Payments on Fire Podcast with Klas Back

Klas Back, our CEO and one of the founders of Pagos, recently guest starred on an episode of the Payments on Fire podcast. This podcast, produced by Glendbrook Partners, highlights payments professionals and news stories to help listeners stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the payments world. On this episode, Klas chatted with Yvette Bohanan and Drew Edmond of Glenbrook Partners about the complexities of finding answers to seemingly simple questions in your payments data. You can listen to the entire podcast here: Episode 205 – Why Simple Questions Can Be Hard To Answer, with Klas Bäck, Founder and CEO of Pagos Solutions

To wet your whistle, so to speak, here are a few snippets from the recording, showcasing what Klas means when he says that payments data—and the questions you may ask of is—can get very complicated very quickly.

What is the average order value for each form of payment a business accepts?

“The real magic in answering that question is maybe breaking it down. So is [average order value] different across products or countries, or is it different across sales channels? Is it actually different across vendors and how can that be if, that is the case? [And if it changes,] was it something we did that improved it…or was it an accident?”

“We have seen several people in this scenario or a variation of it… like, okay, we added this payment method [and] we got some new customers, but now it’s making up a large share of the total amount of payments being made on the website and this payment method is more expensive. …Is that ok or is it actually a bad thing that this payment method is getting more and more successful? And if your margins are low or you’re looking at reducing your cost, then of course it becomes more sensitive...”

Why did our authorization approvals drop last week?

“[To successfully answer this, you have to ask yourself:]  Can we establish the data? Is it the right data that we’re looking at? Can we break it down in all of the components that maybe matter? Let’s say it’s a core transaction—can I establish on the totality? Can I establish that it’s only happening on this platform, or this product, or this vendor, or it’s actually tied to specific use cases? So it’s only happening in Portugal, or it only happened with one issuer in Portugal, but that happened to be a meaningful part of my total transaction. So it all stems from there! Or it only comes from one of my vendors and only in one country, but not in the other one? Why is that? Not necessarily something I did. Or was it something that I did? How can I establish that? And if you can’t [answer these questions], how are you ever going to answer any of these questions in terms of establishing the benchmark and understanding your consequences and how you can do bette?.”

Head over to the Payments on Fire webpage for the full recording and a transcript of this episode. Want to talk about the difficult questions your trying to answer using payments data? We’d love to hear from you!