Twenty years, one question.
How does money actually move at the point where someone buys something?
01 The work
It sounds narrow. It isn’t. Behind every tap of a card there is an acquirer, a scheme, an issuer, a processor, a terminal estate, a fraud model, a pricing structure, and a commercial agreement between parties who each want a slightly different outcome.
I have spent two decades inside card acquiring and payment institutions in Central Europe, on the commercial side of that machinery — building market entries, structuring monetization, negotiating the agreements, and carrying the number at the end of the quarter.
02 The shift
Then the point of sale moved.
Somewhere in the last few years, the point of sale walked out of the shop. It went into car parks, motorway service areas, kerbside bays, logistics depots. EV charging is the clearest case: an unattended terminal, standing outdoors, in the rain, taking a card from a driver who will never come back to that site again, under a regulation that did not exist when most of those sites were designed.
That environment breaks a lot of assumptions people carry over from retail payments. The economics are different. The fraud profile is different. The compliance obligations are different. And the people building charging networks are, quite reasonably, energy and infrastructure people rather than payments people.
03 Professional history
Two decades inside the machinery.
Slovenská sporiteľňa
Erste Group. Head of POS sales management — the card-acceptance business on the bank side, Slovakia.
Global Payments
Country Manager, Slovakia; Business Development Director, CEE; then Senior Director, Business Development & Mobility Solutions for Central Europe, until August 2026. Since September 2026 an external strategic advisor — no longer an employee.
Ultima Payments
Advisor to the Board from 2021; Member of the Board since January 2026. Managing Director of SmartFuelPass — fuel-card and mobility payments for fleets across the region.
Delvant Consult, s. r. o. is an independent practice. Institutions above are professional history, not clients.
04 The practice
Why Delvant exists.
I founded Delvant Consult in 2026 to do this work independently. The practice takes on engagements where a payments business needs commercial firepower it does not have in-house — entering a market, restructuring how it makes money, fixing a partner channel, or getting the payment layer of a charging estate right before the regulator or the fraud arrives.
I work on defined deliverables with agreed milestones, not on headcount. That suits both sides: you know what you are buying, and I stay accountable for outcomes rather than hours.
— Erik Brinkáč, founder · LinkedIn
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