EXCLUSIVE: “Payments Re-Engineered” – Nigel Thacker, Silverflow and Victor Padee, Aevi in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Payments were traditionally something businesses consumed, not something they shaped. Now Aevi and Silverflow are empowering clients to create their own future

For decades, payments sat in the background of commerce like plumbing: essential, expensive, occasionally troublesome, but rarely something merchants imagined fixing or refurbishing themselves. If merchants accepted card payments in-store, they accepted the infrastructure that came with them. Terminals came bundled with processors, processors came with fixed scheme relationships, data visibility was limited, costs were often both excessive and opaque, and innovation happened at the pace dictated by incumbent providers, not retailers. Not any more.

Because, from retail and hospitality to platforms and financial services, payments are moving from the back office into the strategic conversation. That means businesses increasingly see payment acceptance not merely as a functional must-have, but as a lever for margin control, customer experience, loyalty and long-term competitiveness.

And they are demanding more of a say. They don’t see why the final act of commerce should remain rooted in a previous era, and that disconnect is becoming harder to ignore

“The knowledge that businesses have internally about payments and how they operate has increased massively in the last five to 10 years,” says Nigel Thacker, Chief Commercial Officer at Silverflow. “Historically, they got what they were given because that was all that was available. Now they know what they want.”

A retailer may want to optimise for customer experience. A platform business may prioritise recurring billing. A multinational merchant may want routing flexibility across markets. A payment services provider may need faster scheme access without rebuilding its infrastructure. One size no longer fits all – and more importantly, businesses are increasingly unwilling to accept it. The acceleration of innovation has only intensified that shift.

Customers no longer distinguish neatly between digital and physical commerce. They browse online and buy in-store. They expect instalment payments whether they’re on a mobile app or stood at the checkout. They want loyalty rewards to follow them between channels. They expect receipts, offers, and payment options to feel connected and immediate.

The idea that payments should behave differently, depending on where the customer happens to be, is increasingly out of step with consumer expectations. But delivering seamless payment experiences has historically been difficult because the underlying payments stack has been fragmented, rigid and often beyond merchant control.

A new philosophy is now taking hold. Instead of accepting monolithic end-to-end solutions from a single provider, businesses are embracing modularity – assembling the very best payments capabilities around their own needs. For some, that means bringing more control in-house. For others, it means orchestrating specialist providers into a bespoke stack.

Either way, the principle is the same: payments should adapt to the business, not the business to payments capabilities. That shift sits at the heart of Silverflow’s partnership with Aevi – two companies operating in different parts of the transaction ecosystem, but responding to the same structural change. The old world of payments was defined by vertical integration. The new one is increasingly about interoperability. And that changes the= commercial conversation entirely.

“In the last five years, I’ve seen more change than in the 15 before that,” says Victor Padee, Chief Revenue Officer at Aevi.

The reasons are obvious. E-commerce transformed expectations; new payment methods proliferated; buy now, pay later reshaped checkout economics; digital wallets normalised tokenised credentials; open banking introduced alternatives to traditional card rails, and embedded finance blurred the boundaries between commerce and financial services.

Consumers expect payments to be invisible, seamless and immediate. However, systems intricacy has exploded to achieve that. That complexity demands simplification – not through consolidation, but through better architecture.

“People want to build the best-of-breed stack that suits their clients,” says Padee. “Not something they’re forced into.”

But building payments infrastructure internally is expensive, slow and resource- intensive. Padee sees orchestration as the practical answer to that.

“We are the only in-person payment orchestrator,” he says. “We connect devices at the front end to card acquirers and financial institutions at the back end, with all the value-added services in between.”

That allows merchants, PSPs and banks to design in-person payment experiences around their own requirements rather than inheriting fixed configurations.

Circumventing the legacy conundrum

Physical commerce is no longer operationally isolated, but traditional point-of-sale infrastructure wasn’t designed to allow a customer to start a journey online, complete it in-store, switch payment methods midway, redeem loyalty rewards, request alternative financing or have all their credentials to follow them seamlessly between environments.

While modularity offers a solution to this problem, Padee warns that with it comes the risk of building a ‘Franken-stack’. His point is that modular architecture promises freedom, but freedom without strategic design creates chaos. Stitching together multiple providers without a coherent layer risks recreating the fragmentation businesses are trying to escape.

The orchestration layer becomes strategic infrastructure, and future-proofing also matters because payments remain in relentless motion. Take AI-driven agentic commerce, the latest industry obsession. Both executives are measured about its immediate impact.

“There’s a lot of discussion,” says Thacker. “Where that will lead, I don’t think we know yet.”

What he does know is that businesses need payments infrastructure that can evolve quickly, which is why infrastructure modernisation has become such a pressing issue.

“What we’re really changing is the card acquiring processing platform, which is predominantly legacy boxes, based on mainframes running COBOL and FORTRAN,” says Thacker, adding that some of those systems have likely been operating for half a century.

For an industry that’s processing billions of transactions daily, that dependence on ageing infrastructure is extraordinary. Cards remain the dominant global payment mechanism, with roughly 2.5 billion transactions every day. Yet the infrastructure supporting them is often expensive and inflexible. That is the problem Silverflow was built to solve. Its Cloud-native acquiring processing platform consolidates direct scheme access through a single API architecture, replacing fragmented legacy infrastructure with a scalable modern model.

It recently announced a $40million Series B funding round, with expansion plans targeting North America and Southeast Asia. The company is approaching one billion annual transactions and a $100billion processing run rate, having grown from roughly 180 daily transactions to nearly 1.75 million in just two-and-a-half years. Its client roster includes Deutsche Bank, Bolt, payabl. and Buckaroo. This is no longer infrastructure experimentation. It is active market adoption.

But perhaps the most compelling aspect of Silverflow’s proposition is neither speed nor scale. It is transparency. Legacy systems often expose perhaps a hundred usable data points. Silverflow surfaces more than 750. Richer data improves authorisation performance, reduces downgrade risk, helps avoid scheme penalties and lowers acceptance costs.

“The more data you have access to now, the more likely you are to be successful,” says Thacker.

That observation reaches beyond acquiring because payments are becoming a data story as much as an infrastructure story. For Aevi, that is where much of the strategic opportunity lies.

“The future of payments is becoming more and more about software,” says Padee. “Having data that both customers and businesses can use enhances the customer journey.”

The payment itself becomes just one event in a wider customer interaction. The terminal is merely the collection point. The real value lies in what happens around the transaction: loyalty activation, customer recognition, contextual offers, connected receipts, cross-channel continuity and personalisation. Payments stop being purely transactional and become part of customer engagement strategy.

That changes the economics, and a payment moves beyond being simply a cost centre; it becomes a source of intelligence, optimisation and differentiation. That reflects a bigger shift in fintech.

For years, the assumption was that the more capabilities one provider owned, the stronger its proposition. Increasingly, that view is being challenged. Neither Aevi nor Silverflow believes in being all things to all clients. Silverflow avoids adjacent areas such as fraud management and onboarding, focussing instead on acquiring infrastructure. Aevi is equally disciplined around in-person orchestration.

In a market obsessed with platform land-grabs, there is something refreshing about companies choosing their swim lane and partnering for the rest. The winners among payment providers, Thacker suggests, may not be those offering the broadest suite of services, but those enabling the smartest combinations, giving retailers the ability to adjust your payment stack quickly and easily.

“That is the way forward,” he says.

The strategic question is no longer whether payments matter. It is who gets to control them.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 26-27

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