By Marco Conte and Ronald Praetsch
If you do a LinkedIn jobs search for “payment manager,” you get nearly 50,000 results from just the United States. About 17,000 more if you search the European Union.
Payment managers perform a crucial role. They source payment services providers, they oversee the building and securing of the organization’s payment systems, they measure the payment system’s performance against certain KPIs, and they regularly report on that performance. They also have a team of full-stack engineers and data scientists to support their work.
At many companies, however, this role does not exist. Payment system management in the majority of companies tends to be a responsibility for someone on the finance, treasury, or operations teams.
Most merchants and retailers, for example, fall into this category. And those companies still have to manage many, many payment channels — even more so since the pandemic.
Imagine a merchant in Berlin, for example, that sells goods worldwide. The company is growing, and recently hit a big goal of 1 million euro in monthly sales. A company like that accepts payments via PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, and whatever local methods of payment are popular in the markets where the company has a presence.
Someone in that company must manage payment reconciliation, track the payment system’s performance against certain KPIs, and try to make informed decisions that maximize payment conversion and minimize the payment costs of each sale.
In our experience, that person is struggling.
We believe the way forward for such merchants is democratized payment intelligence. When merchants have access to the right tools and the right information to optimize their payments systems, they typically unlock significant revenue.
The challenge, historically, has been getting those tools and that intelligence to those merchants. We think this is about to change.
We are a two-person founding team with 25 years of experience in payments. We have built the payment infrastructures for major brands and consulted for payment services providers. We have seen this sector from every angle.
Over the last decade, we also have seen the number of payment channels available to merchants boom. Ten years ago, major online retailers could afford to have a single payment channel. Today, even the smallest merchants accept credit card payments, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, rapid mobile payments, BNPL, and maybe even Bitcoin.
This boom in payment channels has opened up worlds of opportunities for merchants. Merchants have hundreds of payment channels to choose from today.
But each new opportunity introduces numerous new complications. Digital payments are subject to evolving regulations like PSD2 in Europe, for example, and fraud constantly looms as a risk. Emerging channels like BNPL, open banking, and crypto also ask merchants to do cost-benefit analyses of technologies that they might not fully understand.
Further, each payment channel has its own method of delivering payment intelligence back to the merchant. Some just hand off raw data. Some might track their data against a handful of KPIs with basic analytics portals, but there are no industry standards against which to benchmark performance.
And so we are left with a global economy full of merchants who:
We have seen the dilemma above play out time and time again in the market. This is what inspired us to leave consulting and become startup founders. We wanted to build something for merchants to unify their payment data and translate it into meaningful business intelligence.
But a big question remained: How? How do you pull disparate payment data together and make sense of it?
There are some must-haves for such a solution:
In theory, a company could build such a tool. There would be development costs, of course, and the company would have to hire some data people plus a payment manager to generate actual business insights.
But, again, that’s only really feasible for bigger enterprises.
We believe meaningful, actionable payment intelligence should be democratized, not something available to only the biggest companies. Every merchant should be free to expand their payment offerings and grow their revenue without overwhelming cost or complexity.
We built congrify to do just that.
We have leaned on our experience in the payments industry to develop data standards, to define the KPIs that are most impactful for businesses, and to create processes for turning that information into actionable insights.
It’s still early days for our company. We are just now beginning the beta tests of our platform.
Results are encouraging, though. It’s clear that merchants can save money, streamline operations, and make better business decisions with a platform like ours.
Take the hypothetical Berlin-based merchant described above. Our analysis suggests a company like that could save more than 400,000 euros per year with better payment intelligence.
The name congrify comes from the Latin word congruo, which means “to harmonize” or “to be in unison.” That’s a good description of our mission as we move forward. We want to harmonize all of that messy payments data merchants have to deal with, turn it into useful information, and give those merchants a fair shot at growing their businesses.