As FreedomPay's vice-president for partnerships, Barry Stearn has been part of the team helping the Philadelphia-based payment platform to expand internationally over the past two and a half years, first in the EMEA region and now in Asia-Pacific.

The company started as a value proposition for businesses in the food services sector but has since moved into payments encryption, assisting household names such as Footlocker, Marriott, TGI Fridays and FedEx and thousands of businesses across retail, hospitality and other industries as well as a number of stadiums, including Celtic Park and the Emirates Stadium.

Stearn says FreedomPay is a full stack commerce platform for global enterprise, and its fully integrated card payment systems helps clients to consolidate their payment channels and utilise customer data through incentives, loyalty schemes, business intelligence, offers, rewards and more.

He describes data as the new digital currency, and the FreedomPay platform allows clients to analyse data, including basket size, environmental (urban/rural), consumer age brackets and even weather, while helping consumers to simplify their systems.

For instance, a hotel client can bring their PMS (for check-in/out), POS, online reservation, golf course, spa, kiosk and external tech requirements into the FreedomPay platform for ease of use.

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Stearn's role is to ensure FreedomPay has both connectivity with the back-end (banks, acquirers, etc.) and front-end, meaning integrations to the latest selling systems, and he is also focused on international strategy, leading the effort to spread FreedomPay beyond the 136 countries it currently operates in.

Looking ahead, Stearn is adamant that Covid has helped to democratise the world of payments and accelerate technology adoption with QR codes and curbside delivery becoming the norm, and FreedomPay is seeking to support a younger generation that wants efficient, background payments on their preferential consumer journey.

Furthermore, FreedomPay also offers open banking or account-to-account payments for goods and services, with an estimated 4m people in the UK and Ireland now using open banking, ensuring the technology is well on its way to ubiquity.