The awards for Romanian electronic payments industry – NOCASH GALA 2017

The sixteenth edition of the NOCASH Gala will take place on June 15 at the Romanian Banking Institute, having as main partner the Association of Electronic Payment in Romania – APERO.

As well as last year’s edition, the awards ceremony will be preceded by an opening session held by international speakers on topics selected by the organizers.

In choosing the themes, we took into account both the topicality of the subject, its importance in the future development strategy of the electronic payment industry and the representativeness of the institutions invited to speak in Bucharest.

The guests of the opening session of Gala NOCASH are presented as follows:

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Mr. Osman Inegol – Senior Product, Programme Manager, Visa Inc. – Business Innovation, Digital Solutions, Market Readiness

Theme: „Digital landscape in Europe”

Osman Inegol has worked as part of the Client Engagement and Sales Unit at Visa since 2000. He is now responsible for the Market Readiness of Visa’s Mobile Propositions in Southern Eastern Europe as part of the Business Innovation in Europe.

Osman spent 19 years in the card payments industry with in-depth knowledge of retail banking card payment product propositions, innovation and SEE markets due to a series of business development and in-market activities.

Today, Osman is responsible for the readiness and delivery of the Visa’s Payment Token Projects and Visa Mobile Contactless propositions across Croatia, Slovenia, Israel, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Malta, Cyprus and Turkey. With his knowledge of the Visa products, processing systems and digital payments, he also acts as a conduit to the vendor community.

Prior to joining Visa, Osman had worked as Head of Marketing at Inter-bank Card Centre (BKM) and spent five years at IBM as a client representative and product manager.

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Mr. Benzi Axelrod  – Visa Digital Commerce Senior Manager

Theme: „Digital development in U.S.”

Benzi Axelrod is responsible for the global expansion of Visa Digital Commerce App (VDCA) to key Financial Institutions (FI) and processors. In this role, he assists FIs in evaluating and pursuing innovative products and services such as Tokenization, the “Pays”, APIs, and Visa Digital Commerce App.

Prior to joining Visa, he led the US operations of a start-up software company. Benzi gained his payment industry experience while working for American Express for ten years in multiple management roles. He joined AXP after working for five years with a consulting firm. Benzi holds an M.A. in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business. _________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mr. Frederik Mennes – Senior Manager Market & Security Strategy, VASCO Data Security

Theme: „Which strong authentication and transaction monitoring solutions comply with PSD2.  How to prepare your business.”

Frederik heads VASCO’s Security Competence Center, working on the security aspects of VASCO’s products and infrastructure. He is a regular speaker at industry events and conferences about security technology, and a contributor to the Initiative for Open Authentication (OATH).

Besides his role at VASCO, Frederik has supported the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway, University of London in various educational roles. He earned an MBA from Vlerick Business School (Belgium), an M.Sc. in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering from KU Leuven, Belgium.

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Mr. Wido Beekman – OT-Morpho (former Oberthur Technologies) –  Strategic Sales for Solution North-west Europe, Central- and South Eastern Europe and Russia

Theme – „How digital enablement put banks in the front seat together with FinTech companies”

Wido has been working at OT-Morpho for 6 years. After being responsible for Financial Services in the Benelux region, he switched to the Digital Solution group two years ago. He is involved in Digital Payment flagship projects and he is member of the OT-Morpho Digital innovation group.

Before joining OT-Morpho he worked at several Fintech companies, Technology-innovation companies and consumer products multinationals. Wido has a university degree in Chemistry and Business Science.

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Digital enablement, meaning digital provisioning using tokenization, will not be limited to digital payment for OEM wallets and mobile wallets.  Digital enablement offers financial institutes the possibility to differentiate financial products to the many target groups banks have to address. It will open up new  services and with that it will generate additional income via instant services and it will provide opportunities to benefit from the new PSD2 regulations.

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Video projections

Gala’s news includes a series of short video footage on the streets, parks, markets and merchants of Bucharest city. Topics include contactless technology, the introduction of electronic payments to the vending-machines, the attractiveness of financial services and payments offered by non-banks, the utility and opportunity of „cash back” service as seen by merchants.

New prize categories

Last but not least, a number of new prize categories have been introduced so that NOCASH Gala makes a move from a card industry event to a more comprehensive event of the electronic payment industry.

On the one hand, prizes will be awarded for each distinct category of issuers: banks, IFNs and electronic meal vouchers. In naming the winners, less quantity indicators (such as number of cards issued) will be taken into account and more emphasis will be put on quality indicators (product use).

On the other hand, the awards will also be extended to the online economy by recognizing market leaders in payment applications, both in the banking and non-banking sectors.

Attendance

So far, over 40 institutions have been announced at the event: regulatory and governmental authorities (NBR, MFP, ANAF, AADR, Competition Council, etc.), issuers, infrastructure providers, international payment schemes, banking software developers, fintech companies, eCommerce integrators, law firms, telecom companies and card processors.

Here you can see the AGENDA of the event.

Access to the NOCASH Gala is based on an invitation, within the limits of the available places.

For more details: sergiucone@nocash.info.ro / +040 744 427 610