The Modern Hotelier #181: Unified Payment Solutions for Hotels | with Phil Crawford
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Steve Carran: Welcome to a special episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are here at the Dallara IndyCar Factory and we're joined with Phil Crawford, head of hospitality from Adyen. Thanks for sitting down with us. 
Phil Crawford: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And great job and pronating the name.
Steve Carran: Thank you. Thank you.
Phil Crawford: You get an extra payment token on that one.
Steve Carran: Okay, good. So I gotta ask you, well, how many HITEC’s have you been to? 
Phil Crawford: This is actually my first one, believe it or not. What are your first impressions? It's amazing. I actually believe or not a lot of my background has been in technology in a variety of different, call it specters of the industry, but it's great to get this accumulation of merchants and partners and platforms all in one space in Indianapolis and with cars. I mean, you can't go wrong. It's a great event so far. 
David M.: So take us through the problems that your company is solving for us without 'em. 
Phil Crawford: Yeah, look, you know, there's problems a bound everywhere with regards to payments. We're a unified commerce solution that really kinda leverages enterprise payment technology to solve the pinpoint we wanna go ahead and solve our merchants need a payment ecosystem, not just domestically, but globally, and leverages our infrastructure, our APIs, in order to create this local payment method across the world. Excuse me, a, a fly by really quick. He's in a drone, fly over. And the best part about what Adyen does, and since we are our own tech stack end-to-end, we really are robust number one. But we meet what the merchant wants and their overall the leads, which is great. 
Steve Carran: So some buzzwords this year have been AI automation data. How are you utilizing those tools to deliver great value to hotels in 2025? Like 
Phil Crawford: Buzzword is the key thing. Yeah, AI is everywhere, but we actually delivered on it. We have a product called Adding and Uplift, which is AI driven through algorithms. It helps our merchants to think of all the transaction data we have. It really helps streamline fraud reduction optimization of rates. More importantly, our lease cost routing called the US debit routing takes those algorithms and routes the transactions, the best profitability for the merchant, but also for adding. So it's a least cost browning kind of analogy, leveraging AI and true ai, not some smokescreen that's out there. 
David M.: So one of the biggest challenges the hospitality industry faces is in integration. Oh, yeah. So everyone we talk to, whether it be podcasts, trade shows, so let us know how you kind of simplify that and make it easy for hotels and where you fit in in the, in the tech world.
Phil Crawford: Yeah, look, hospitality in general is extremely fragmented in a variety of ways. It's very far behind other industries. So we come in, we wanna allow people to have their technology stack, but allow adding to integrate to it using our APIs. We understand now that every can do a lift and shift. So we wanna plug in where they are, and especially in hotels, we're about the guest experience.
How do we curate this unified token, whether it's in a restaurant or at the front desk? Leveraging the assistance, we get a full 360 view of the experience of the guests, and then allow the merchant or the hotel to go and use that to get data insights of how their guests interacting with them. That is the key for the experience because the overall environment is so fragmented.
Steve Carran: That's great. Yeah. So was there ever a point in kind of your journey that you received feedback from a customer or hotel that really shifted the direction of your roadmap? 
Phil Crawford: Sure. Like we value our merchant feedback all the time. I think if you look at the adding and uplift product, that was one is fraud is rampant, what can we build to help mediate fraud?
Or we're launching new terminals as well. How do we bring new terminals, whether it be mobile terminals. Standalone terminal to really kind of meet where the consumer is because the paradigm shift has happened. People use a device in their hands or they don't wanna have interactions with merchants anymore.
So how do we go ahead and pull that off? We take that feedback. We develop products in conjunction with our guests as well as our merchants, get the seamless environment and end. 
David M.: That's great. It's amazing. Well, we really appreciate you taking time to sit down with us. My pleasure. Enjoy your first HITEC, and enjoy tonight. 
Phil Crawford: I'm gonna enjoy and go get a race car in.
David M.: Good luck. 
Phil Crawford: Thank you guys. Appreciate it.
David M.: Thank you.