The Pagos team is excited to announce the launch of our new podcast: Real Talk Payments! 

We’ve been in the payments trenches for decades and know the pain points merchants face. Our founders, Klas Bäck and Albert Drouart, started Pagos to address these problems and build out the tools they dreamed of having in previous roles. With this podcast, we’ll go one step further to pull back the curtain on what’s actually happening in payment processing and level the playing field of industry knowledge and insights.

If you've worked in payments, you know there's no degree program or step-by-step manual. The industry has little transparency and is built on layers of complexity you figure out as you go, often through expensive trial and error. That's why we're bringing together payments leaders from across the industry to share the unfiltered stories, hard-earned lessons, and insider knowledge you need to effectively manage payment operations in the modern world.

Episode 1: The Dark Arts of Payments

In our inaugural episode, host Kapil Mokhat sits down with Andy Barker (Pagos), Albert Drouart (Pagos), and Matt Wegner (VP and GM of Payments at Adobe) to talk about two of the most frustrating realities in payments: declines you can't explain and costs you can't see coming.

The conversation covers:

• Why the infamous "Do Not Honor" decline code has been sitting at the top of the decline charts since the ‘90s

• The reality of integrity fees and interchange downgrades that appear days after you process the actual transactions

• How one conversation with BBVA Bank improved Adobe's checkout success rates by 1,400 basis points overnight

• The gap between real-time authorizations and delayed visibility into what actually happened

In theory, payments are instant, but the truth about what happens when transactions reach the processor or issuer-level often shows up days later. That gap is where margin leaks, approval rates suffer, and teams waste hours chasing answers or reconciling costs.

As Matt Wegner points out in the episode, hiring a payments professional or vendor to exclusively monitor payment costs can pay for itself many times over. If you're not watching closely, you're almost certainly being overcharged somewhere. That’s just the unfortunate reality of payments and the complex systems and relationships that keep them running.

Watch Episode 1 on YouTube:

Episode 2: Beyond the AI Noise

In Episode 2, Kapil talks with Klas Bäck (Pagos) and Albert Drouart about what's actually changing for modern payments teams given the constant stream of AI hype. The conversation tackles:

• Why payments stacks are getting more complex (e.g. more markets, more methods, more vendors)

• How teams are being asked to do more with a smaller staff

• Why verified, normalized data is the prerequisite for effective AI

• The shift from reactive reporting to proactive monitoring

• What's overhyped in "agentic payments" and what's worth paying attention to

Ultimately, AI can accelerate analysis, but only when the underlying payments data is clean and verified. Most merchants still need to get the fundamentals right first; without harmonized data and operational visibility, you’re flying blind.

Watch Episode 2 on YouTube:

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New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Have a payments war story or a topic you want us to cover? Contact us today!