2 weeks Ago By Lauren Towner
A new global leader has emerged in consulting and testing for payments, smart mobility and ID solutions. Fime’s Lionel Grosclaude and Raphael Guilley of Consult Hyperion, now part of the Fime group, look to the futureBy next year, all EU citizens will have access to a digital ID wallet, unlocking everything from tax records to alcohol sales. In the UK, Londoners have been hopping on and off the Tube simply by tapping their phones for years, while a palm print could soon give you a ticket to ride in Beijing.
And everywhere payment providers are striving to securely tie payment details to the individual authorised to approve them.The technologies that support all these areas of our lives will likely converge in a digital future where identity is the most valuable currency. And it’s a future that Fime has been preparing for.
Los Angeles-based VC Gallant Capital acquired Paris-based payments testing businesses Fime and the payments testing division of US firm UL Solutions, in a separate deal, in early 2024, going on to combine them under the Fime brand. Just a few months later, Fime completed the takeover of London-based Consult Hyperion, a leading global independent consultancy in digital identity, payments, and smart mobility.The result is a group that now employs more than 900 specialists across all three areas of expertise, with 13 global testing labs, representing a huge resource of knowledge and talent.
Outlining its strategy, Fime CEO Lionel Grosclaude says the newly structured company will differentiate in three ways.“First, we’re going to be able to deliver both strategic and technical advisory. So basically, we are going to bridge the gap between strategic advice and implementation.
In French, I would say that we are eating our own cuisine! It’s an even stronger message – the strategic advice is much more effective if it’s backed up by deep technical expertise.“The second initiative involves establishing an innovation hub within the consulting department. It will be composed of PhD-level and senior consultants working on disruptive, state-of-the-art topics such as blockchain and biometrics“This team will have the ability to develop some pilots.
So, although we will never develop any solution, we will develop pilots to show that those solutions could work and bring value.“We have also reviewed our testing portfolio, as we were combining both Fime and UL to get the best out of the two teams, and we have created a digital management platform for testing. We are also integrating a simulator to replicate the ecosystem.
And, if a customer wants to outsource the testing to us, we can wrap it up around a managed services contract.“Lastly, we have strengthened our partnership with key players in the industry, like ISO, but also central banks, schemes, large payment service providers (PSPs,) and large technology providers, to make them aware of who the new team is and what we are capable of.”Grosclaude says the formation of the expanded Fime group had to satisfy three key pillars: expertise, scale and trust.
“We now have 900 experts throughout the globe in 19 countries, and we are able to serve our customers almost anywhere”Lionel Grosclaude, Fime“Expertise in e-identity came with the acquisition of UL’s payment solutions division and consulting with Consult Hyperion,” he explains. “As to scale, now we have 900 experts throughout the globe in 19 countries, and we are able to serve our customers almost anywhere.“The last pillar, which is important, is trust.
We don’t manufacture, we don’t develop any solution ourselves. So we remain always neutral, totally independent from any solution. That is very important for our customers.
”From the perspective of Consult Hyperion, which will continue to deliver services under its own name, Raphael Guilley, its SVP of Consulting, sees huge advantages from being part of the Fime group.“Combining the teams and having this single entity across many countries helps us to better understand the local ecosystem, the local rules, the local specificities in terms of user experience,” he points out. “So it’s about geographic reach – but not only that.
We are working also for all the ecosystems, meaning the chip makers, the card and terminal manufacturers, the mobile vendors and the wallet providers, the issuing banks, the acquiring banks and all the PSPs. And each of those clients will benefit from the learnings and transfer of knowledge.”Both men acknowledges the opportunities being created by the convergence of digital identity, payments and smart mobility.
“Frontiers are blurring, which is creating a new set of opportunities for new products and new services,” says Guilley. “Not only can we provide guidance to our customers on where the market is going and what the opportunities are, but with our in-depth technology knowledge, we can also help them build proofs of concept to go a step further.”A licence to thrillThe Fime group is already involved in projects on both sides of the Atlantic, with Consult Hyperion helping to design the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet architecture.
“We have launched a new version of our e-identity testing solution, which will be able to test not only mobile driving licences (mDL), but also e-passports,” says Grosclaude. “We will be part of two main large-scale pilots in Europe for the EUDI project, We Build and Aptitude. And we are partnering with some states in the US and technology providers to deploy the mDL proposition.
”Mobile driving licence systems are already active in 14 states in the US with a further 15 planning to soon introduce them. The Secure Technology Alliance’s Identity and Access Forum has forecast that nearly 70 per cent of states will adopt mDLs within two years. In Europe, the voluntary adoption by citizens and residents of the EU Digital Identity wallet will enable users to identify themselves to public and private online services, all over Europe.
In addition, users will be able to store, present and share digital documents as well as electronically sign or seal documents.With digital identity becoming an ever-more important weapon in the fight against financial fraud, it is widely anticipated that digital wallets will be increasingly used to provide an enhanced range of services, as well as payments. From a consultancy standpoint, Guilley sees three types of customers to which Fime can offer its significant expertise in the development of wallets.
“The first customer group is the issuing parties, the ones issuing credentials or different digital attributes,” he says. “What does it mean for them to move from paper documents to a mobile? What does the choice of wallet mean, technologically speaking? What are the use cases you want to explore with partners to enable new services?“Frontiers are blurring, which is creating a new set of opportunities for new products and new services”Raphael Guilley, Consult Hyperion“The second group is the wallet providers. As a wallet provider, what type of attributes do you want to have in you wallet? Where do you want to have your different relying parties using these wallets for new use cases, new services? You need to onboard all this ecosystem together, not making it work most of the time, but work all the time.
“The last group is the relying parties, all the banks and other government services. What type of new services do they want? How can they improve the citizen journey? Streamline KYC processes? Enhance payments through a digital identity wallet?”Smart mobility is another important market for Fime through Consult Hyperion, which helped pioneer Transport for London’s (TfL) open-loop ‘tap-and-go’ payment system back in 2014.“We have an amazing track record in major cities like London, Dubai, the Netherlands, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Australia and India,” says Guilley.
“We are supporting these major cities to implement mobile ticketing because citizens want to rely on their mobile to enter into a metro network. Account-based ticketing will help the cities to implement new fare plans and EMV open loop will help to facilitate tourism.“While we have helped these cities to shape the strategy, set up the requirements, select the vendors and support them during implementation, we also help them to make sure it works.
We have helped them to set up internal labs and operate them on their behalf in order to make sure that on an on-game basis, everything is still functioning, particularly if you’re adding a new operator, new type of services, implementing the introduction of biometrics, for example.“Some are now looking at how citizens can use the palm of their hand to enter the networks, which is amazing.”Digital identity has finally come of age, concludes Grosclaude.
But while the wallet is key to enabling that, there are now many more questions that Fime will be helping the ecosystem answer.“There is one question that is even more pressing now that Apple has announced that it is going to open NFC in some regions of the world. That is, are we going to see wallet fragmentation or consolidation? Does the consumer want their health data mixed up with their bank and travel data [in one wallet]? It comes back to making the choice between privacy and convenience and it’s the big question for the year to come.
”It’s one he believes the new Fime/Consult Hyperion team are well-placed to address.“The complementary nature of the skills between us means there are new opportunities for the people we employ, as well as the two companies,” says Grosclaude. “There are new things for people to be excited about.
And that’s not just on paper. I can personally feel that. This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue 34, Page 56-58The post EXCLUSIVE: “The Digital Me” – Lionel Grosclaude, Fime and Raphael Guilley, Consult Hyperion in ‘The Fintech Magazine’ appeared first on FF News | Fintech Finance.
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