19AUGUST 2024CFO TECH OUTLOOKcautious as needed to make the right decisions of going for payment innovations or not. So do not miss any promising window of opportunity but do not risk any too high bad investments. There are so many buzzwords that you can find on the payment market: AI (as everywhere), open banking, decentralised finance, cryptocurrencies and hundreds more. You must be very careful to not get lost in this jungle of possibilities. When it comes to operational business, I think that fraud prevention, securing stable interfaces and reconciliation are still the topics that you normally spend the most time on. This depends on the payment mix you offer to your customers, the size of the company, the products you sell (in case of retailers) and, of course, your capabilities. How have modern technologies influenced the payment management landscape in recent years? Can you share specific examples of technologies that have had a significant impact?The answer to this question is likely the same for many industries: machine learning and artificial intelligence. Using such technology in fields of e.g. credit scoring and fraud prevention but also observation of customers' preferences for different payment options makes life easier a lot. The rise in the quality of interfaces has also made a difference: Introducing a state-of-the-art API to enable a payment feature today is much less time-consuming than a few years ago. That, furthermore, has made possible a lot of forms of consolidations that we find today: gateways by which you can channel the connection of payment's components through one interface­no matter if we speak about payment features, authorisation requests or reconciliation files. One thing you must not forget about is the nature of the high regulatory standard of payment­what, I think, differentiates this field from other innovative areas. Every one of these new technologies normally comes along with a risk of misuse, which means in payment language misuse of data and loss of money. For this reason, there is normally no innovation coming onto the payment market without an innovation also of the legal basis (e.g. PSD2, credit consumer directive, the whole payment licensing system, etc.). What future do you envision for payment management in the ever-evolving business landscape? How are you preparing DOUGLAS to embrace and leverage this future?Payment management has always been a massively interdisciplinary task, lasting from IT over legal to marketing and financial aspects. This fact will be strengthened in future by innovations we just talked about. A well-versed person working in the payment space will need to get trained more and more in technical fields, not only but also to understand what is going on in the daily business when looking at all the different data flows through interfaces. But the fields of payment management are wide: For me, disciplines like fraud prevention or cash logistics have always been a part of it. So, it depends on what exactly you are responsible for. But in the end, the world will get more and more digital and, therefore, physical things like coins and notes are already continuously vanishing and even if they do not disappear completely, there will be ways to manage them via virtual systems. In this sense, it will be crucial to not lean back and trust in one skill you have, e.g. fraud detection or classical feature management. Payment managers should get familiar with the term payment as holistically as possible. That is the reason why the organisational home of payment is often located in product management nowadays­sometimes maybe with a too heavy technical focus as it is still all about money. All these thoughts are the foundation for my department structure and how I manage my team and all topics at DOUGLAS.What advice would you give to other senior leaders and CXOs on navigating the complexities of the payment management sector?Give yourself to chance to see the big picture. With that, I do not mean all great innovations rushing onto the market today. I rather mean the interconnection of topics that I have just mentioned in the prior question. I still see a lot of companies where the fraud team is located somewhere in finance or customer service whereas the so-called payment team sits in IT or vice versa. This cuts the full view enormously. To only mention a few examples: Know how your fraud tools interfere with your authorisation and capture processes. Know how new payment methods change your existing shares. Know how these shares are affected by your acceptance rates. Speaking simply, know how to manage your payments as a whole. And last but not least, of course, keep track of your major provider contracts. And a personal wish, give payment the space in your company that it­data-driven wise - deserves and your people the chance to grow in these fields as the payment niche still suffers from a lack of talent. To navigate the complexities of the payment management sector, it's crucial to see the big picture, understand the interconnections of your processes and ensure your teams are strategically aligned to manage payments holistically
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