Payments Experts

I'll help you decrease processing fees by 20%, and improve approval rates, guaranteed — or your money back. 

Click the link below for a 1:1 session with me to boost revenues and slash unnecessary expenses

Founder & CEO

Shift4 Europe (formerly Finaro)

Director Of Sales & Business Development

• Leading the technical engagement with customers and partners to ensure that the functionality, performance, services, and technical infrastructure are clearly understood and executed.
• Identify & build customized solutions for strategic customers and managing their delivery
• Actively involved in analysis, solution design, client communication, and implementation
• Close collaboration with different internal teams (such as Product, R&D, sales, marketing, operations & support)

Solution Architect

Hey-CPA

Hey-CPA offers a CPA as-a-service platform, automating Bookkeeping work.
• As a CTO I was responsible for all technology aspects: software development, specification, design, architecture, infrastructure, and implementation.
• Built the code and the product from the ground up to be scalable and user-friendly.
• Product presentation, Sales & Recruitment of new businesses.
• Engaging customers, to continuously collect feedback and improve the product.

Co-founder & CTO

Isracard

• Project leader and coordinator, achieving success through collaboration with multiple departments, including R&D, Product Managers, Sales & Marketing.
• Responsible for Business Development, partner success, and Go-to-Market strategy.
• Maintaining positive relationships with business partners and customers to ensure adoption success.

Technology Project Leader (Product Owner)

Wix.com

• Working with the most cutting edge methodologies and technologies to develop ground-breaking web platforms, optimized for performance and scale - Wix platform - which is used by millions of people around the globe every day to build websites. 
• Understand and leverage customers business challenges to expand revenue and increase usage rate.
• Worked in a small team, that follows agile work methods and use continuous integration/deployment methodologies to run quickly as a startup while maintaining the high-end quality of the product.

Web Developer at Wix.com

Touche

• Work in a cross-functional team to deliver a complete user experience.
• Development of full projects, client and server-side - from specification and UI to the stage deployment on the servers.
• Expert in JavaScript and Web development.
• Presented the company and its technology at conventions and trade shows all over the world.

Full Stack Developer

ClickSoftware

• Helped enterprises and SMBs solve workforce management obstacles using ClickSoftware products
• Worked closely with customers and partners, onsite and remotely, to ensure the successful launch of new products.

Solution Specialist

Ness Technologies

Software Development Instructor

RE4MA Group SL

Direct Retail in shopping centers
• Extensive experience in frontal sales, Retail activities, brands development.
• Managed the sales organization (120 employees) in 27 locations globally.
• Responsibility for the Go-To-Market strategy and sales plan.

Sales and Product Line Manager

The Payment Solutions Guy — I'll help you decrease processing fees by 20%, and improve approval rates (guaranteed) by finding the best Payment Providers for your business | Visit my website to learn how

We help companies struggling with difficulty finding the right payment solution, high transaction fees, low approval rates, hidden fees to decrease processing fees by 20% and improve approval rates by 5-10%.

Using our unique Discovery & Assessment process, Payments Strategy, Cost Optimization, and Increase Approval Rates steps from day one. 

If we cannot achieve these results, we will continue to work with our clients for free until we do.

Alan Brian Dardic

🚨 Payments is Changing at an Unprecedented Rate. I Help Companies Navigate It.

Most payments companies struggle with navigating complex global payment landscapes, from startups that are trying to define where they fit, to legacy acquirers, who are trying to fight back to the emergence of Fintechs.

They either:
❌ Aren't able to connect with new and fast-growing merchants.
❌ Fail to differentiate in a saturated market.
❌ Rely on outdated strategies that no longer work.

That’s where I come in.

For the last 20 years, I’ve worked with some of the biggest names in Payments (Adyen, Checkout, and over 50 of the top 150 Nilson acquirers, PSPs, and fintechs). 

I’ve helped payments companies:
✅ Define their Strategy to unlock new opportunities and products
✅ Scale across Europe, the U.S., and emerging markets
✅ Raise Capital to expand their capabilities and get to Product Market Fit

In 2018, I started DataBright, a payments analytics consultancy, and helped 50+ fintechs before selling it to a global data company. 

Now, I work directly with PSPs, Acquirers, and Fintech founders to scale their payments business and stay ahead of the curve.

How I Can Help You
💡 Payments Strategy & Optimization: Build a payments stack that reduces costs & increases approvals.
🔍 Advisory for PSPs & Acquirers: Market positioning, GTM strategy, and performance optimization.
🎤 Keynote Speaker & Thought Leadership: Insights on the future of payments, fintech, and scaling businesses.

📩 Want to talk? DM me or reach out to discuss how we can work together.

Dwayne Gefferie

Who will actually capture the value in Agentic Commerce?

That’s one of the ideas I’ll be unpacking tomorrow at Mastercard’s Space4Commerce in Vienna.

A lot of people are asking whether AI agents will change how people buy. They will.

The more important question is who captures the value when they do.

My view is that many people are looking in the wrong place.

If agents become the buyer, a large part of today’s discovery economy starts to weaken.

Search, affiliate, referral, retail media, much of it exists because humans browse.

Agents don’t browse. They query APIs, compare options, and execute with far less patience for sponsored clutter.

That changes more than the customer journey. It starts to change the economics behind it.

So the real prize in agentic commerce may not sit where many expect.

It may not sit with the protocol layer, because protocols tend to standardize. It may not fully sit with the AI interface either, especially if those players do not control the transaction layer end-to-end.

The value, in my view, lies where trust, authorization, identity, compliance, and control converge.

That is where autonomous commerce becomes viable. That is where the margin can be defended.

And that is why the players enabling trusted agent transactions may end up in a far stronger position than many people think.

One of the points I’ll be making is simple: in the agent economy, the protocol may be open, the interface may be contested, but the trust layer is where value concentrates.

Looking forward to discussing this tomorrow in Vienna at #Space4Commerce.

The Payments Strategist | The Future of Payments Is Changing. I Help Payments Companies & Acquirers Stay Ahead.

Merchant Payments Ecosystem 2026 is four days away. And this year, I'm showing up differently.

I'm returning as an Ambassador and Advisory Board member. 

But I'm also hosting something new: MPE LIVE TV, a daily video commentary series filmed live from the conference floor in Berlin.

Three episodes. 120 seconds each. Published daily on Merchant Payments Ecosystem LinkedIn.

The format is simple.

I'll frame the key theme of the day in 60 seconds, then hand over to 2-3 curated voices from the room, speakers, merchants, and practitioners who have something real to say.

No fluff, no event promo. Just sharp, forward-looking takes from people actually building the future of payments.

We have a proper studio set up just outside the main halls. It's going to be good.

Beyond that, I'm looking forward to catching up with my fellow ambassadors, including Natalia Ivanis, Filip Rasovsky, Panagiotis Kriaris, Andréa Toucinho , Volker Schloenvoigt, Francesco Burelli, Sam Boboev, Laura McCracken, Faheem Bakshi, Geoffrey Barraclough, Daniel Kornitzer, Hagay Elyakim, Neill Butcher, Tony Moroney, Alex Rolfe, Sandra Mianda🖇, Angela Yore (Fin/Tech PR), as well as my peers and colleagues. 

The room is always the best part of MPE.

If you're attending, come say hi. And if you have something worth saying on camera, I want to hear from you.

Are you heading to MPE this year? Who are you most looking forward to seeing?

Yesterday, Mastercard and Santander completed Europe's first live AI-agent payment within a regulated banking framework.

Not a sandbox. Not a lab somewhere.

A real AI agent, initiating a real payment, on live rails, with Santander's compliance team having signed off on every control.

But why does "regulated" change everything?

As we know, the US moved first. PayOS ran the first live agentic token transaction in the US in September 2025. Major banks like Citi and U.S. Bank were among the early adopters. However, that was more about technical validation.

What Santander cleared is different: Consumer Duty, PSD2 authentication requirements, and strict liability rules. The major difference is that now, a compliance team has to sign off on it, not just a product team.

Santander's press release doesn't soften it.

"Validate the end-to-end operational and control framework under real conditions."

That sentence was clearly written by lawyers.

The reality is that it took 11 months from Mastercard's Agent Pay launch in April 2025 to get a European bank to utter those words.

The infrastructure isn't new.

Mastercard extended the same tokenization that powers Apple Pay and Google Pay to cover AI agents.

So why did it take so long?

What's new is the identity layer: Know Your Agent, a KYC-equivalent process in which every agent receives a unique ID and cryptographic credentials before touching the network.

No registration, no transaction.

The auth flow changed, too.

Agent requests now include the agent's registered identity, the consumer's pre-set limits (spending cap, validity window, merchant scope), and verified purchase-intent data. PayOS orchestrates it.

The issuer sees all of it. That's new data inside an auth message that most issuers aren't built to handle yet.

Santander now has a reference model, and the blueprint is public. Every European issuer and acquirer watching this faces the same challenge. Technology is the easy part.

Implementing KYA onboarding, consumer consent architecture, and regulatory sign-off is the real challenge. 

In other words, it is not just a technology project. It's a technology project, wrapped in a compliance and risk program.

Based on many of my conversations with European/UK issuers, I know that most haven't even started yet.

But I believe bridging that gap will decide the next 12 months.

How far along is your institution?

Most merchants think they have a payment analytics problem. They actually have a token problem.

And no amount of dashboards fixes it if the data underneath is incomplete.

Payment teams are drowning in reporting.

Every PSP has its own portal, its own definitions, its own settlement schedule. 

Adyen calls it one thing. Stripe calls it another. Your regional acquirer in Germany has a third format entirely.

McKinsey & Company found that data teams across enterprises spend up to 30% of their time on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability. Payments are not an exception.

That's not an analytics problem. That's a data ownership problem.

Here's what's happening underneath it.

Each PSP holds its own token namespace. The credentials stored with Adyen aren't readable by your second processor. The transaction history tied to those tokens stays inside that relationship. When you try to build a unified view of your payment performance across providers, you're working with deliberately siloed inputs.

You're not analyzing your payment data. You're analyzing each PSP's version of it.

The practical cost is significant.

\Failed payments cost the global economy $118.5 billion in fees, labor, and lost business in a single year, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Most of that leakage is invisible in fragmented reporting because no single view captures the full picture. Authorization anomalies look like noise. Fee mismatches go undetected. Decline patterns that would be obvious in a unified dataset stay buried in separate portals.

Merchant-owned, portable tokens change this. When the credential travels across processors and sits in a merchant-controlled vault, the data layer becomes coherent. One token, one transaction history, one analytics foundation.

In a conversation with Marco Conte, founder of Congrify (an IXOPAY company), he put it simply: the insight is only as good as the data underneath it.

If the token layer is fragmented, the intelligence is fragmented too. You can build the most sophisticated analytics layer in the market and still be working blind.

Most merchants are optimizing the wrong thing. They're refining their routing logic and chasing improvements in authorization rates using data they don't fully control or trust.

Fix the foundation first. The intelligence follows.

Who Loses and Who Wins When Mastercard and Visa Settle Funds in Stablecoins?

Mastercard just enabled stablecoin settlement. Visa and Bridge expand their collaboration to bring Stablecoin‑Linked Cards to over 100 countries.

Great news for both...but the question most people probably aren't asking is...

Who actually benefits from this? And who loses?

While we often talk about interchange and acquiring markup as the way payments companies make money, those who have worked in the industry know that the real money is earned from currency conversion and the yield on the gap between authorization and settlement.

T+1 today, sometimes T+2 for cross-border. Unglamorous, but real.

Visa and Mastercard together processed $10 trillion in card volume in 2025.

One basis point of overnight float on that pool is $1 billion. Per year.

Stablecoin settlement is near-instant. T+0. Big difference.

So when SoFi settles Mastercard transactions through SoFiUSD, or Fiserv does the same with FIUSD, they're not just testing new rails. They're compressing a margin line that's been quietly reliable for decades.

And this isn't just a Mastercard story. Visa settled $4.5 billion in stablecoin volume last year and is now expanding stablecoin-linked cards to 100+ countries through Bridge.

When both networks are moving toward T+0, it means the compression is happening in real time. With an opportunity size of $10 trillion.

So why would banks line up for that?

Because the float was never the biggest prize.

Circle holds roughly $60 billion in T-bill reserves. Tether.io holds $140 billion.

That's $200 billion in yield-generating assets sitting outside the banking system. Banks that issue their own stablecoins bring that backing onto their balance sheet.

They're not giving up float. They're trading it for a bigger book.

There's a distribution play too.

Galileo Financial Technologies, SoFi's B2B platform, will offer stablecoin settlement to its issuing bank clients. That's not an experiment. That's a land grab in infrastructure.

Faster settlement is a genuine win for merchants. For issuers, it's a trade with hard economics attached.

I have worked at several acquirers and continue to work with some of the top acquirers and issuers today, and every time, settlement timing isn't just an ops detail. It is a margin conversation. One that, if you don't have a plan for... might disappear from your P&L.

Want to learn more about the strategies I share with my payments clients? 

Check out my newsletter here https://lnkd.in/e6eXZrF9

Tokenization isn't a security decision. It's an ownership decision. 

However, most merchant payment teams don't know the difference.

And that gap is quietly giving their PSPs leverage.

Mastercard has committed to 100% e-commerce tokenization in Europe by 2030.

Nearly half of European Mastercard e-commerce is already tokenized, up by more than a third over the past 12 months.

Visa has issued over 12 billion tokens, with a 44% surge in 2024, and further double digit growth in 2025. 

The infrastructure shift is happening whether merchants are thinking about it strategically or not.

Here's what the compliance framing misses.

The token isn't just a security layer. It's an asset. Who holds it determines who holds the relationship.

Most merchants process through one or two PSPs, and in most cases, those PSPs hold the token vault. That works fine until you want to route a transaction through a different processor. Or run analytics across your full payment history.

Or switch providers without re-collecting card data from millions of customers.
Then the dependency gets expensive fast.

Merchant-owned tokens travel. They work across processors, markets, and payment methods. That's what makes a multi-PSP strategy genuinely flexible rather than just technically connected.

It's also the foundation for payment intelligence, orchestration, and agentic commerce. None of those builds cleanly on a token layer that the merchant doesn't control.

Visa's own figures show a 4.6% lift in authorization rates for tokenized card-not-present transactions versus PAN. That's not a security stat. That's a revenue number.

The point came up directly in a recent webinar I co-hosted with IXOPAY on payments intelligence: the data story only works when the token layer underneath it is clean and portable. You can't build meaningful analytics on fragmented credentials spread across PSP vaults you don't control.

European merchants are in the window where these infrastructure decisions get made. What you pick now sets the terms for the next decade of payment operations.

Do you own your credentials, or does your PSP?

Most teams can't answer that clearly. That's where the problem starts.

Why Every Scaling Payments Company Hits the Same Infrastructure Maturity Curve.

We've seen it time and time again.

A fast-moving payments company finds a gap in the market, launches on a white-label platform, grows quickly, then starts to feel the weight of what it built.

The cracks don't appear at launch. They appear at scale.

It's shaped an industry in which full-stack providers compete with unbundled specialists covering issuance, acquiring, fraud, KYC, and reconciliation. 

Everyone is selling a piece of the puzzle.

And while I've watched many companies try to build the next Stripe, Adyen, or Revolut from scratch, the truth is simpler and more humbling.

Every successful payments company deals with the same Infrastructure Maturity Curve, whether they like it or not.

There are three stages.

Stage one: Buy to launch. 

You pick whoever gets you live fastest. That's correct. Speed beats perfection here, and reliability matters more than cost. Monzo Bank launched on a prepaid processor. Revolut started on BaaS rails. Neither was ashamed of it, and neither should have been.

Stage two: Build for control.

Volume grows. Your vendor's ceiling becomes your ceiling. You start internalising capabilities. The work is necessary. What surprises every company is how long it takes, and how much engineering capacity it quietly consumes.

Stage three: Consolidate to survive.

Full in-house turns out to be its own trap. Integration overhead compounds. One company I know ended up with four separate KYC vendors across four product lines, paying four times for the same capability. The answer isn't more vendors or more builds. It's fewer, deeper partnerships with cleaner architecture underneath.

The good news is that the infrastructure landscape has matured alongside the curve.

Modern providers like Silverflow, Marqeta, and Pismo aren't the white-label platforms of ten years ago. They're API-first, modular, and built to integrate cleanly into whatever architecture you're running or building.

For startups, especially, that changes the way to strategize about it. You don't have to choose between speed and architectural integrity anymore. The right infrastructure partner gives you both.

Here's what most companies still miss.

The ones that struggle at every stage transition didn't choose the wrong vendors. They encoded vendor logic deep into their core systems. When it was time to move, they couldn't. What looks like a vendor problem is almost always an architecture problem.

Build an abstraction layer between your product and your payment integrations from day one. Vendor-agnostic at the core. Swappable at the edge.

The question isn't "Which vendor should we choose?"

It's "Have we built a system that can survive if or when we change vendor?"

Payments and Fintech are booming....however, what happens when your competitive advantage becomes everyone's baseline?

Tomorrow I'm on the main stage at Money Motion.

The session is called "Fintech's Next Phase: Technology as Core Infrastructure."

And the premise is one I've been thinking about for a while.

For years, fintech companies built competitive advantage by moving faster than the banks. 

Better APIs. Slicker UX. Smarter data models. Technology WAS the differentiator.

BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYONE HAS THE SAME TECHNOLOGY?

When cloud infrastructure is a commodity.
When AI tools are "table stakes".
When the payments stack you spent three years building is available off-the-shelf from a dozen vendors.

The answer is: the game changes entirely.

Technology stops being the moat. It becomes the floor.

Which raises harder questions:

Where does competitive advantage actually come from now?
What does this mean for how fintech companies should be structured?
And who captures the long-term value when the tech layer gets compressed?

I'll be exploring all of this in a debate-style fireside chat with Panagiotis Kriaris from Unzer.

No slides.
No safe takes.

Just two people who've seen this industry from the inside, stress-testing ideas in real time.

If you're at Money Motion tomorrow, come find us on the main stage.

What do you think is the real source of competitive advantage in fintech right now?

#moneymotion

The payments industry spent 30 years building the most sophisticated fraud prevention infrastructure in financial services.

In doing so, it accidentally built the most expensive revenue leak no one is measuring.

False declines cost merchants $50.7 billion across just four markets in a single year.

Global card fraud losses in 2024? $33.41 billion.

The thing the industry built its entire defensive architecture to prevent is causing less damage than the defense itself.

I published the first issue of a five-part series on this today. Here is what it covers.

The structural reason this problem exists by design, not by accident.

Issuers face regulatory penalties, reputational risk, and direct cost attribution for every fraud approval.

False declines carry none of that.

The cost lands entirely on the merchant's income statement. Risk teams know this. The incentive structure just doesn't give them a reason to care.

The compounding spiral makes it worse over time.

Chargebacks get coded as fraud. Models tighten.

More legitimate transactions get declined. Customers leave.

The ratio shifts further toward fraud in the training data. Models tighten again

It feels like the system is working. It isn't.

What Stripe and Adyen's most recent results actually prove.

Hertz increased authorization rates 4% by switching to Stripe.

Adyen's Uplift reduced false positives from 95% to 42% for merchants, including Just Eat Takeaway.com  and American Eagle.

This isn't network-level magic. It's deliberate product investment, using signals already available to every institution in the chain.

The gap is widening between institutions that treat authorization intelligence as a strategic capability and those that still treat it as an operational footnote. That gap is now large enough to show up in revenue and competitive position.

For a merchant processing €1 billion annually, a single percentage point improvement in authorization rate recovers €10 million. At zero incremental customer acquisition cost.

The authorization rate has always been the most important number in payments, yet nobody has treated it as such.

That is finally starting to change.

The question is whether your institution is part of the change or part of the problem it is correcting.

Four more issues will follow, breaking down exactly how Issuers and Acquirers are improving their authorization rates. As well as the impact of Network scoring and authorization rate optimization in Agentic commerce.

Full piece here → https://lnkd.in/ekBeZkEd

Why Issuers Keep Getting the Authorization Decision Wrong, By Design.

Issuers hold the final decision on every card transaction.

They are also the worst-informed party in the chain when they make it.

That paradox isn't an accident. It's the entirely predictable output of a system designed to measure the wrong things.

In the second edition of my Authorization Intelligence for my Payments Strategy Breakdown newsletter, I break this down for the more than 7,000 readers already subscribed.

Here is what it covers.

Why the data problem is actually an organisational design problem.

By the time a transaction reaches the issuer, the richest signals have already been stripped out. The ISO 8583 format was built in 1987 for speed, not richness. The issuer decides what to do with what's left.

Why rational people produce irrational outcomes.

No one gets penalised for declining too many good transactions. Every dollar of fraud costs a bank more than four dollars once recovery is factored in. The incentive to over-decline is baked in. The cost lands entirely on the merchant's income statement.

Why the spiral compounds quietly while every internal metric stays green.

Friendly fraud gets coded as genuine fraud. Models tighten. More legitimate transactions get declined. The training data gets worse. Repeat.

Why the network layer is starting to work around it.

Mastercard's On-Demand Decisioning launched globally in October 2025. For the first time, the quality of the authorization decision can be separated from the limitations of the internal system. Visa provides a similar solution called Visa Risk Manager.

The third of issuers who've already cracked this aren't running better tools.

They're measuring both sides of the equation.

The other two-thirds are succeeding at exactly what they're measured on. The cost just shows up somewhere else.

If you work in risk, product, or strategy at an issuer or acquirer, this one is worth your 10 minutes.

Full piece here → https://lnkd.in/ecdNwuaD

taplio

The Battle

Alan Brian Dardic

Dwayne Gefferie

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreDwayne Gefferie's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Alan Brian Dardic

Dwayne Gefferie

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dwayne Gefferie's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDwayne Gefferie's LinkedIn Performance