At MPE 2026, Victor Padee, Chief Revenue Officer at Aevi, and Nigel Thacker, Chief Commercial Officer at Silverflow, discussed the accelerating shift in the payments landscape, moving from outdated, monolithic systems to flexible, modular solutions
Padee, whose company Aevi is an in-person payment orchestrator connecting front-end devices to back-end acquirers, kicked off the discussion by highlighting the dramatic pace of change in the industry. He noted that in his two decades in payments, the last five years have seen more complexity and innovation than the preceding 15 years. This shift is being driven entirely by customer demand, forcing businesses to move away from being locked into simple, end-to-end solutions that were previously “forced onto them”.
Thacker, representing Silverflow’s cloud-native, next-generation card acquiring processing platform, explained the root of the problem: a huge part of the payments ecosystem still relies on legacy mainframes running decades-old technology like COBOL and FORTRAN, which Thacker said are “not fit for purpose anymore”. As businesses have become much more knowledgeable about how payments work, they are now demanding the ability to take control and build their own infrastructure that genuinely suits their business needs, whether that’s focusing on recurring payments or enhancing the in-store consumer experience.
This desire for control is fueling the modular revolution as Aevi stressed that companies are looking to build a “best-of-breed stack” using different components. Modularity is crucial for speed to market in today’s “attention economy,” allowing companies to create solutions quickly rather than undertaking the expensive and time-consuming task of building everything themselves. However, Aevi warned that the key is careful design: businesses must establish an overarching orchestration layer to avoid creating a clumsy “Franken-stack” of disparate systems.
The conversation then turned to the critical role of data as Silverflow pointed out that while legacy solutions deliver a maximum of about 100 data points, whereas Silverflow can provide over 750+. This deep data and transparency are vital for success, helping to avoid scheme fines, reduce costs (especially in the US market where a downgrade can cost at least 1% per transaction), and increase the likelihood of successful processing. This data also empowers clients to manipulate their systems to give customers a better overall experience.
Looking ahead, both Aevi and Silverflow agreed that while “agentic commerce” is a huge buzzword, its future is still unclear due to significant hurdles, particularly around identity. Aevi sees the future of payments as increasingly software-driven and hardware will simply become the mechanism for gathering payments, while the payment itself becomes an “event” that triggers valuable surrounding services like loyalty programs and contextual offers. Ultimately, both Silverflow and Aevi concluded that “having one provider for everything really doesn’t suit” while agreeing that staying in their respective “swim lanes” and partnering; Aevi on the front end and Silverflow on the processing side is the winning strategy, a modular approach driven entirely by evolving customer expectations.
