will gain understanding of what this is and why initiatives like these are important to evolving Payments.
Can you give our readers a brief introduction to what Project 27 involves?
Project 27 is a joint initiative by Danske Bank, DNB, Handelsbanken, Nordea, OP Financial Group, SEB and Swedbank, exploring the possibility of establishing a pan-Nordic payment infrastructure for domestic and cross-border payments in the Nordic currencies and the Euro.
How do you see the impact of Payments evolving over the next 6-12 months?
If we consider all the Payment modernization journeys around the world at the moment, it is clear that the push is towards Instant Payments, as the new norm.
This combined with GDPR, OpenBanking and PSD/2 creates lots of opportunities for the introduction of new products in the market, mostly aimed at the retail and SME sector.
Combining these opportunities with Gig Economies, IoT and others will continue to drive the paradigm shift in how Payments become “invisible” in our everyday lives.
Like the air we breathe, we will start to focus less and less on the activity of Payments and more on how this enable us spend our most valuable commodity, namely time, on either contributing to services and production of goods whenever and wherever or consuming these “just in time”.
