Galileo Shares Blueprint for the Future of Value-Added Services

Banks and FinTechs have many of the same goals.

They want to be top of wallet, offering everything from direct deposit to account linking and debit cards to help move money in myriad ways.

Galileo Financial Technologies Chief Product Officer David Feuer told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series on the service economy that enhancing the customer experience depends on financial services providers such as Galileo bringing payments innovations to the forefront, while making those innovations relevant for end users depending on the market.

“We’re seeing a diversification of what remittances mean, what cross-border transactions mean,” he said, adding that “there are many more ways of exchanging value than there were just five years ago.”

As a result, “expectations around services providers are much higher than they used to be,” he said.

With a nod to his own company’s client roster, he said Galileo has multiple customers operating internationally, and they want to expand into new markets but need help with compliance and building new features on a market-by-market basis.

“We can be there with them on the journey,” said Feuer. “We enable them along the way to extend their brand … and create connectivity and ecosystems between those different countries so they can operate efficiently and at scale, with a global remit.”

By way of example, he pointed to the February announcement of Galileo’s co-brand debit card program offering, which allows participants to launch those rewards, enlisting the firm’s card issuing, processing, Cyberbank Digital and program management capabilities. Galileo has built a platform and used platform economics (with sponsor banks in the mix) that help Galileo serve a “coordinating function where we can put things together for clients,” Feuer said.

Those ecosystems, which build upon traditional network offerings, help Galileo’s financial provider customers identify what Feuer termed “micro-moments when clients need a financial institution, showing up when the customer expects you to be there,” whether on an Alexa assistant or Apple Watch.

“It’s wherever the customer is in their flow, and you’re not spamming them with a ton of different notifications and emails … and offers that may not be relevant to them,” Feuer said.

Galileo “is able to leverage the best of the technology that the networks bring to the fore in order to drive those value propositions forward,” he said.

The platform approach has an additional benefit, as adding new features and services has a low incremental cost of adoption by Galileo’s customers.

“It’s a new API, a new report, new data, and then we’re able to create a point of leverage and real value in terms of time to revenue and time to market, to validate an idea or fail fast so that we help our clients succeed,” Feuer said.

For the payments that cross the platform , balancing security and customer satisfaction remains paramount, he said. “We think about how we can help clients make better decisions about that balance, and the way to get there is not necessarily more data.”

“We’ve been working on innovations in that [security] space to leverage AI so that our clients can make better decisions, quicker decisions with less data that’s more accurate and helps reflect what they want for their customer satisfaction and risk goals,” Feuer said.

With the Galileo Score, which takes hundreds of signals and uses artificial intelligence to aggregate them into one risk score, it’s easier for customers to make a decision. “This puts the power back in the financial institution’s hands to say, ‘how do we want to manage risk and customer satisfaction,’” Feuer said.

“At the end of the day, this is the key to the [financial service providers’] brand,” he told PYMNTS. “It’s the emotional connection they have to their customers and how the customers view that brand.”

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