Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 17. Published 23 January 2025. Guest: Mark Gerban, head of product at Pairpoint. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. My name is Lars Markull. In this episode we're going to speak about cars, or in-car payments to be specific. The world of financial services is blending more and more into different parts of our day, and especially in the last year we've seen a number of car brands announce new payment related products or features. I guess we all understand how car related payments, such as parking or paying at toll booths, can be improved, but how does it actually work? In this episode I'm speaking with Mark Gerban, who is a payment veteran. Currently he's head of product at Pairpoint, an IoT software provider, but before he worked at Mercedes-Benz and Apple. He has actively built in-car payment products and shares his insights in this episode. Let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Mark. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you actually located right now?
Mark Gerban: Hi Lars, thanks for having me. So currently right now I'm in Hamburg, Germany, and just kind of enjoying the nice sunny day that we're actually having here. It's amazing.
Lars Markull: Great. I think actually Hamburg was also the place we met for the first time a couple of years ago. I just interviewed a couple of weeks ago Nik from KASKO and it was exactly the same story when he said, yeah, I'm in Hamburg right now. That's what I remembered, like, yeah, that's actually the first time we met, I think. And maybe we also met like 2015, 16, around these days.
Mark Gerban: Yeah, I think so. It's probably around the Sternschanze area, back then. It was quite well back then. Yeah, I remember.
Lars Markull: Today we are going to do a little bit of a deep dive on the topic of car payments, to be specific. We spoke briefly in the pre-chat already. With my newsletter, obviously I cover everything in and around embedded finance, and again, the definition of embedded finance is non-financial brands doing something in the world of financial services.
What I've noticed in the last 12 months is that more and more car brands are doing something in payments and have launched something in payments, obviously, and we're going to talk about that. There are a couple of car brands who have been doing that for a very long time and they didn't just start it this year, but I did notice that even smaller car brands, not just the big fancy brands, so to say, have launched something. So my goal with this episode is a little bit like, okay, let's set the stuff straight, what's happening in the industry, what are the car brands exactly doing. And obviously you, with your background, are the perfect person to answer all of these questions.
Mark Gerban: Oh, thanks. I guess it's a compliment.
What in-car payments actually means
Lars Markull: Maybe to kick things off, I mentioned now in-car payments. And I guess we can all understand a little bit, there are car related costs, maybe let's say parking or paying for a toll booth, and obviously this can be somehow done as an in-car payment. But maybe can you help us to give a little bit of an introduction? What do we really mean when somebody says in-car payment?
Mark Gerban: Yeah, and it's a great question, and I think it's also something the whole industry is still struggling to understand. So what we're kind of looking at is that anything that takes place in car as an actual transaction while you're driving per se, or not in motion, because there are also these regulatory aspects of what you can and can't do based on today's technologies and constraints. That's what we're talking about with in-car commerce, if you will.
So you really have to think about stuff that's very obvious to cars. So we're looking at fuelling, charging, parking, tolling, QSR, so we're talking about restaurants and being able to do drive through, that kind of thing. And these are kind of obvious things that should be taking place in a vehicle, because we do them in a slightly different way today. And those experiences today are moving from this ecosystem of, here are parking terminals, or here are this or that, and now we're converging that kind of infrastructure into the actual vehicle itself. And that has a lot more of a better digital experience and gives people a bit more control into having a better customer journey.