IT PROCUREMENT
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Subrata , however , points out that in many ways , this bureaucratic work was easier than the technical work to follow . “ We thought the tech would be the easy part , but that was not the case . We were working with legacy systems that had been built 30 years ago with very different protocols , a very different architecture . Plugging into that needed specialist skills , specialist knowledge , and if you wanted your app to communicate with this infrastructure , you had to build a layer on top and in between with the right communication protocols .”
Fidel soon realised the value of the work it had done on these legacy systems was so great that it warranted pivoting the company ’ s aims .
“ The smart cities of the future will be enabled by [...] multiple APIs working together ”
— Dev Subatra , CEO , Fidel
“ At some point along the way , we thought to ourselves : hang on , we ’ ve now built a communication layer on top of Visa , MasterCard , and Amex . If we open this up to the wider ecosystem , we have solved the much bigger problem of data access . If we marketed this , other companies like us out there won ’ t have to go through all the pain that we had to connect to a data source .”
So what are the possibilities that this approach enables for Fidel ’ s customers ? “ You connect very fast ,” says Subrata . “ That ’ s probably the biggest value driver . Second , you don ’ t need to worry about payment card industry compliance because you can just use our UI to capture
AUGUST 2020