London, 16th May - A highly successful Cloud Payments Summit was held yesterday in London at Altitude, Millbank Tower. This event was sponsored by STS, the leading payments acceptance software specialist and attended by payment industry specialists, IT solution providers and STS customers from across the UK and Europe. Altitude, at 118m above street level, provided a most appropriate venue for the summit as attendees were right “up in the clouds”, although the fact that the sky was cloudless for the day meant that delegates got to experience spectacular views of Parliament, Westminster, the Thames and the London skyline.
In a keynote presentation, delegates heard from Derick Wiesner of IBM how Cloud has become the preferred implementation choice for IT applications and why this has become so. At the summit we learnt about the different flavours of clouds that exist and the merits of each.
Whenever a cloud deployment option is raised for a payments application the question of security inevitably gets raised. At the summit Steve Gooding from Armor Defense Inc. tackled the issue and shared best practices on how to keep cloud payments secure. It became clear that cloud deployments could help strengthen data security protection levels.
An interactive panel discussion moderated by Mark McMurtrie of Payments Consultancy Ltd allowed key issues related to payment clouds including security, resilience, compliance and in-store usage to be debated. Andy Brown from NCR, Andy Davies from Pay360 Capita and Neil Poultney from Vodat International answered a wide variety of questions raised and agreed that we can expect to see more cloud payment deployments.
Howard Buck from STS presented the cloud capabilities of STS’s G8 payments acceptance application and PayOp, a next generation vendor agnostic terminal management system, sharing observations and offering deployment guidance. After lunch attendees had the opportunity to view product demonstrations and discuss cloud capabilities in more detail. Steve Turner closed the summit with a presentation that looked to the future for payments acceptance and made suggestions on how new payment options and technologies can be introduced faster and at lower cost.
“We are delighted to have hosted this first of its kind cloud payments summit and with the very positive feedback we have received,” said Steve Turner, CEO of Smart Technology Solutions “Cloud deployments have become the preferred choice for the majority of business applications today. At the summit, we heard how payment applications are expected to be increasingly deployed in the cloud and also at the POS.”
About STS
STS is a leading payments acceptance application developer with unrivalled EMV expertise. Although the company is based in the UK, we have supplied over 150,000 merchant implementations located around the world across multiple industry sectors. We offer merchants independence from payment schemes, acquirers, gateways, PSPs and device manufacturers, thereby generating financial savings and maximising their payments flexibility and future choices.
We are a product-led company that invests heavily in developing high-quality payments acceptance applications and features in order to remain at the forefront of payments innovation. This started with EMV Chip and PIN payments in which we became a global market leader and now includes contactless, in-store mobile payments, payment cloud implementations and the management of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Our applications are designed to allow partners to establish competitive advantage. We have earned a reputation for trust, honesty and integrity by continually delivering high quality software and excellent support throughout our 20-year heritage.
Contact details:
Bing Dai, Senior Channel Manager, STS
+44 (0)20 8680 0252
bing.dai@stspayments.com