Latest / The Payments Shed / Ep. 11 - VAMP in Motion with Kiel Cook, Product Manager at IXOPAY @ Money 20/20 USA 2025

Transcript

Ep. 11 - VAMP in Motion with Kiel Cook, Product Manager at IXOPAY @ Money 20/20 USA 2025 · The Payments Shed

• 0:06
  Welcome back to the Paper Set podcast.
• 0:08
  Today we're lucky enough to be joined by Kyle Cook, Principal
• 0:12
  Product Manager at Ixo Pay. Kyle, thank you so much for
• 0:14
  being here. Give us a bit of an intro.
• 0:16
  Tell us more about yourself. Thank you for having me.
• 0:19
  It is a marvellous Monday here at Monday 20/20.
• 0:21
  As we start this conference off a little bit about myself, as
• 0:25
  mentioned, Principal Product Manager at EXO Pay, I'm closing
• 0:28
  in on 20 years of experience in this payments industry.
• 0:31
  I've been across multiple different customers, multiple
• 0:33
  different interactions are different sides of the payment
• 0:37
  side of the payments spectrum from work being in the merchant
• 0:41
  system, being on a payment provider system.
• 0:44
  The the ecosystem experience that I've been able to glean
• 0:47
  throughout my experience has positioned me to be here in this
• 0:50
  place and be ready to talk to you guys about the topics you
• 0:52
  have. Fantastic.
• 0:53
  Thank you so much. So talk to me a little bit more
• 0:55
  about Ixopay's vision and more importantly for the listeners,
• 0:59
  what is orchestration? All right, so orchestration is a
• 1:03
  bit of a buzzword. Depending on who you talk to,
• 1:05
  you might get a slightly different definition.
• 1:07
  At Exopay, how we define orchestration is merchant
• 1:11
  empowerment, giving merchants the ability to own their own
• 1:15
  data and send their data where they want it to be.
• 1:17
  So we're looking at avoiding processor lock in, giving you
• 1:21
  the ability to choose where you're going to process and when
• 1:24
  you're going to process with those providers.
• 1:26
  So orchestration is all about payment connectivity and we
• 1:29
  provide you the infrastructure for you to have that full stack
• 1:33
  capability of connectivity across all of your provider
• 1:36
  connections. Fantastic, fantastic.
• 1:38
  I know you and I spoken before Kyle on Vamp.
• 1:41
  We're three weeks in now. Some people are loving it, some
• 1:45
  people are hating it, some people think the world's going
• 1:47
  to end you to it. What's your thoughts on on Vamp
• 1:49
  so far? Well, from a product
• 1:52
  perspective, the biggest thing that I've been doing is meeting
• 1:56
  with customers, having conversations, having dialogue.
• 1:59
  And what I've learned is we're still in that reactionary period
• 2:03
  where people are still trying to figure out exactly what this
• 2:05
  mean. I guess it's been enforced as of
• 2:08
  October 1st, but fines and penalties haven't started to
• 2:11
  really trickle down the funnel just yet.
• 2:14
  And as I meet with customers, I'm seeing a dichotomy of
• 2:18
  experiences here, depending on what your payment stack looks
• 2:21
  like, who you're processing with depends on how much you care
• 2:25
  about the change that that brings, right?
• 2:28
  So do you have a chargeback problem?
• 2:31
  Do you have processor lock in? These are two of the questions
• 2:34
  that merchants have to answer. And really if both of those
• 2:38
  answers are yes, you do have a chargeback problem or you do
• 2:41
  have processor lock in that these are the situations that
• 2:43
  we're finding that that is more impactful in a negative way to
• 2:46
  customers. And what are your thoughts on
• 2:49
  the global versus local differences with that coming
• 2:52
  into into play now? Well, it's more it's more so
• 2:56
  about managing your payments tax.
• 2:58
  So it looks different global versus local, domestic versus
• 3:02
  cross-border. But at the end of the day, it's
• 3:04
  all about do you have a chargeback problem and are you
• 3:07
  able to pivot away from your processor if your processor has
• 3:11
  a vent problem. Do we think there's been enough
• 3:13
  education by everyone in the ecosystem when it comes to
• 3:17
  helping the merchants? I, I don't think there's enough
• 3:20
  education out there, but I think it's, there's a, there's a
• 3:24
  learning curve, right. So if you are a high risk
• 3:27
  merchant and you have you have constraints with your, with your
• 3:31
  payments capacity, you're getting new mids on a consistent
• 3:34
  basis, you're having to exchange mids on a consistent basis.
• 3:38
  You're more trying to stay compliant because you have a
• 3:41
  challenge. Those are the scenarios where
• 3:43
  VAMP is going to squeeze those merchants and those acquirers.
• 3:47
  And I say squeeze because my perspective of this is the goal
• 3:52
  of VAMP is a, a key in the clog of agentic commerce.
• 3:59
  So when I, when I think of agenta commerce, I think of the
• 4:01
  consumer that they're experienced with their car,
• 4:04
  their willingness to allow someone else or something else
• 4:07
  to manage that card for them. So how do we get in that psyche?
• 4:10
  How do we get the customers, the card holders to be open to those
• 4:14
  kind of things? To me, the first thing you got
• 4:16
  to do is you got to squeeze out the bad merchants.
• 4:18
  And it's too many bad merchants for Visa and and MasterCard to
• 4:23
  go after each one of them. But you can kind of regulate
• 4:26
  this at the acquirer level. So the, the quote UN quote bad
• 4:29
  acquirers who are allowing the, the high risk merchants who are
• 4:34
  basically masking their, their, their payments morality and,
• 4:38
  and, and doing it in a way that they're able to stay complaining
• 4:41
  by bending the rules, so to speak.
• 4:44
  In my opinion, those guys days are numbered.
• 4:46
  And and that's happening intentionally to allow agents
• 4:50
  and commerce to have legs because if, if, if card holders
• 4:53
  are concerned about their card, if they don't trust the market,
• 4:58
  agentic commerce is going to take is going to be even a
• 5:01
  bigger hurdle for it to take off.
• 5:02
  It's a really good point there when we talk about bad acquires
• 5:05
  and we see it all the time where there's different MCCS, right?
• 5:09
  They're always being logged against merchants that we know
• 5:12
  are doing X, but they're being seen doing Y Visa, MasterCard,
• 5:15
  go and do their work as they should be.
• 5:18
  They figure out what's happened, They do some mystery shopping
• 5:20
  and all of a sudden an acquirer gets a knock, knock on the door
• 5:23
  to say what's going on. They didn't have to go to the
• 5:25
  merchant. And some enquirers know what
• 5:27
  they're doing with this, right? This is why they're charging 345
• 5:30
  percent for domestic transactions on what should be a
• 5:32
  low risk MCC. Right.
• 5:35
  So do you think there's enough collaboration between the
• 5:37
  schemes, the PSPS and the enquirers?
• 5:42
  I would say there would be enough collaboration between the
• 5:45
  schemes and your full stack providers, our schemes and your,
• 5:51
  your, your high level are your, your your poster child, your
• 5:55
  your Rockstar acquires like your, your stripes, your world
• 5:58
  pays your your brain trees. I feel like those guys have a
• 6:02
  good relationship, but if you have historical chargeback
• 6:07
  problems, fraud problems, I don't think your relationship's
• 6:10
  going to be that well with the Visa Mastercards as.
• 6:12
  Well, I agree. I agree.
• 6:13
  So Kai, what are your thoughts so far?
• 6:15
  Money 2020 How's it been for you?
• 6:17
  Oh man. Well, throughout the year of
• 6:20
  2025, I've had a couple of different moments to, to speak
• 6:24
  on the payments ecosystem, to talk to talk about payment
• 6:27
  connectivity and the, the different product offerings in
• 6:29
  the market. So coming to Money 2020, I
• 6:32
  actually got here on day one yesterday and I set in on a
• 6:36
  session and I, I, I caught me off guard.
• 6:39
  It was talking about the future of payments.
• 6:41
  It was talking about the expansion of specifically buy
• 6:45
  now, pay later. And it was talking about, and
• 6:49
  then it got into the topic of agentic commerce.
• 6:52
  And on stage, I feel as if Visa indirectly confirmed my
• 6:57
  suspicion all year that the, the vamp things, the network token
• 7:01
  things, the, the actions that they're taking are not done in
• 7:04
  the silo. These are not just random dots
• 7:06
  on the board. These are all dots with the
• 7:09
  intention of painting a picture, setting the table for Ajita
• 7:12
  Commerce to come about. Absolutely.
• 7:15
  I I know it's a really, really good point there.
• 7:16
  I think Visa, MasterCard now are allowing merchants and PSPS to
• 7:21
  come to the table their ideas and not necessarily dictating
• 7:23
  the future of payments and buy now pay later is incredible when
• 7:26
  it comes to agentic commerce. Someone was mentioning if I as a
• 7:30
  consumer was using agentic commerce to purchase a product
• 7:35
  and I want to use interest free credit or buy now, pay later is
• 7:39
  the AI that's sitting behind it and where I'm going to educate
• 7:43
  me as a consumer what my APR is, how long it's going to take me
• 7:46
  to pages, What happens if I don't pay it in time of when
• 7:49
  risk of payment As a consumer, do I believe and trust that the
• 7:52
  AI, machine learning, whatever it may be behind the retailer is
• 7:56
  going to really help me as a consumer understand what I'm
• 7:59
  buying, right? Right, right.
• 8:01
  Yeah. I, I would assume that would be
• 8:02
  equivalent to having fine print in our day-to-day today, right.
• 8:06
  As you go in to a merchant's website and you purchase
• 8:08
  something, you want to have clarity on what it is that
• 8:11
  you're buying. So how do they bridge that gap
• 8:13
  with the gented commerce? I'm waiting to see myself.
• 8:15
  Absolutely fantastic. And lastly, Kyle, the shelf
• 8:18
  shame, what grinds your gears in the industry that we work in
• 8:21
  every single day? Oh man, in the payment space,
• 8:25
  one of the things that bothers me are that grinds my gears, as
• 8:28
  you say, as I travel the world, as I drive across the country
• 8:32
  and have moments with my kids and I run into a gas station or
• 8:36
  a local shop and I see all these random surcharges, $10 minimum
• 8:41
  to just buy a pack of them. These are things that I feel
• 8:44
  like the car schemes need to find a way to enforce this, like
• 8:48
  this is it feels like stealing money from the local public.
• 8:51
  Yeah, that's really good. I really like that because I
• 8:53
  think we looked at PSD 2 for example, was to come in and
• 8:57
  remove the the ability to search as it was a revenue stream for
• 9:00
  merchants. Right.
• 9:01
  And all we've done is is create a new buzzword form.
• 9:03
  It's a booking fee or something else that doesn't say the word
• 9:06
  servicy, but the intention is the exact same, which is to
• 9:09
  drive more revenue from unknown consumers, right?
• 9:11
  Right. And I think it, I think at some
• 9:13
  point the rubber's going to have to meet the road for that
• 9:16
  because we want to become a cashless society.
• 9:18
  And having those abrasive moments where I get penalized
• 9:22
  for using my car, we're going to have to circumvent that in some
• 9:26
  way in order to get to that place that we want to be.
• 9:28
  Absolutely, thank, thank you so much for your time and enjoy the
• 9:32
  rest of the show. Absolutely.
• 9:33
  You guys as well. Thank you.