C-suite buy-in critical to drive profits from payments
Ecommpay, the inclusive global payments platform, has released a new white paper championing the role of payments teams as profit generators rather than operational cost centres. Drawing on research with a range of e-commerce businesses, Making Payments a Profit Centre outlines how the payments function is increasingly being recognised as a core engine of growth.
Arturs Gocs, Chief Operational Officer at Ecommpay, emphasised the need for a mindset shift within online retail. “For too long, payments has been seen as a cost to a business – rather than a revenue generator.
“A wide range of e-commerce retailers were interviewed for our new white paper to discover how they are improving customer experiences and driving profitability through payments. Internal attitudes to payments are being transformed, with many securing C-suite participation and creating cross-functional steering groups to elevate payments internally.
“We found that where perceptions of the payments function’s value within the organisation are changed, new revenue streams are unlocked, as well as customer experience enhanced for long-term growth. Gaining internal support appears to be the single biggest factor in turning payments into profit.”
Key findings
• Securing internal support — especially from C-suite leaders — is the single most important factor in transforming payments into a meaningful source of profitability.
• Spotify views payments as integral to customer experience and partners externally to maximise performance.
• Blink Pet Foods reported that investing in the payments function delivered greater returns than other commercial opportunities.
• Outsourcing can reduce account-to-account transaction costs by 12.5% and cut manual workload by 520 hours per year.
• Deploying Large Language Models for fraud prevention and dispute handling can reduce false positives and accelerate fraud detection by 60%.
• Improved routing and fee optimisation can generate up to 26% savings on debit card charges.
Cross-border e-commerce is expected to maintain its rapid expansion, with some forecasts suggesting it may grow almost three times faster than overall online retail. Recognising the payments function’s strategic contribution is therefore essential for businesses seeking to compete globally.
Interviewees for the Ecommpay report placed payments within different parts of their organisations, yet all agreed that active involvement from C-suite executives is pivotal to elevating the function internally and enabling change. This goes far beyond simple buy-in: it requires senior leaders to participate directly in steering groups and committees dedicated to payments.
Contributors to the research included Spotify, Blink Pet Food, the Vendorcom payments community and sustainable fashion retailer Finisterre.
