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processor Galileo spotlight
A Fresh Perspective of the Universe
An interview with clay Wilkes
Fifteen years ago Galileo was among the first in a new wave of trans- action processors catering to the special requirements of prepaid. Today, Galileo is the oldest of that early breed to remain independent. And, although prepaid processing continues to comprise a significant part of Galileo’s business, CEO and founder Clay Wilkes is clear that prepaid was the tip of the spear for the company’s entry into the larger e-payments processing environment.
This is what Wilkes told Paybefore about starting a payments processing company from the ground up, the challenges processors face now and what he’d do differently if he were starting all over today.
paybefore: Does it bother you if people regard Galileo as a prepaid processor?
clay Wilkes: Of course not,
but I try to correct the mispercep- tion pretty quickly. It’s like an actor who’s typecast because of a suc- cessful role. It was never our goal to specialize in prepaid, but we used it as an introduction to program man- agers and financial institutions.
In the early 2000s, Galileo was un- known. Banks weren’t going to turn over their credit or debit portfolios to us, but many were willing to give us a shot at their prepaid business —because it was small relative to their other portfolios. And the people we were calling on recog- nized prepaid had unique require- ments we understood well.
Entering the business through prepaid enabled us to test what we believed in a real regulated environment. And, because my background is tech—not pay- ments—we built our system,
applications and structure with a technologist’s sensibility.
paybefore: Meaning what?
cW: As technologists, we under- stood that long-term success called for a general purpose processing system, so we built ours around general capabilities with the flexibility to handle a variety of payment and transaction types. Rather than focusing on product types—credit, debit or prepaid— we designed the system around functionality and process—like, organizing data, handling trans- action flows, interacting with de- vices and having money come on and off cards. To a technologist, transactions are just information. The challenge is organizing that information to make it usable in
the complex payments environment.
paybefore: And the benefit of that approach is ... ?
cW: I recently saw a film, The Imitation Game, about a guy I’ve
CLAy WILKES
admired for a long time, Alan Turing, who led the team that cracked Nazi messages encrypted through Enigma during World
War II. One of Turing’s significant insights was recognizing the need