Easy Does It

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Merchants need technology that makes their lives easier and more profitable, and that’s why they turn to North American Bancard

North American Bancard Holdings LLC (NAB) is a key player in the rapidly evolving merchant services industry — and it’s on a mission to revolutionize the payment experience. Providing best-fit technology solutions for businesses across the retail, hospitality, professional services, enterprise, and specialized industries has made it the sixth-largest acquiring payments processor in the country. With over $100 billion annually in electronic transaction volume, NAB provides hundreds of thousands of merchants with feature-rich and seamless payment solutions.

NAB offers payments solutions, credit card processing, and payment processing for mobile, e-commerce, or in-store environments, helping merchants grow and innovate with convenient, fully featured processing technology. The company has grown through foresight, boldness, and a customer-centric ethos that keeps it continually adapting to meet its merchants’ economic and business challenges.

NAB is on a mission to be the most customer-friendly payment processor and merchant services provider in its industry by harnessing technologies that provide more sophisticated, secure, and seamless financial solutions for growing businesses.

Jeffrey Vagg

“We are expanding the evolution that we're moving towards to take advantage of new technologies, new directions, streamline our processes, and the way we do business,” said NAB Chief Data & Analytics Officer Jeffrey Vagg. “We’re looking for new services that we can provide to our merchants and customers in an intelligent way and bring these solutions to market as quickly as we can.”

Vagg’s role is to make sure that the fintech company has the right data architectures, data strategy, data governance, and data quality. “It’s about driving towards the true data-driven culture within our organization, as well as how IT services our merchants,” he added.

Since its founding in 1992 by Marc Gardner, NAB has been a truly data-driven organization, embracing the latest architectures and fintech innovations, including machine learning and big data analytics, to propel it into the top tier of merchant services companies. At present, it’s exploring the use of artificial intelligence.

“Generative AI has hit the mainstream more within the last several months and there’s a lot of excitement around this nice new shiny toy,” Vagg said. “But you have to be grounded in reality, just as we must understand the limitations of any technology and how you're moving forward. You want to jump on it and go, but you have to cautiously move forward, making sure everyone truly understands where the limitations are.”

Vagg pointed out a host of basic questions that must be asked about adopting advancements like generative AI. “What is a large language model? How does it work? What's its bias? What are the things you have to worry about, such as the security, the IP rights, and ownership, depending on the procedure and process you’re integrating it with so you can move forward at a good speed, while understanding what it can and can’t do?”

Any time a new technology is considered, there’s plenty of experimentation and demonstrating proof of concept to see if there's a hint of value. “My data science organization is very good at doing that. They’re focused on failing fast; if we're going to look at new technologies and new directions, we want to find the value and see if it’s something we want.”

The organizational culture is focused on innovation, agility, customer-centric approaches, and commitment to its merchants. These core tenets form the backbone of NAB’s overall approach and encourage everyone to think outside of the box, continuously learn, and drive change. As Vagg sees it, the blend of collective collaboration amongst teams combined with the agility to change quickly makes being part of the organization invigorating and fun. “To be willing to make these changes and risks as an overall organization makes everything more interesting. We know that approach pays off in the end and helps our customer base.”

An ongoing job is to monitor existing infrastructure so it can support applications properly, but keeping eyes trained constantly on the future is tough. “How do you leverage new technologies and move to a ‘co-infrastructure as code’ type of approach when part of the application the infrastructure definitions are embedded into are the applications themselves?” he posited.

The challenge is to be reactive and responsive when the scale of business changes, security issues arise, or actionable data insights are discovered that may be driving data quality or changes in data. From an infrastructure perspective, NAB takes a containerized approach and looks at how best to leverage the cloud for maximum benefit.

Working with rapidly advancing technologies has an impact from a data standpoint. “Well, it's not the easy thing to do, but if you have a fairly strong foundation that hones on in the data space and ensure that you have the policies and procedures that drive governance, data quality, and data security to the level that you've leveraged when the tech was state of the art, you should be able to embrace some of these new technologies,” Vagg noted.

“I think that the tech transformations and the direction that we're heading at NAB is really a testament to our commitment to staying at the forefront of the payments industry and fintech.”

As NAB stays in its comfort zone on the leading edge of merchant services technology, embracing the future, the company’s core values, and unwavering dedication to their customers, it is adopting advancements to redefine excellence and become the world’s easiest payments company to partner with.

“A lot of the technology and systems we're putting in place allow us to work more quickly, things like generative AI and large language models, for instance,” Vagg concluded. “We figure out how those fit in with our traditional data science and machine learning approaches, be it helping reduce fraud, or protecting our merchants from fraudulent types of behavior that they may be seeing to reduce chargebacks, or other issues that could negatively impact them. We embrace these technologies as we continue moving towards a better customer experience and personalization of the user experience based on data-driven insights.”