Pagos CEO on Reducing Costs by Leveraging Data-Driven Payments Intelligence

A dollar saved is a dollar earned, and every penny counts in today’s challenging macroclimate.

“What we see now is an intense pressure on finding ways of reducing cost,” Klas Bäck, co-founder and CEO of no-code payments intelligence platform Pagos, told PYMNTS.

If you go back a year, Bäck added, it was much more about driving top-line growth and revenue.

PYMNTS has been tracking how, when faced with strong macro headwinds, businesses increasingly turn to technology and modern digital solutions to help strike a proactive balance between growth and profitability.

“For many businesses accepting payments or billing online at scale, payments is a top two or three line item in terms of biggest spend, so there’s a lot of money that can potentially be optimized,” Bäck said, adding that over the past five to seven years, the infrastructure around payments has become more complicated as businesses look to sell in more countries, build up larger vendor networks, and increasingly move operational processes to the cloud.

“This typically means they have a lot of vendors for all the services businesses need in order to be efficient today, versus their old technology stack,” Bäck said, emphasizing that all this complexity leads to a lot of opacity and crossed wires with regard to being data-driven and having clarity around payments.

Finding the Signal in the Noise

A lot of key operational questions like, “Am I doing good job or a bad job? Can I do better in terms of selling more, reducing my costs?” can be solved for by future-fit data tools that help companies better execute against both internal and ecosystem signals without getting drowned out by “noise,” Bäck said.

Businesses increasingly want information and intelligence around all their payments because “when people are flying blind and don’t look at the data, there is no way for them to be aware of the problem or to imagine what they could be doing more of or be doing better,” he said.

Benchmarking best practices can be quite powerful, “even knowing that you’re doing significantly worse [in comparison to a peer] can be an opportunity, right?” he said. “And best case is they get there much later from an execution perspective. But sometimes payments make it too hard. There are compliance and regulatory dimensions; sometimes there are fundamental changes required around technical architecture, partnership relationships, a lot of work that is basically impossible to take on.”

That’s why Bäck said no-code tools that let businesses keep what they already have in place are important in helping as many organizations as possible successfully realize the upside of today’s ongoing digital transformation.

Solving for Payments as a Digital Hurdle

“Pretty much everyone now has the same need to be more data driven, sell more and reduce costs, but what’s also happened is more companies and industries are aspiring to become more or less fully digitized, and payments sometimes makes that very hard or completely trips up the transformation,” Bäck said. “I think most people just have much more to clean up on a process basis when it comes to the digital, if you include mobile and the web.”

He added that, in general, companies which have been around longer tend to have more complicated infrastructure, where no-code tools and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions can be leveraged to take a lot of the labor lift and time cost out of the equation.

“We think machines do a lot better of a job,” Bäck said. “They can sift through all the data and track the KPIs, set alerts, do it faster, and do it after 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon … so it becomes super straightforward to work out an ROI, which is pretty exciting for a lot of bigger companies to move things to the next level so quickly and so seamlessly.”

As for what Bäck is looking forward to most? It’s working with big companies that want to do things faster and helping them get there, he said.

That’s because, as Bäck added, very large companies tend to see the broader picture earlier and ask, “What would it take to make that happen sooner?”

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