Making payments a profit centre

Intro:

Welcome to Making payments make sense — Ecommpay’s new podcast, where we strip back the hype and get to what actually moves the needle in payments.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: for many businesses, payments still sits in the background… right up until it breaks. Or until margins tighten. Or until international growth exposes all the weak spots at once.

For this episode, we’re discussing a hot topic in the industry — and one Ecommpay has been digging into deeply. This conversation is based on a white paper commissioned earlier this year, Making payments a profit centre, built on primary research with merchants and payments leaders across e-commerce.

We’re asking a bigger question: what if payments isn’t a cost of doing business — but a profit lever?

And if that’s true, what does it take to prove it internally, build the right function, choose the right partners, and drive measurable impact?

You’ll hear James Wood (Founder and Managing Partner at Eris Intelligence) in conversation with:

• Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales and Alliances at Ecommpay

• Adam Sherlock, Fraud and Payments Manager at FitFlop

• Faheem Bakshi, Payments Lead at Kinguin

• Micheál Egan, Global Head of Payment Operations at Retail InMotion

If you enjoy this episode, subscribe — we’ve got plenty more practical, no-fluff conversations coming.

Let’s get into it.

James Wood:

Hello, and welcome. I’m James Wood, Founder and Managing Partner of Eris Intelligence. My company undertook the primary research for the white paper we’ll be discussing today, and I’ll be moderating this conversation.

Before we get into the discussion, I want to share a few words on why Ecommpay commissioned this study — Making payments a profit centre — what we wanted to learn, and how we approached the research.

Ecommpay commissioned this study to reflect the dynamics of the online retail marketplace and help retailers drive improvements in payments performance.

All of us can see the huge opportunities to improve the profitability and efficiency of payments. And we know how critical this is: more than three quarters of consumers say they’ll go elsewhere if they can’t use their chosen payment method, or if they experience too much friction — including escalated authentication and multiple personal information requests.

Most of us are also familiar with the intensity of competition in online retail — particularly across borders. Over the next five years, cross-border e-commerce is expected to grow around three times faster than domestic transactions. That means greater opportunity — and greater competition.

In that context, retailers need the right mix of payment methods by geography, a smooth and rapid checkout experience, and value-added services — such as express checkout and after-sales follow-up — that keep customers loyal.

In terms of how we approached the research, we spoke to merchants at different stages of their payments journey — including the chief executive and founder of outdoor apparel company Finisterre, the VP and global head of customer experience at Spotify, the head of payments at pet food company, Blink, the chief executive of a leading European travel and ticketing business, and Paul Rogers, founder and chair of VendorCon, an organisation that represents merchants’ interests in payments.

Once we’d collated these findings, we presented and discussed them at a private meeting in London with seven more retailers, which yielded further insights.

I’d now like to turn to our discussion.

Roy, can you start us off — what is Ecommpay seeing in European e-commerce today?

Roy Blokker:

Thanks, James. We have a lot of actionable insights to unpack today, so I’m looking forward to diving in together.

Based on the study, what we’re seeing across Europe is a market that’s not just growing — it’s also becoming far more diverse. Cautious forecasts put European commerce past the trillion-dollar mark by 2030, and B2B is becoming almost as important as B2C.

Cross-border is the big engine right now. It’s growing roughly three times faster than domestic. And more merchants are actually building for international buyers from day one — considering pricing, logistics, payments — basically the whole journey.

What we’re also seeing is a real shift in how people want to pay. Wallets, account-to-account, BNPL — they’re becoming core payment methods and not just add-ons. Analysts expect them to overtake cards before the end of the decade, which changes the economics for merchants.

Something new on the horizon is agentic commerce — AI agents that shop and pay on behalf of customers. It’s still early, but it could represent almost one out of five transactions by 2035. So payment infrastructure has to be ready for that kind of non-human buyer.

At the same time, we see that B2B marketplaces have experienced rapid growth. They’ve grown almost 10x since 2020, and any retailer with a B2B channel is either building or joining a marketplace to tap into that demand.

So if we zoom out, the pattern is clear: payments aren’t a cost layer anymore. They are a strategic growth lever — helping companies expand faster, run leaner, and stay competitive. So that’s what we see in the market and where the market is heading.

James Wood:

A core part of this discussion is the importance given to payments within an organisation.

Faheem, can I turn to you first — where do payments sit in your organisation, and how have you seen this change in recent times?

Faheem Bakshi:

Thank you, James. And hello.

Payments is a cross-functional team. I represent Kinguin — a global marketplace where you buy and sell digital products. For that, you need payments globally. You need local payment options and local acquirers because you have customers and sellers all over the world.

Our organisation works with product, finance, compliance, customer success and fraud, manages global PSPs, and ensures proper account management and relationship management, as well as vendor management — making sure we have the right business discussions going on.

It acts like a bridge between payments and business expansion. If the company wants to expand in Germany or Japan, we need local payment options. So it works directly with marketing, finance, top management, and closely with risk, fraud, compliance and business intelligence — maintaining strong control of the digital goods side too.

After I joined, we moved payments from more of a cost-centre mentality towards something closer to a profit-centre mindset. We negotiate more significantly with PSPs for better commercials, introduce multiple PSPs, and create revenue streams into B2C and B2B.

We also have a strong optimisation mode — optimising checkout flow, improving success rates, and reducing chargeback exposure. We try to be more professional with partners, build relationships, and even if a PSP isn’t integrated yet, we cooperate closely to speed up onboarding of payment methods and support more regions.

James Wood:

Micheál, can I ask you the same question — where do payments sit in Retail InMotion, and how have you seen that change?

Micheál Egan:

Thanks for having us, and thanks to Ecommpay for conducting the survey and putting together the white paper.

Within Retail InMotion, we see payments as a strategic enabler. You don’t see many Chief Payments Officers in the C-suite. Typically, you’ll see a Head of Payments or a Payments Manager reporting into a COO or a CFO — or, in my case, into the CTO.

It depends a lot on collaboration across various different functions, and that’s so important.

Three things really matter: education, data, and collaboration.

On education — it’s important to educate the C-suite and bring them on board. Payments is full of acronyms and complexity, and you have to communicate it in a way that makes sense to stakeholders making key business decisions.

But it’s also important across the organisation — finance, technology, customer service — everyone needs to understand payments enough to communicate effectively.

Then data. You need data to create business cases and demonstrate the value of payments. And you need it to report on success — to say at any point where you sit, how you’re performing, and where you might be underperforming.

And then collaboration — teams need to understand payments and communicate what they’re trying to achieve.

A few years ago, I presented a business case to the C-suite. I briefed people beforehand but couldn’t get time with the CEO — and the CEO vetoed it. That happened because there wasn’t the opportunity to educate, show the data, and demonstrate how important it was.

So going forward, education, data and collaboration are foundational.

James Wood:

Adam — where do payments sit inside FitFlop, and have you seen that change?

Adam Sherlock:

Thanks, James.

My department covering payments is a bit of an orphan — covering two separate functions that correlate. Originally I sat under operations, but I’ve migrated underneath the tech department. That has helped me push priorities up the roadmap.

Previously I was competing with operations priorities for limited engineering resource. Being in the engineering team now gives me a better chance of pushing priorities forward.

And picking up on what Micheál said: there isn’t a wide knowledge internally that the payments team exists. Employees assume there’s some sort of magic when people click “buy now” and payments flow through.

So raising awareness has been one of my missions — educating the company on who we are, what we do, and how critical payments is. Because as soon as there’s a problem and payments stop flowing, you become priority number one.

James Wood:

Some of what came through in the research is the challenge of coordinating physical retail payments with e-commerce payments, and raising awareness internally.

Micheál, how have you seen payments established as a unique function inside Retail InMotion?

Micheál Egan:

It’s an interesting question. Earlier this year, John Hurley — the CTO from Ryanair — was asked how projects get accepted into Ryanair Labs. He said it’s simple: it either has to make money or save money.

For us, we have an executive committee for all projects — C-suite and investors. Business cases are evaluated in the same fashion, presented in a given format. That’s our opportunity to demonstrate: is this going to make money or save money?

We take a data-driven approach. We look to data and learn where we can improve cost or conversion. Having that data is really important.

We also have to be mindful of customers. Whether card-present or card-not-present, the customer is so important. A good payment method needs to be cost-effective, convenient, and trustworthy.

If you don’t have the payment method that’s top of the customer’s wallet, they may not return. So the function needs to highlight what we’re trying to achieve — make money or save money — and also what customers want and how we provide for that.

James Wood:

Faheem, you spoke about the cross-functional nature of payments at Kinguin. What work did you do to establish payments as a function in its own right?

Faheem Bakshi:

A couple of years ago, payments was part of finance — acceptance of pay-ins, like a cashier. But when I joined, payments became more independent.

We focused on fees and understanding PSP commercials, and we introduced multiple PSP strategies. Previously there was only one PSP — if it failed, the whole company had no payment mechanism or disaster recovery.

Having multiple PSPs impacted renegotiation as well.

We also built different roles within payments. Fraud is often part of payments, but we separated elements. We have business development and account managers for PSPs, and internal account managers as points of contact — so providers always know who to contact.

We also tackled chargebacks and built payment filters. Because we’re a digital marketplace, different categories have different risk profiles — some are low risk, some are high risk for fraud — so we separated and built controls.

Now we have more than 10 PSPs onboarded and operate globally, with different APMs in Japan and Latin America. If customers don’t see their preferred method, they don’t buy — especially in entertainment and gaming.

At the beginning, the organisation struggled to understand why payments needed to be independent. But as e-commerce grows, it becomes easier to restructure and create new roles.

James Wood:

Adam, you mentioned the importance of promoting payments internally. Any concrete steps you’ve taken to establish payments inside the company?

Adam Sherlock:

One of the best things has been speaking at company all-hands — standing in front of the whole company and highlighting what we’re doing, the impact on the bottom line, and our goals and aims.

We opened communication lines — how people can talk to our department, send requests or information we can digest.

We publish company-wide announcements when we launch new payment methods. Employees are our best advertisers — but only if they know what we offer. If they don’t know we offer Klarna in the UK, they won’t tell friends and family.

And recurring meetings with key stakeholders matter — face-to-face time with people driving decisions, highlighting challenges and opportunities. Without stakeholder engagement, you don’t get traction.

James Wood:

One theme from the report is the importance of identifying and executing quick wins.

Roy, can I get your view on that?

Roy Blokker:

Quick wins matter because they earn trust.

Payments can easily be seen as a technical back-office function. When you show impact relatively quickly, it shifts perception and senior leadership starts paying attention.

The easiest place to start is often costs: negotiating better terms, optimising routing, expanding acquiring options. These aren’t massive projects, but they can reduce fees and improve total cost of acceptance — and often improve approval rates.

Then there’s the customer journey: adding payment methods people prefer, offering local currencies, enabling express checkout — these can lift conversion without long engineering cycles.

And the back office is full of hidden wins: automating chargeback disputes or reconciliation can free up the team, cut leakage and pays for itself quickly.

Quick wins build momentum — proving payments delivers value and opening the door for bigger strategic shifts.

James Wood:

Adam, what metrics do you focus on in internal reporting? How frequently do you report, and who to?

Adam Sherlock:

There are five primary areas I look at across each of our websites.

We look at authorisation rate per payment method — are any methods having low authorisation rates, and why?

We look at full funnel conversion rate — authorised transaction through to money in the bank. Is there drop-off? Is it stock, cancellations, something to feed back to purchasing?

We look at 3DS rate — friction and exemption rates across websites. Are there actions we can take? Do we need to enhance exemption procedures? Are there BINs failing 3DS regularly, or technical issues?

We look at the top three rejection reasons — are they technical, outside our control, and what actions can we take?

And we look at chargeback rates — staying below thresholds to avoid penalties or risk to merchant IDs.

I report via WBRs, MBRs, and QBRs — and I email these out to stakeholders via a PDF with a high-level summary, and archive them for reference. Those go up to members of the C-suite who respond with questions, or we use them to prioritise improvements — for example, showing we’re losing revenue because there’s too much friction in checkout.

James Wood:

Faheem — how do you report internally, and to whom?

Faheem Bakshi:

I report to senior leadership. They want high-level reporting: authorisation rate, conversion rate, traffic by payment method, which methods are top, and what customers prefer.

We also track chargebacks, fraud rates, drop-outs. And leadership wants to see reliability — if there were issues overnight, whether switching happened automatically. Automation is important, and product teams are interested too, but the reporting goes to the C-levels.

James Wood:

Micheál — what metrics do you use, and how do you structure reporting?

Micheál Egan:

I report into the C-suite and sit on a senior leadership team. We have a monthly business review and we report summary-level metrics too.

I once heard a merchant had over 100 payments KPIs — difficult to consume. You need to distil it down so the C-suite can see immediately whether you’re performing better or worse than yesterday or last week.

Retail InMotion is different — we’re often card-present at 30,000 feet with no connectivity — so different challenges, but the measurement principles still apply.

Key metrics include order conversion rate, payment conversion rate, authentication rate, settlement rate. On risk: chargeback rate, refund rate, fraud rate. Don’t boil the ocean with too many metrics — you can’t see the wood for the trees.

James Wood:

Do you benchmark as part of reporting?

Micheál Egan:

Absolutely. We’ve looked to the schemes to provide benchmarking, and we’ve benchmarked to industry papers — including work from Mastercard for the given industry.

It’s important to compare apples with apples — look at merchant category code, and ensure you’re comparing like with like. And if you’re doing A/B testing, distribute as evenly as possible to get a fair view.

James Wood:

Faheem and Adam — do you benchmark?

Faheem Bakshi:

We do some industry benchmarks — more around fraud and chargeback rates. Not as deeply on Mastercard/Visa benchmarking, but it’s a good idea and we should look into conversion and authorisation benchmarking more.

James Wood:

Adam?

Adam Sherlock:

Limited benchmarking. We rely on our PSP to provide peer comparisons, making sure it’s aligned to the right MCC codes.

James Wood:

The next step in building a payments function is attracting top-level talent.

Faheem, what steps have you taken to sell the payments function internally to talented payments executives?

Faheem Bakshi:

We’re hiring at the moment. Candidates ask: “why should I join your payments team?”

One attraction is that it’s cross-functional — you work with legal, product, BI, compliance, fraud, and marketing. When we onboard a method, we discuss with legal and product and tech, and later marketing.

Because we’re global, you get exposure to multiple PSPs across Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa — you meet people, learn how local methods work. Kinguin is a rare marketplace where you can work across multiple PSPs and global payment providers.

It’s very interactive — not only fintech, but marketing, compliance, legal — and that breadth of experience attracts talent.

James Wood:

Micheál — how do you attract talent into Retail InMotion?

Micheál Egan:

It starts with bringing in a subject matter expert first, then building out the team.

We’re recruiting a senior payment product manager. Two traits I value: curiosity — asking why — and passion for payments and delivery.

We’re fortunate we have support from the C-suite: business cases go to an investment committee and they support and follow through.

Daniel Pink talks about autonomy, mastery, purpose — those are strong motivators. Payments is a place where you can move the needle and demonstrate contribution.

And quick wins matter. Cost is often a starting point because it flows straight to EBITDA. But it’s not always where the most value is — sometimes conversion wins and hidden capabilities within the organisation can create bigger uplift, especially when paired with payments.

Adam Sherlock:

I’m not recruiting — I’ve got a tenured, small team.

What I would say is: as an employee, you’re a brand ambassador. Use networks like LinkedIn. Many companies have referral programmes — refer people in, and it helps.

And curiosity is crucial. People have to look under the hood, ask why, and have the bias to roll up sleeves and get into the detail.

James Wood:

Roy, what are the benefits to e-commerce businesses of partnering with external organisations — either a single partner or multiple partners across geographies and functions?

Roy Blokker:

The message from merchants was consistent: partnerships help businesses scale capabilities without necessarily scaling complexity.

The right partners bring expertise, technology, and reach that would otherwise take years to build internally. There’s a clear financial upside — outsourcing the right pieces can cut cost by double digits and free up manual work. Even outsourcing PCI assessments can remove a significant internal burden.

Performance is another driver. The right partners can deliver meaningful savings through better routing, optimised fees, and smarter operations. Layer in orchestration or data enrichment, and you can lift approval rates while making checkout more seamless and faster.

Leading merchants work with multiple partners — not to create complexity, but to preserve independence, allow A/B testing, and maintain negotiating power. No single provider excels at everything: cross-border, fraud prevention, and local payment methods demand specialists.

In the end, the right partnerships make payments work harder — helping you grow faster, approve more transactions, reduce operational hassle, and expand into new markets.

James Wood:

Micheál — where and how does Retail InMotion partner externally?

Micheál Egan:

It depends on where you are as a business — size, growth stage.

For Retail InMotion, we created our own payment gateway and we’re connected to over 11 acquirers. We saw value in that, solving many of the problems Roy described.

In a previous role, I took a hybrid orchestration proposal to the C-suite and the CEO initially vetoed it. Later, when education, data and collaboration were in place, it was approved — because we demonstrated clearly the problem we were solving.

We were also able to create a B2B revenue stream. We leveraged orchestration to create sub-merchants under a pseudo-PayFac structure. That meant we could push B2B partner volume through the same platform.

Payments is volume-driven — more volume can reduce cost, and you generate revenue from partners as well as your own platform. For Retail InMotion, we’ve derived value through our gateway and direct acquirer connections.

James Wood:

Adam — your view on external partners?

Adam Sherlock:

We’ve taken a different approach — we migrated from multiple PSPs down to a single PSP. That simplified reconciliation for finance and made data analysis easier from one source.

A partner that’s been beneficial is Blackfoot UK — they handle PCI DSS compliance, ASV scans, and provide action items to get us compliant. We don’t have the knowledge internally.

And Mastercard’s Ekata provides business intelligence for fraud screening — filtering out illegitimate customers and retaining genuine customers through the order flow.

James Wood:

Faheem — a few words from you on partnering?

Faheem Bakshi:

We work with multiple PSPs, often because they operate in different countries. I wish we had one or two that covered everything globally, but it’s not realistic.

It’s also a business decision for resilience — if one PSP fails, we still have another. We have different local methods and acquirers, plus fraud platforms and KYC/KYB providers.

Managing multiple vendors isn’t easy, but it’s a business requirement — and we’re happy with the setup.

James Wood:

But, Adam, how do you identify areas for further improvement and what processes do you have to make that happen?

Adam Sherlock:

The biggest area we get improvements from is our customer service department. If the e-commerce business was a body, payments would be the heart, but the CS team would be the eyes and ears. They see and hear everything that’s going on, and they’re the greatest source of feedback on what customers are experiencing.

Being on top of our data as well—constantly analysing what’s happening. Is there any pain point? The weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews help, but the daily reviewing—going in there and checking it daily, even hourly—of what’s going on, that’s where you spot issues early.

James Wood:

Faheem, anything you’d add in terms of the processes you have in place for continuous improvement?

Faheem Bakshi:

One of the biggest things is data transparency. Different teams have different dashboards and sometimes they make different assumptions. If we have the same dashboards and the same metrics, the company won’t lose money because the reality is different depending on which data you look at.

James Wood:

Micheál, anything to add?

Micheál Egan:

Start with the problem you’re trying to solve, and then work from there. If it’s reducing declines to improve conversion, or reducing costs to hit the bottom line faster—start with the problem, then take it from there.

James Wood:

Just wrapping up now in terms of key takeaways. These are taken from the report — and many of which we’ve covered in the discussion today.

One of the key things the report argues is the need for active C-suite involvement.

We’ve spoken about the importance of creating a cross-functional payments group, and we mentioned Spotify building out an internal payments function.

On quick wins, the report highlights that Blink Pet Foods achieved a 12% saving on fees by moving to a higher-volume contract with their acquirer.

We’ve also discussed how to identify and communicate the metrics that matter.

Every organisation we spoke to uses expert partners across geographies and functions.

And finally, the importance of data — gathering it, analysing it, and using it to inform ongoing improvements in payments that deliver greater revenue, better profit, and a smoother customer experience.

All that remains is for me to thank our panellists — Faheem, Roy, Adam and Micheál — for their contributions.

Thank you.

Outro:

That’s it for this episode of Making payments make sense.

If you found this useful, subscribe — we’ll be bringing you more honest conversations and practical insights from the people shaping payments every day.

And if you’d like to go deeper, you can download the full report, Making payments a profit centre, via the link in the show notes.

Thanks for listening — and we’ll see you next time.