In this episode of the Connector Podcast, hosted by Gunnar of DFS Live, Cedric, CEO of GTEAL (formerly Digitil), discusses the company’s regulated, API‑driven payment services and how they fit into the rapidly evolving European payments ecosystem. He explains Belgium’s February 2024 law mandating B2B e‑invoicing via Peppol, positioning Belgium as a pilot for the EU’s VIDA e‑reporting initiative aimed at curbing VAT fraud across borders. Cedric outlines how GTEAL leverages PSD2 passporting to operate in ten European countries, and how the upcoming PSD3 will shape compliance services that GTEAL offers to its clients. The conversation moves to the firm’s “fintech for good” ethos—first eliminating paper invoices, then lowering transaction fees and promoting European payment sovereignty after the 2024 acquisition by Norwegian retailer‑backed Aira, which adds card‑present terminal expertise to GTEAL’s card‑not‑present e‑commerce roots. Cedric also details how artificial intelligence is reshaping customer onboarding by shifting from document‑based verification to authentic‑source checks, and introduces a new Verification of Payee (VOP) API that confirms IBAN ownership directly with banks. The episode closes with a call to action for developers to explore GTEAL’s API documentation on digitale.eu.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another podcast from DFS Live, and not really live, but close. So I have with me Cedric from Digitil. So Cedric, who are you? And what does your company do?
Hi, Koen. Glad to be here. So I'm the CEO of a company called GTEAL, indeed. And GTEAL is a payment institution. We provide regulated payment services through APIs. And those services go from, well, payments on marketplaces, splitting, merging, QR codes, all of that, but also invoicing with all the heat that we're getting from Peppol. And finally, open banking to be able to have a full embedded finance solution.
And it's not your first time that you're in this podcast. So if we look back to last time, what has drastically changed?
Well, the B2B mandate for e-invoicing that we were talking about last time now is in full effect. And we have seen a massive adoption of companies that have registered on Peppol. I cannot— well, a day doesn't go through without me listening to the radio and all our competitors making their announcements about register to Peppol. You don't have just a few days left, all of that. So that has drastically changed. And for the rest, for the payment industry, what we are seeing is a lot of consolidation and actors taking space in the kind of sovereign EU payment solution. So, uh, Wero, uh, MyBank, uh, open banking, PSD2/3, PSR, all of that. And of course, the digital euro. So yeah, a lot of things are changing in the payment world.
Although you're API-based most of the time, um, how do you actually strike the balance between all those, um, regulations that come out versus the solution that you provide to your customers?
So, as I said, we are a regulated payment institution. And so it means that we have a lot of rules to follow. Those rules come from the National Bank of Belgium, but the National Bank of Belgium is actually following the PSD2 for the moment, soon to be PSD3 regulation. So for us, what does it mean? It means that we have to, well, comply. And this compliance is actually the service that we're offering to our customers. They don't need to have all of those extra compliance burdens on themselves. We are taking care of that. And we are delivering it through the API. So that's, that's really part of, part of the job. We are delivering the companies from the compliance that they otherwise would need to face directly.
You earlier mentioned that there's a lot of promotion about your competitors on the radio here in Belgium, but can you clarify a little bit to the audience what is the initiative that's going on and why only in Belgium?
Yeah, so in February 2024, a law was passed in Belgium to mandate all VAT-registered companies sending to other VAT-registered companies in Belgium The mandate is that they need to send this through invoicing channels. So as structured e-invoices, whether through Peppol or if they have agreed on through what they call the second track, which is basically EDI, if the companies had preexisting connectivity. And this was typically only for Belgium because, well, our parliament can only legislate for what's happening in Belgium. So it happens.
Makes sense.
Yeah, but we are in a much larger context and with the European Vida initiative, so VAT in the digital age, we are actually seeing a convergence of all of the countries to go into what is called e-reporting. So if we look at the grand scheme of things, this is the first step. And Belgium is in fact a frontrunner in this first step. I'll explain the bigger picture. So we have this invoicing. So companies sending structured data between each other through a network with self-discovery. So all of that is great. At least we think it's great. Some are complaining, but still, it's, I think, a good improvement. This allows to have traceability, a standard on which to base all the checks. And we are now, as we are speaking today, above the 60% mark of companies that are registered in Belgium, hoping to reach 75% before the end of the year. So that alone is like 150,000 companies. And that is Belgium. But later in 2028, still in Belgium, we will have e-reporting. And e-reporting is our dear friends from the Ministry of Finance looking over our shoulders and seeing all the invoices that are going through and seeing the VAT implications of those invoices. They're not doing this just because they can. They're doing it because there's actually a lot of VAT fraud that is happening, not only in Belgium, in the whole Europe. And that is actually what Vida is trying to solve. So by 2030, we should have an interoperable network of e-invoicing and e-reporting that will allow cross-border invoices to be checked and like that avoid the VAT carousels that are in place. And so that's the grand scheme, how to get there. And everyone is looking at Belgium because we are, as I said, frontrunner in this.
Mm-hmm. I called it a guinea pig before, but that's probably wrong.
Not so wrong, but the guinea pigs are actually the companies in Belgium that need to go through these changes. But it's still a great experience, I think, to have from Belgium for the companies in Belgium, because as we will have went through this initiative, it will be much easier to deploy that in the other countries. And for a company like GTL, what does it mean? It means that we're following up who is going to be after Belgium using the same, I would say, workbook. And we will be able to deploy the same solutions that we have deployed now in Belgium to those other countries.
I also want to take out another myth because it almost sounds that you're only active in Belgium. I don't think this is totally the case, right? You're active in the rest of Europe too. Can you explain a little bit what you do in the rest of Europe?
Yeah, G-TIL is active in 10 countries for the moment, and we have done this mostly through opportunities that, well, presented themselves. Europe is for us a single market. And what I mean a single market, it's because in their great wisdom, the PSD2 directive allowed for passporting. And that means that when you are able to deliver the service in one country with one regulator, in our case, the National Bank of Belgium, you can passport this service and authorization in all the other countries. So without needing to establish offices in every other 26 members of Europe, we can deliver our services exactly the same way that we're doing from Belgium. And that is the case for payment. And for Peppol, it's actually even better because there the service is worldwide. So we can deliver that wherever we want around the world.
Wow. So the future looks very bright for you guys.
Yep. There will be a lot of opportunities. And as you know, Belgium is a small country in Europe. So while we deploy the invoicing and payment solutions in Belgium, we're actually looking at a much larger market outside of Belgium. And so yes, a lot of opportunities and a lot of work for us in the coming years.
That's good news. Because we heard at DFS we had a very strong focus on fintech for good, and I kind of want like to reflect on that versus your business. What would be your comment?
Yeah, we believe that we should be doing good in every way we can. But it starts not from a, I would say, a greenwashing perspective, but more of a just attitude of every day. So that's our position. We are in a company that the teal in GTL is for teal management. So we advocate for trust, transparency, and in general, try to leave the world in a better shape than we found it as we came. So that's really what we strive for. And so fintech for good for us at the beginning meant get rid of paper. Well, paper is an ecological nightmare. All the paper invoices that we were receiving at the time.
Not only that.
Yeah. And so that was the idea at the beginning. Today, the good that we want to do, in fact, is a bit different. We are now owned by merchants. So Gtil is owned by a company called Aira in Norway, and Aira itself is owned by the biggest retailers. And the retailers, they want lower transaction fees. And, well, you can tell me, what does that have to do with good? Well, we end up as consumers paying those transaction fees through the groceries that we are shopping at in the retailers. So For me, doing good means trying to strive for lower fees in the transactions, a more European sovereignty system so that we cannot pay American taxes on our payments. And that's really what we're looking at delivering.
Well, thank you very much. You mentioned about the new partnership. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
With Aira?
Yes, please.
Yeah. So GT was acquired by Aira in 2024, and Aira's focus has been on the terminals that you find in the shops. So when you're doing your grocery shopping, you buy a few things, you go to the end of the store and you go in a lane, and at the end of the lane you're going to pay, paying on a terminal. So we call those card-present transactions. They're specialists in this. And so great experience doing that for very big retailers. So a lot of volume being processed. We're talking about a billion transactions a year.
So really impressive.
Yeah. And we come from e-commerce. So Digitil started as a company providing, as you said, payment buttons, QR codes to enable payment of invoices, but also for anything you could buy online. So we come from the e-com word, and e-com is card not present. We started from Belgium, they started from Norway, and together we want to conquer Europe for everything related to payments, card present and card not present. So you see, there's a lot of synergies in what we're doing.
Absolutely.
And that's really the strength of this collaboration. We've been merged into Aira, but we still are Distinctive companies with a distinctive focus, but trying together to provide better payment services throughout Europe.
Makes a lot of sense. Since we're moving towards the end of the conversation here, I always want to have that little bit of touch around artificial intelligence. I mean, it's a question that I need to ask almost. So how is your company actually dealing with AI?
It's a usual question, but very interesting still. In fact, AI is changing the world, and what we thought or took for granted before isn't granted anymore. I'll explain it, how it changes our business. You know that as a regulated payment institution, we need to make sure To whom we're delivering the payment services, we need to know where the money is going. We cannot allow money laundering, financing terrorism, fraud—all of that. The way we were doing this is by collecting documents. So give me a copy of your ID, copy of your bylaws, a copy of your—I don't know—an invoice from your water distribution to show where you're. What is your actual address? All of those, those are documents. And today with AI, documents cannot be trusted anymore. So this changes a lot the way we are processing the onboardings of our customers. We now need more and more to rely on the authentic source and to check not from a document, but really from the authority that was able to deliver you—
Mm-hmm. Almost double-checking?
Well, no, we try to go directly to the authentic source so we don't have to ask the customer for the document because we know that we will not be able to trust the document anyway. So why even ask for it?
Fair point.
Yeah. So that is a big change in our business. And as every change, it brings new opportunities. One opportunity is, well, through this connectivity with the authentic source, we have a lighter onboarding. We ask less things to the customers, so that's better for them. It's easier for us.
So you ask less, but you know more.
Yes. And we trust more because it comes from the authentic source. So that's one part. But the other part is it's actually also a new business for us in the sense that we are now providers of a VOP service, so verification of payee. And that is exactly in the line of, okay, get the data from the actual source. So I'll explain a bit. When you provide a mandate for your telco company, you're going to say, okay, this is me, Cedric, this is my IBAN, and it better be my IBAN because if I would put your IBAN on that mandate, you will start paying for my electricity. I might like it, but you might not. And the company that is providing the electricity will have Quite a few problems if they try to collect from your account for my electricity. How can they check that it's from my account? Well, they can have a document, a rib like they say in France, or a copy of a bank card. But all of those are documents that can be forged very easily. So how can they do? Well, access the authentic source. And what is the authentic source of your a bank account, it's your bank. And how can you do that? Through a verification of payee request. So you're going to actually call a service on our side, again, through an API, to know, okay, this is the IBAN, this is— it should belong to Cedric. Is it really Cedric's IBAN? And the answer will be yes, no, maybe. And like that, you will know. And you didn't ask any document, you just asked the bank.
So in this podcast, we touched upon a lot of stuff all around payments, APIs. I heard invoicing, I heard card not present, card present, and I hear verification of payee. These are all things that you obviously want to be contacted for. So how do they do that?
Yeah, so the best way to start is really from our website, www.digitale.eu, EU for the European reach.
Absolutely.
And from there, you'll be able to have a presentation of all those services. You'll also be able to see the documentation of all those APIs because that's our best ambassador. If the documentation is clear, it should be easy for you to use. So don't hesitate for your tech teams to look into it and to contact us whenever they are ready to start using those APIs. All the contact information is from the website. I can also be contacted if you want, but it will be much better through the sales team.
Through API then, Cédric.
Yeah, exactly. Cedric's API.
Absolutely. Thank you very much for your contribution today. Thank you also to the listeners and stay tuned for more fintech news on this channel. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Gunnar.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit Hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
