The power of payments: Why every team needs to take notice

Payments aren’t a topic that most people in a business wake up thinking about every morning. In fact, historically, there’s only ever been one or two people who think about payments within a business. And often, those thoughts are downbeat, centered around dealing with problems like fixing technical issues or understanding why the fraud rate has spiked. 

But it’s time that changed. 

Payments profoundly shape team performance across the board, whether acknowledged or not. And a finely tuned payment system can turbocharge various departments, expediting workflows, enhancing effectiveness, and moving them closer to their objectives. 

In this blog, we'll explore the far-reaching impacts of payments on various teams and offer you some compelling arguments to rally their support for your payment transformation initiative.

Marketing

Acquiring a new customer has become increasingly expensive for businesses. Research reveals the average customer acquisition cost (CAC) has risen by 222% in the past eight years. And this upward trend coincides with tighter marketing budgets, putting pressure on your marketing colleagues to deliver results.

Why your marketing colleagues should be excited about payment transformation:

1. Enhanced customer experience: An investment in payments can allow your business to build a checkout that wows customers. And by offering relevant payment options and making the process seamless, you can ensure that payments don’t cause customers to abandon their carts. This approach will ensure that marketing gets more ROI from every dollar spent.

2. Improved customer retention: As the cost of acquiring new customers rises, many marketers are shifting their focus to maximizing the ROI of existing customers. This strategy often involves implementing loyalty programs or subscription offerings. However, both these programs can only succeed with high-performing payments underpinning them. 

3. Enriched customer insights: Marketing teams are always looking for new customer insights. So imagine how they could utilize data from your payment infrastructure that shows what products and services to market to customers (and where) to deliver the highest ROI. 

Engineering

The engineering team didn't have to sweat over payment processing a decade ago, as they only needed to handle a few integrations. But fast-forward to today, and managing the payment stack has become a significant headache. Teams are bogged down with integrating and juggling numerous payment services, each with their complexities, documentation, and quirks. Providing them with a solution to this mess and letting them concentrate on their primary projects is a guaranteed strategy to garner their support for your proposal to transform our payment systems.

Why your engineering colleagues should be excited about payment transformation:

1. Reduced workload: After integrating the payment infrastructure, your engineering team won't have to handle payments again, allowing them to focus on more value-added projects.
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2. Newer tech: Legacy tech creates a ton of issues for engineers, bogging them down by trying to repair lousy code or using outdated tools to drive innovation. It’s also demotivating, with 52% saying the challenges of using old technology negatively impact their morale—with many saying it’s a factor in their decision to quit their job.

Finance

Managing payment reconciliation has become a daunting task for many businesses, owing to the growing number of payment methods and processors used, leading to increased complexity when closing the books. This complexity has led to stress and burnout among finance teams, with 85% reporting feeling this way. Additionally, it increases the risk for the business as it prevents the finance team from identifying mismatches, discovering fraudulent activities, and improving cash flow management.

Why your finance colleagues should be excited about payment transformation:

1. Automated reconciliation: Upgrading to a modern payment infrastructure can eliminate the need for manual reconciliation, thereby reducing errors, saving time, and allowing your finance colleagues to focus on more strategic tasks.

2. Reduced costs: By liberating your finance team from manual reconciliation duties, they can dedicate more time and attention to identifying cost-saving opportunities around payment processes.

3. Real-time visibility: Modern payment infrastructures also give finance teams real-time visibility into financial transactions. These insights empower them to monitor cash flow, manage budgets more effectively, and make faster decisions, leading to enhanced financial planning.

Support

Your support team is on the frontline, solving customer problems. They strive to be accurate and proactive in their advice to deliver a positive experience. But they’re likely unable to do that when it comes to payments because they’re just not getting the data they need from a legacy payment stack. In an era where 81% of shoppers attribute a positive customer service experience to increased purchase likelihood, addressing this pain point should be a top business priority.

Why your support colleagues should be excited about payment transformation:

1. Reduced workload: Upgrading to a modern payment infrastructure capable of higher performance will naturally diminish the frequency of customer payment issues, leading to fewer inquiries for the support team to handle.

2. Increased accuracy: In cases where payment issues arise, your support team will be alerted to incidents before customers reach out, equipped with all the essential information to resolve the matter swiftly.
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3. ‍Proactive support: Armed with deeper insights into payment trends and common customer issues, your support team can develop comprehensive FAQs and self-service tools, empowering customers to complete transactions independently—and thereby reducing reliance on frontline support.

Risk & Compliance 

Over the past decade, the risks confronting businesses have intensified. Whether it's the imperative to comply with new regulatory requirements or to combat the surge of fraudulent activities targeting businesses, the stakes have never been higher. And legacy payment stacks often exacerbate these risks—or impede teams from effectively managing them. 

Why your risk & compliance colleagues should be excited about payment transformation:

1. Complete compliance: The adaptability and agility of modern payment infrastructures empower businesses to swiftly implement necessary changes to meet evolving regulatory and compliance obligations with minimal disruption.
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2. Real-time monitoring: Fraud teams can monitor transactions in real-time to promptly detect and respond to suspicious activities. This approach includes building alerts for unusual transaction amounts, locations, or frequencies, enabling immediate investigation and intervention.
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3. Preventative protection: With a payments infrastructure, routing payments through third-party fraud prevention services, blocking bad BINs, and utilizing 3DS to proactively sift out is effortless.  

Final thoughts

Payments don’t sit in a silo. Helping others in the business to recognize the transformative potential of payments is a crucial role of a modern payments leader. 

Lucas Quinio, Head of Payments at Conforama, says it best: “Payments affect every part of the business, from marketing to customer support and finance to logistics. And when these teams understand the power of payments, it can be transformative, leading to new ideas and creating new opportunities for the business.” 

Look at our playbook for insights into promoting payments across the business and making a case for payments transformation.