Licensed by the National Bank of Cambodia as a Third-Party Processor, Kardal PLC is working to build shared card infrastructure for Cambodia’s financial sector. Operating under NBC oversight and in close alignment with its regulatory framework, Kardal provides participating financial institutions with access to a common card platform — with the goal of reducing infrastructure costs, broadening access, and supporting the NBC’s financial inclusion agenda. We spoke with its CEO, Jean Pierre Joseph André H S (‘JP’) Gagnon, about the work underway and the thinking behind it. Kardal PLC’s model is straightforward in principle and deliberate in execution: rather than each bank building, certifying, and maintaining its own card infrastructure independently, Kardal provides a mutualized card platform that participating institutions connect to together. This model is designed to reduce duplication, lower the cost of card infrastructure across the sector, and allow financial institutions of all sizes to access modern card payment capabilities on an equal footing — all within a framework that operates under the oversight of the National Bank of Cambodia. The work Kardal is focused on spans two tracks. The first is domestic: building and operating a mutualized card issuing and acquiring platform, with the goal of reducing infrastructure costs for banks and expanding access to modern card payment capabilities, particularly in supporting greater use of the Khmer Riel in everyday transactions and the NBC’s broader financial inclusion agenda. The second is a longerterm pipeline initiative — the Special Payment Economic Zone (SPEZ), currently in development — which is being designed to support merchant identification for international business corporations, facilitate multi-currency card operations, and provide a structured, regulatory-aligned gateway for fintechs seeking to establish in Cambodia. The SPEZ, targeted for 2027, is not yet operational, but represents a meaningful part of Kardal’s strategic direction as it develops in close collaboration with public sector stakeholders. “The SPEZ would position Cambodia as a regional financial hub by making it easier to use riel for crossborder payments, alongside multicurrency capabilities for international transactions.” Underpinning everything Kardal does is the regulatory environment the NBC has created. The NBC’s TCRMG has produced a framework that is both rigorous and progressive — one that enables genuine innovation without compromising stability. Bakong stands out in particular: very few central banks have built a distributed ledger-based national payment rail from scratch, and the NBC has done exactly that. Kardal operates within that ecosystem and is building card infrastructure designed to be complementary to what the NBC has already put in place — not a parallel system, but a connected one. Card rails and Bakong serve different but complementary functions, with Bakong strengthening domestic rielbased payments, while card infrastructure supports broader acceptance and cross-border use cases. Together, they provide institutions and their customers with a broader range of payment flexibility across domestic and international transactions. This shapes Kardal’s approach at every level. Its role is to ensure that Cambodia’s card infrastructure meets the same standard of reliability, compliance, and governance that the NBC expects across the financial system as a whole — working within the framework the regulator has established, not around it. At the helm of this work is JP Gagnon, whose career spans more than 25 years across banks, issuers, and processors in both Europe and Asia. The experience he brings to Kardal is practical and operational — covering EMV migration, PCI compliance, mPOS deployment with global card schemes, realtime digital banking, and B2B payment infrastructure across regulated financial institutions in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia. Having worked within regulated bank environments, JP understands how financial institutions adopt technology, manage risk, and navigate compliance — and this perspective is embedded directly into how Kardal designs and delivers its card infrastructure. Prior to Kardal, JP was recognised as one of the 30 International Voices in Finance in 2024, an honour awarded following his leadership of teams that achieved 12 Visa and Mastercard innovation awards. These are the foundations on which Kardal has been built. At the centre of Kardal’s platform offering is the Kardal Unified Payments Portal (KUP) — an agentic, orchestrationdriven platform that enables banks, PSPs, and fintechs to deploy card issuing and acquiring capabilities within a standardised, certified framework. A recent major update, led by JP and his team, has expanded KUP into a comprehensive, modular card operations platform — built for compliance, designed for auditability, and engineered to support secure card transactions across the institutions it serves. KUP is not simply a connectivity layer. It provides institutions with full control across card payments, compliance, billing, and AI governance, alongside usage streams, pricing tiers, and omnichannel customer support. A key component is its agenticAI orchestration layer — a governed system that operates strictly within defined policy guardrails, with configurable playbooks, integrated approval workflows, cost caps, and rollback capabilities built in. All actions are fully auditable. This is not AI deployed for its own sake — it is AI deployed within the kind of disciplined, accountable framework that regulated institutions require. KUP also embeds practical intelligence directly into card acquiring operations: dynamic MCC mapping aligned with real merchant activity, margin modelling Payments Infrastructure Innovation CEO of the Year 2026 (Southeast Asia): Jean Pierre Joseph André H S (JP) Gagnon & AI-Driven Unified Payments Platform Excellence Award 2026 Kardal PLC
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