The growing sophistication of financial technology offers more companies the opportunity to derive significant revenue, if they are nimble enough to take advantage.
The business of payments is booming. The transaction value of the next-generation payment technology market worldwide is forecast to reach US$13.98 trillion by 2022, according to Statista.
By building the right team and technical capabilities to bring new payments services to market with speed and agility, companies can make payments management a strategic engine for growth.
In particular, when a business is trying to scale into new markets, and wants to accelerate its speed to market, it soon becomes essential to build out the capacity to manage payments better.
Payment roles to focus on
Building the optimum team to manage payments can be difficult. Identifying the most important roles and understanding their significance makes it easier to have the right team and capabilities in place. So what roles are most important?
Data science bring focus to the work
There is enormous value in data analysis but without the expertise to turn it into actionable insights, you won’t be able to use it to address key business challenges. By identifying opportunities to continuously improve the value derived from it, data scientists use existing data to create models that simulate a variety of potential actions.
For payments in particular, a data scientist can improve the security of transactions by using predictive analysis and building fraud engines and data models to reduce risk and fraudulent transactions. A data scientist can also contribute to delivering the right products at the right time, using data analysis to create personalised customer experiences and facilitate improved decision making.
Product management solves problems for customers
Product managers play a key role in encouraging ideas, promoting innovative thinking and creativity, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. Product managers must have a detailed understanding of user personas and potential issues affecting customers.
A good example can be found in the property industry. PropTech platforms are an all-in-one solution for multiple parties to communicate and manage properties with increased convenience. The industry also has a large use for bill payments.
If the payments experience is cumbersome, or if users feel unsure about the security of the payments process, you could end up losing customers. To boost engagement for PropTech app users, Assembly Payments enabled BPAY Payouts for customers, helping end-users to make bill payments directly from the app or website to more than 45,000 billers, vastly improving the customer on-platform experience.
Engineering builds great products
All businesses need to deal with payment transactions; whether it's collecting funds from customers in exchange for goods and services sold, or perhaps paying out funds to users, as in the case of remittances.
The end-to-end flows that involve all parties and their technical and financial relationships are complex, while the compliance and security of payment systems is paramount. Engineers must possess meticulous quality standards and attention to detail to ensure the correctness of payment systems.
Everyone needs to be able to work together
It’s impossible to ignore the value of experience when recruiting for payments team roles but creating a culture that attracts and retains the best people is also vital.
Culture fit is important because the payments team is compact and everyone needs to be able to work together successfully. Collaboration is essential and needs to be reinforced by a strong value proposition and meaningful employee experience.
Improving teamwork in a complex and challenging work environment like payments, is about providing deeper meaning to the work employees are doing. Establishing a strong sense of identity and values will underpin how you operate, drive culture and improve performance.
Set objectives and measure activities
Creating a successful culture and inspiring people to perform is one thing, but key performance indicators (KPIs) are a key measure of progress because, “what gets measured gets done.”
KPIs provide a focus for improvement and an analytical basis for decision making on what matters most. This is particularly relevant in the context of payments with its multi-disciplinary, project-based nature with quality, timeliness, governance, compliance, financial indicators and resource utilisation all vital to track and improve.
When scaling up, remaining lean is important
Building a strong lean culture makes it easier to scale up at pace and rapidly grow a product into the market. Each company's growth formula is unique, and there is no single template to implement lean, however the core principle is to constantly identify better ways to eliminate waste and deliver more value to the customer.
Lean has proven to be a highly effective approach to identify opportunities quickly and drive fast improvements. It's also important to build a team where everyone is engaged and empowered and can learn, improve and scale up together.
One of the best ways to remain lean is to outsource payments to an experienced partner. By removing the need to build a specialised payments team, it’s possible to focus on delivering more value for customers, and the outcomes that matter most to them.
