Elevating Payments: From Operational Necessity to Strategic Growth Engine

As payments become more complex and more critical to businesses, there is an emerging consensus among top merchants, platforms, and innovation companies: payments cannot hide under IT or finance anymore. Among noteworthy insights from MRC Barcelona, one is that treating payments as an independent strategic function is not just a trend but an imperative for innovation, compliance, and business sustainability.

This change is part of an even bigger industry awakening. Payments aren’t just about executing transactions anymore—they’re about facilitating customer experiences, controlling risk, and unlocking revenue potential. Here’s what we gathered from industry thought leaders at MRC Barcelona—and how to use these ideas to future-proof payments for yourself.

The Legacy Model: Payments Trapped

Typically, payments have been thought to fall within IT infrastructure or within financial operations. That model served when payments were straightforward and relatively stable—but

now, payments have exploded beyond these traditional domains. As new channels, new tech, and new consumer behaviors arrive on an ongoing basis, payments have moved beyond these traditional domains.

Placing payments in IT prioritizes system availability and data pipelines at the expense of customer experience and business agility. Placing it in finance usually results in an emphasis on cost containment and reconciliation, not innovation or growth. Either way, organizations lose sight of payments' strategic value.

The Cost of Siloed Payment Management

If payments aren’t made a strategic priority, companies have real business costs:

• Slower-paced innovation: Cross-functional efforts trail behind, limiting quicker implementation of alternate payments or localized experiences

• Increased risk of fraud: Without an active fraud plan, initial threat indicators pass unseen

• Friction at the point of checkout—due to under-optimisation—results in cart
  abandonment and lost sales

According to a report by Checkout.com, 56% of merchants say failed payments negatively impact customer satisfaction, and nearly a quarter say it causes significant revenue loss (Checkout.com).

Unlocking Agility: What a Standalone Payments Team Can Do

Organizations that have dedicated payments teams realize essential benefits. This team setup
introduces agility, enabling businesses to:

• Accelerate Further on Innovation: A centralized payments team is able to test and bring to market new ways to make payments quickly—like BNPL, wallets, or even crypto—specific to particular markets.

• Enhance Checkout Conversion: With exclusive responsibility for improving the payment experience, the team is able to tweak performance between gateways, introduce tokenization, and cut friction.

• Respond Proactively to Risk: By possessing fraud detection and compliance, payments teams can get involved sooner in the transaction flow—cutting chargebacks and false decline.

Fraud, Compliance, and APMs: Why Specialization Matters Now More Than Ever

The digital commercial environment is evolving more quickly than legacy teams can keep up. Several sessions throughout MRC Barcelona reaffirmed that specialized competence is needed to address three areas in particular:

• Early-Stage Fraud Detection: Fraudulent techniques become increasingly sophisticated. A dedicated team may devote resources to developing machine learning models or leveraging third-party solutions to flag suspicious behavior ahead of authorization attempts—streamlining approval rates and minimizing downstream losses.

• Emerging Regulatory Environments: From European PSD2 to U.S. FedNow, regulations evolve all the time. Compliance-focused payments teams can drive faster adoption—without depending on slower departments.

• Alternative Payment Methods (APMs): Consumers demand flexibility. Indeed, over 40% of consumers worldwide have applied at least one APM that is not traditional debit/credit over the last year (McKinsey & Company). Putting these approaches in place in a short space requires committed resources and expertise—not ad hoc assistance from non-experts.

How to Make the Shift: First Steps to Elevating Payments in Your Org

Making payments a separate function does not have to involve an overhaul for an entire organization. It's more about raising visibility, allowing for specialization, and letting payments strategy drive toward overall business objectives. There are two primary ways to begin:

• Option 1: Create an In-House Payments Center of Excellence

Assemble a cross-functional team that has in-depth knowledge in payments, fraud, compliance, and customer experience. Give this team complete ownership over KPIs related to growth, efficiency, and customer outcomes.

This model is suitable for companies that have the size and resources to create internal capabilities and possesses long-term strategic control. The team can concentrate on:

• Promoting innovation through A/B tests and checkout optimization
• Managing changing compliance requirements
• Cross-functional cooperation to link payments to customer experience
• Constantly assessing and adding new payment channels and providers

• Option 2: Collaborate with External Experts

For businesses that need to accelerate or don't have unique in-house capabilities, outsourcing is often an equally efficient solution. Hiring a payments orchestration platform or strategic consultancy enables you to speed performance without having to rebuild from ground zero.

Outsourcing possibilities can include:

• Payments Strategy Consulting
• Gateway and APM Integration Management
• Fraud support and risk mitigation
• Monitoring compliance and adaptation

The correct partner will also assist in benchmarking, offer cross-industry insights, and bring tools that grow with your business. Notably, outsourcing does not equate to losing control—it involves adding concentrated expertise to augment internal efforts. From European PSD2 to U.S. FedNow, regulations evolve all the time. Compliance-focused payments teams can drive faster adoption—without depending on slower departments.

Why Payments Are Your Next Growth Engine

Payments have the potential to be a top-line driver of growth, drive better customer experiences, and protect against rising fraud and compliance risks. Those that view payments as a fundamental business driver—not an afterthought—are best positioned to succeed in this increasingly fast-paced digital world.

Payments are not just a utilitarian function — they are a key enabler of new revenues, resilience, and long-term prosperity.

About Spreedly

Spreedly's Payments Orchestration platform enables and optimizes digital transactions with the world’s most complete payment services marketplace. Built on Spreedly’s PCI-compliant architecture, our Advanced Vault solution combines a modern feature-set with rule-based configurations to optimize the vaulting experience for all stored payment methods. Global enterprises and hyper-growth companies grow their digital business faster by relying on our payments platform. Hundreds of customers worldwide secure card data in our PCI-compliant vault and use tokenized card data to enable and optimize over $45 billion of annual transaction volumes with any payment service. Spreedly is headquartered in downtown Durham, NC.