Volker Schloenvoigt (Director, London) spoke with Cameron Calof, CEO of DINAPE, to discuss the future of digital commerce, the role of payment orchestration, AI in fintech, and the impact of the Digital Euro.

1. Who is DINAPE and why have we not heard about you until now?

DINAPE (www.dinape.com) is an Austrian based Payment Orchestration Platform, which was created in 2016 as a spinoff of the Austrian Payment Service Provider DIMOCO (www.dimoco.eu) with the plan to develop a modern payment platform supporting DIMOCO’s growth in Mobile Payments. Since 2024, this platform developed into a multi-tenant payment orchestration platform, which now also supports A2A, card and APM payments and focusses on data-driven payment optimization. With a team of more than 50 experts in Vienna, Cologne and Bratislava, we currently are focused on completing our e-Commerce features, but are already working on new products like SoftPOS and Marketplace-functionalities.  

2. How do you include AI as one of the biggest trends into your daily life?

Like many companies, it took time for us to understand how we can best utilize AI to help grow and improve our business. A big change within DINAPE came as our teams began to understand how they can use AI as a beneficial tool in their day-to-day work to automate and scale how we do business. Now we’re already creating documentation and source code using AI, amongst other things. Some key learnings for us were to define a multi-provider strategy and avoid being locked-in to one solution. It was also imperative to create balanced guidelines to prevent confidential information from being shared with the cloud. Overall, we are quite happy with our progress and by end of this year we want to run our first pilot projects providing client-facing AI-supported features.

3. What is your view on the Digital Euro, which will be launched as product forced by the ECB?

It’s a very interesting topic and we are convinced that the Digital Euro has the power to support the creation of a true single European market in terms of financial services, but let’s start from the beginning.

The strength of Europe is that it could be one of the world’s largest single markets, but unfortunately the financial services are still strongly dependent on national banks. Introducing new EU legal frameworks such as the Payment Service Directive has helped some, but cross-border payments within the EU still remain a major operational challenge.

After countries such as Brazil with Pix system have successfully introduced central bank created payment systems, the Digital Euro could do for the European Union something similar to what Pix did for Brazil, providing a single payment system and supporting economic growth.  

4. What do you do in your spare time?

My favorite way to spend my spare time is with my family. My family is a multi-cultural family, so we love to travel and experience things together. There also aren’t many things I enjoy more on the weekend than being my sons’ biggest (and loudest) fan at the baseball field. If I ever find a little time for myself, I try to get out for a round of golf. It’s a great way to enjoy a few hours outdoors with people you like spending time with. And just about anything I can do at the lake or in the mountains I enjoy doing; there’s just something about both that just calm me and help me find my middle.

5. What book are you reading, or which is one of your favourite books?

When I read, I like to lose myself in a story that moves fast and keeps my attention. I enjoy multi-perspective novels that tell the same story from as seen through different peoples’ eyes. I’m currently reading Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets and I’ve read every one of his books in the Robert Langdon series. It helps that I also love Tom Hanks as an actor (who we all know plays Robert Langdon in the films!). I also couldn’t put down the Game of Thrones books when they came out.

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