Stanchion Taps Pierre Aurel as new Chief Product Officer

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1 November 2023 – Stanchion Payments, a prominent global provider of payment technology, is thrilled to announce the appointment of Pierre Aurel as its new Chief Product Officer. With a remarkable track record in payment product development and innovation, Pierre brings a wealth of experience to his role in Stanchion’s dynamic and expanding team.

Pierre Aurel’s achievements include spearheading the successful launch of Africa’s first SoftPOS solution and pioneering cloud-native solutions. As Chief Product Officer, he will drive strategic priorities aimed at enhancing Stanchion’s product offerings and improving the customer experience across the payments value chain.

Steve Kirrage, CEO at Stanchion, underscores the pivotal role of product development within the organisation’s strategic vision. We strive to provide banks and financial institutions with solutions that simplify payments, empowering both customers and partners to adapt easily to the ever-accelerating demands of a competitive payment landscape. Enriching our product capabilities is not merely a choice; it’s a necessity. It calls for strong leadership through the role of Chief Product Officer,” states Kirrage.

“Over the past two years, Stanchion has achieved significant milestones, delivering impressive payment solutions across multiple regions. These innovations have been instrumental in supporting financial institutions and payment organisations, spanning across issuing, acquiring and fintech enablement. As our endeavours in this domain continue to yield favourable growth, the timing is ideal to expand our efforts further, to continue meeting the evolving needs of our markets.

Pierre Aurel’s appointment aligns with Stanchion’s mission to adapt to the evolving payment landscape, simplifying complex payment processes for clients. His vision is to bring Stanchion’s technology closer to banking customers by creating mobile applications and web portals that enhance the customer experience.

Pierre Aurel also shares insights into the key challenges and opportunities in the payments and technology field:
“The major challenges that our customers experience are the same ones that have existed for some time – how to manage system complexity while keeping payments simple for end users. Digital Wallets like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay are prime examples of how this has been achieved for cardholders with payment technology. Tapping a mobile phone to make contactless payments is both easy and secure, and the payment technology masks all the sophisticated security, encryption and compliance that underpins it all.”

Aurel adds: “As new payment methods like real-time payments emerge, banks and payment providers need to provide these new payment methods while maintaining their existing complex environments – it’s a full-time job managing how it all fits together. Imagine the position and responsibility that banks hold, where they need to provide real-time payments, crypto currencies, Apple Pay, and numerous other existing or legacy payment rails – it creates massive overheads and expenditure. This results in a perfect storm, one that creates a real opportunity for Stanchion to prove how its products can help our customers; by simplifying payment complexity.”

Aurel adds that managing payment products in highly regulated environments has allowed him to develop a balance of moving at pace and being agile, but at the same time ensuring that security and compliance are always a top priority. His experience with SoftPOS and partnering with major card schemes like Visa, Mastercard and American Express have given him valuable experience to build on.

Stanchion’s commitment to innovation is underscored by its plans to enhance Tokenisation features in the coming year, catering to card issuers, acquirers and merchants.