EP111 The Churn Hidden Inside Payment Adoption with Kevin Armstrong and Jay Stansell

Kevin, when you talk about these challenges in different countries, I hear the passion in your voice around the challenges.

Can I ask, what do you think it is about product management and payments that's kept you captivated? Why is payments captivated? You could have gone off in any product management direction, but throughout your career, the payments, the money changing hands, the challenges of different countries, challenges of different governance that's required in not only at a business level, but at a government level quite often as well.

What is it about payments do you think that's really captivated you and kept you so close to payments throughout your career?

Payments is a representation of our trust.

It tells who we are.

And it's an expression of how comfortable you are with paying later, with interest, with all that.

And it tells so much about your customer base.

So as a product manager, when you're just looking at demographic signals, for example, it's just a tertiary layer into who your customer base is.

Payments tells you who they are, how do they trust.

And so you can establish a better connection with that customer from your product that comes into other areas that you wouldn't think about and try to build that trust with the customer based on the type of payment method that they have.

So it's more than just, hey, we offered an access point to complete payment.

It's, hey, we offer an opportunity to connect with the customer in a level of trust that is where they're at.

I love that.

I love the authenticity of that as well.

I've never really thought about it that way.

I think we get so sort of focused on varying different metrics, but we don't think about how we measuring trust.

And you're quite right.

Nothing says I trust you more than here's my credit card details.

Thank you.

It's really interesting.

So with that in mind, I mentioned during the introduction your role in coaching product people into this domain of FinTech and payments.

can i ask where where do they start because when i first joined my first fintech back in 2017 it's all around governance and frameworks and privacy and security there's a lot of acronyms there's different things required in different regions states or countries as well and it can be quite overwhelming What is your advice to how to break in and what not to worry too much about if you're trying to get into FinTech or into payments?

I find...

It's best to learn something, build and experiment yourself.

And in a highly regulated space, it can seem that there's no way that you could build something on your own for that.