The payments industry is changing in ways that go well beyond new technologies and payment methods.

From how merchants manage multiple payment providers to what they expect from their PSPs, some fundamental industry dynamics are shifting. And as the landscape becomes more complex, the skills required of payments professionals are evolving, too.

In this episode, Glenbrook’s Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond sit down with Lee Clifton, COO of Acquired, to explore these often-overlooked developments. The conversation covers payments optimization, multiprocessor strategies, the current state and expectations of account management, and how AI tools are changing the way merchants and providers work with payments data.

They also discuss the changing role of the “payments professional” and why ongoing education and industry engagement matter more than ever.

 

Watch the full episode on YouTube: 

 

 

 

Episode Transcript

Chris Uriarte: And welcome to Payments on Fire. I’m Chris Uriarte, a partner at Glenbrook, it’s great to have you with us today. I’m really excited about today’s show as we’re going to hit on some topics that are really, important to the industry but are not often discussed even here on Payments on Fire and around the industry at some conferences. So we’ve got some good stuff for you today.

And helping me navigate the discussion today is my co-host and fellow partner here at Glenbrook Partners, Drew Edmond. Hey, Drew, how are you doing today?

Drew Edmond: I’m good, Chris. Always happy to be here.

Chris Uriarte: Good to be back on another episode with you on Payments on Fire. We’ve had a very busy last couple months. It’s the heart of conference season, so we’ve had our eyes and ears out there in the industry, and I think we’re gonna hit on some interesting themes today that we’ve spoken about with some folks over a few cocktails and a few lunch dates over the course of the last few months.

And one of those folks that we’ve had a few discussions with at some of these conferences, and I’m happy to have our special guest today join us, Lee Clifton, who’s the COO of Acquired. Lee, how are you today? Thanks for joining us here on Payments on Fire.

Lee Clifton: Hey, I’m good. Thanks, Chris. Hey, Drew. It’s great to be here today. After so many discussions over the years of about doing this, it’s funny how it’s taken so long, but great to be here today to discuss and debate what works, what doesn’t work, and, have some fun over the next hour or so.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, for sure. It’s great to have you with us on the show, and you and I had the pleasure of spending some time together in person, now going back, probably six or seven weeks ago at the MRC, the Merchant Risk Council San Diego conference while we were preparing for this podcast.

And I joked for you a bit that you’re a pretty difficult guest to have on the show because you have such a broad background, and there’s so many things that we could talk about. It’s really impossible to almost pin down what we should be talking about. So I want to spend some time with you today talking about just the changing nature of some of the fundamental things that we’re seeing in the industry. Things like how merchants are using providers in the modern payment world today, how providers are servicing their merchants, and how we as payments professionals need to grow in this really crazy, rapidly changing environment. But before we get into the depth of that, let’s get a little bit of background on you.

So first of all, why don’t you take us through what Acquired does and what your role is there?

Lee Clifton: Sure. Thanks, Chris. So today, I’m a commercially driven COO at Acquired. my role spans much across kind of customer and operational life cycle, including account management, customer support, partnerships, revenue operations, optimization, activations, integrations, and onboarding, and work closely with all the other teams there. High visibility across the journey from the first point of talking to a customer through to getting them integrated live, optimizing their payments, supporting them day to day, and also growing the relationship over time. That breadth is one of the things I really enjoy about the role, because payments isn’t just about processing a transaction, it’s about the technology, the performance, the customer experience, and ultimately the commercial outcome for the merchant.

Acquired is a payments business focused on recurring commerce. At a simple level, we help businesses win customers, keep them paying, and recover payments when something goes wrong. And today we support both financial services and subscription businesses across cards, open banking, variable recurring payments, direct debit, payouts, all through a single API.

Where I think we’re a little different is we don’t just think about processing as an individual transaction, we look at the whole recurring payment life cycle. How to optimize the first payment, how to maximize the likelihood that the subsequent payments continue to be improved, when something does fail, how intelligently can you recover the payment rather than necessarily losing the customer.

It’s a really important part of that is our multi-acquirer architecture. We connect to multiple acquiring banks rather than effectively locking the merchant into a single acquiring relationship. Our routing technology allows transactions to be distributed across different acquirers based on factors such as performance, while also providing resilience through capabilities such as failover and cascading. So rather than a merchant having to build out and manage all of the complexity themselves, we’re providing one layer through which they can manage multiple payment methods, multiple acquiring relationships and optimization around those payments.

The other thing I’d highlight is that we’re deliberately a specialist. We’re a smaller payments company compared to some of the global giants. We can move really quickly, we’re also deeply focused on recurring payments.

That specialist is reflected not just in technology, but the people and the level of payments expertise that we try and bring to customers. I think that’s particularly important in payments today. Technology is obviously critical, but merchants increasingly expect their providers to bring expertise.

Chris Uriarte: The point about sort of your multi-acquirer support in the way that you do that is something that is really unique, and we’re gonna get a little bit deeper into that and some of the strategies that we see out in the industry as we talk a little bit more. But before we get deeper into that, we always have this standard question for all of our first-time guests, which is, how did you get into this crazy payments industry?

We all know that we didn’t study it in university and just magically, that nobody grows up in school and says, “I want to be a payments professional,” right? And I usually let our guests go right at it. But I wanted to first highlight some headlines in your resume, which I think are really impressive, right?

So you really have a pretty diverse range of experience, ranging from sort of these big name payments companies to working with some of the big impactful industry organizations that we have out there. So you’ve worked with the likes of Worldpay as an account manager, JPMorgan as a relationship management, eventually leading to a role where you were focused on international expansion and some other things there. So we’d love to hear a little bit about that.

And then you moved to Stripe as their head of global payments, performance, and strategy. And, all at the same time, I know you’ve been tremendously involved in a lot of efforts at an industry level. Like you were the global chairman of the MRC, working closely with MPE as an ambassador there, working as a mentor for Money20/20. That’s a lot. It’s a lot of experience you have. What has this journey been like to sort of lead you to where you are today?

Lee Clifton: As you said, I didn’t wake up, didn’t grow up thinking I want to go into payments. I’m not sure I even knew what payments was growing up. But I spent a number of time, a number of years working for Royal Bank of Scotland, a big UK bank. And honestly I weren’t even looking even for a payments role then.

It was, I remember talking about it, Chris, couple of months ago when we were at MRC, and I was just always keen on, even back then, on like pushing myself, trying to strive to do the next big thing. Perhaps didn’t have much patience. That may still not have changed, to be honest. But, I wanted to move on.

And as part of the structure when you applied for a role at Royal Bank of Scotland was that if you applied for a role, whether you got an interview or didn’t, you got feedback on your application. And so I moved even, this was my first role in London, at Royal Bank of Scotland. And then I saw a role that literally was like one or two floors above where I was sitting, and it was a promotion. So I thought, “This is great. I’m gonna apply for the role, and I’ll get feedback from the application, and I’ll use that feedback to help build out a development plan.”

And the role was as account manager at Worldpay, and Worldpay was still part of Royal Bank of Scotland at the time. I applied, and a week or so afterwards, I got a note back to say, “We’d like to invite you for an interview.” I thought, “Amazing. I’ll get feedback on my application form, and now I’ll get feedback on the in-person interview.” Took the interview and I got the job. And so I went from promotion into London still working for the bank and then five months later, another promotion to work for Worldpay as an account manager.

And I had no idea really even what Worldpay did then as part of the bank. It was just really a plan to help build like a development plan for future progression. So complete fluke really I ended up into there and it’s been an amazing journey ever since then and one that has always helped keep me, I think, grounded because it’s so complex, it’s so fascinating. You think you’re learning something and something else pops out the woodwork and I think that’s really helped. So that’s really how I got in there as that role at Worldpay, was as a relationship manager. Again, first, real interaction into really what payments was.

Looking back, as I said then, it was probably the best grounding I could have ever had. I was learning directly from merchants what mattered to them, what frustrated them, what they expected from their provider, and just how important payments can be in the wider performance of their business. Worldpay for me was definitely learning like payments 101 and the majority of my portfolio was card-present merchants.

After then, I moved for a short spell with Cashflows, a UK company, and then moved to JP Morgan and that’s really where my career I think broadened, nearly 10 years, at JP Morgan. I had a boss that was really tough, but fair. And then I had high profile merchants, managed luckily to manage some of the world’s largest merchants were majority ecommerce. And my boss in that first six months absolutely made me analytical and technical and those are skills that I would say that were not strengths of mine when I was, before I joined JPM.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. That’s pretty significant, and I think when you think about your history at Worldpay, a Worldpay that was part of RBS at the time, that was many Worldpays ago now. We always joke, Drew, I think we’ve had the exercise here at Glenbrook a couple times where we’ve tried to trace back the Worldpay lineage through all the different, back through private equity-owned to the recent spinoff, back to Vantiv, and, the Lidls and the RSBs and blah, blah, blah.

Drew Edmond: It kind of looks like a Chutes and Ladders board game, it kind of weaves around, drops down, and goes back here.

But I think a couple things stand out though from Lee’s background to me. I think one, one is for if anyone’s younger in their, earlier in their career thinking about, how do I move up in this world? Sometimes you just have to shoot for the moon, right? You go for a role that you didn’t think you maybe had a chance of getting at and go for it and see what happens. And you may land in a lifelong career in payments as a result. So I think that’s something to keep in mind.

And then the second piece is really around that client-facing component, right? In terms of, you get immediately into the weeds, right, of what merchants care about. You have to understand the, from a provider perspective, you have to understand, you have to start learning kind of the technical components, the business components, the strategic components of it as it relates to your relationship with those customers.

And so I think it’s just a great kind of learning ground for folks that are entering the industry from a, at a new, point in their career.

Chris Uriarte: I just want to move on quickly because the other theme that we’re gonna click on is sort of the changing nature at how we’re servicing these customers. And, we think payments optimization is really a key component of that.

So you went on and you joined Stripe, and you played a critical role at really forming and growing this function around payments performance. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that role looked like?

Lee Clifton: Yeah, sure. So in August ’22, I joined Stripe as their Global Head of Payments Performance and Strategy. Moving from one large organization to another large organization, very different organizations, after spending like 10 years at one company, moving to another one, do you learn a lot about payments on day one?

I don’t think so after being around for that long time. But what you do learn is how another business do things and certain things one will do very different and some will do them right, and some will do them, like, very different. But I think that was a very different and exciting and enjoyable part of my career there.

Lot of the customers obviously, work in the same way around the global enterprise are focused on that optimization. You’re all trying to compete and obviously then, very different to when I first started out. That couple of basis points on an approval rate can mean, like, multiple millions worth of dollars, right, to the bottom line.

So spent a lot of time traveling the globe. Spent more time likely, probably, in the US than I did in my home country of the UK. So, but yeah, very good time.

Chris Uriarte: And we’ve spent a lot of time working with that team there at Stripe. They’ve been really helpful to us in understanding what the industry, what Stripe is seeing, and as you just at a broader sense, what the industry is seeing. So I’d like to kick off with some of the deeper topics that we’re gonna focus on today.

The first thing that I wanna talk about is something that is most certainly related to your job at Acquired and what you guys are doing in Acquired, which is multiprocessor strategies for merchants. And Drew, you and I have talked about this a lot on this podcast with our clients. In fact, we kinda had a pretty popular episode several months back or maybe earlier in the year, now time goes fast, on going global and sort of some of the things that we’re seeing from merchant strategies related to multiprocessors.

But Lee, you and I joke that back in the old days, a merchant used to sort of sign a contract with the likes of a Worldpay or Cybersource, then just kinda shove all their transactions down the pipe to that one provider. Renewal time comes up, they generally just renew the contract with them three years later, or maybe they’re not happy and they switch providers and they send everything to that new provider. But obviously, that strategy has changed dramatically over the years.

So let me start by asking you for kind of your view on where we’ve been and how merchant multi-acquirer strategies are really evolving today.

Lee Clifton: Yeah, I think the change has been enormous. And I think I could bring it to life, bring it to life with an example, and as you just touched on a moment too. So when I joined as a relationship manager at Worldpay, may have even been the first, but definitely one of the first few kind of major contract renewals. Very large merchant. We went into a negotiation thinking that we would likely have to give up about 5% of our commercials. They wanted 10% rate reduction. After months of negotiation, we eventually shook hands on 7.5%.

But I think the interesting piece, looking back at it, is that in return of that 7.5%, we got a five-year contract with 100% exclusivity. Those two things, as you just touched on, is just not normal for global enterprise merchants.

So I think the other two things that stand out the most. You don’t see sophisticated merchants wanting to lock themselves into that kind of structure anymore. And then there was another dynamic back there, which was the sheer cost and complexity of changing providers. Another large merchant of mine told me the cost to move from Worldpay to another provider was, like, over seven figures. So it’s like that ease or easier now than what it was back there, was not that option for merchants back then.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. Yeah, I think the exclusivity clauses are not something that we see anymore, especially with larger merchants, but I don’t think we really see those with anybody.

Lee Clifton: Right.

Chris Uriarte: Very, different environment today too in regards to kind of vendor lock-in. Now, we all know that changing PSPs is still a very difficult task for merchants, but there is a lot more flexibility when it comes to implementing multiple provider relationships.

We have more dynamic orchestration platforms and things like that, things that we didn’t even think about today. So, it’s a very, different environment. Anything else to add on this based on kind of what you’re seeing in trends in general today?

Lee Clifton: I think also back then, the competition, you thought you had competition then, but in reality versus today, it was a very different landscape. There was, company I work with today, like Acquired weren’t around, there was no Stripe, there was no Checkout. Adyen was only just emerging.

You didn’t have dispute management companies. There weren’t fraud companies, identity companies, orchestration weren’t a word. And we thought it was complex back in 2008. Fast-forward 18 years, we live in a very different world from back then to now.

Drew Edmond: And how do you see it coming down market? I think historically when it came to the resources available to these large merchants to build, you talked about orchestration just then, to build that orchestration in-house and say, “Okay, now that we’re moving away from this single-threaded PSP relationship and we want to move to this, okay, we’ve got enough money, we can build this ability to route transactions somewhere else and to manage the different types of reporting and the operational complexity that comes with multiple providers and things like that.”

And so, it was those large merchants doing that, maybe not some of the mid-market or smaller merchants. How do you see that shift happening and where do we stand today across the merchant community on their ability to kind of leverage multiple PSPs?

Lee Clifton: I think it’s been a year now, isn’t it? Not even for the largest global like e-commerce and just merchants across the globe. It’s now a lot of even the non-household names know that the ability of routing volume from one provider to another provider can really enhance and make a difference.

So I think, this is the world we live in now, and whether you’re using a company like Acquired to help do your orchestration and drive the highest performance or that you’re doing it yourself, ultimately, right, there is just so much on the line now of kind of drive it.

And the understanding back then is that people used to just accept what the approval rate was, whether it was 80%, or 90%, or 95%. No one ever really thought there was work that could be done to change it. So I think this is the world we live in now. Every single provider is doing a form of optimization to try and obviously help retain, and win, and grow the business.

Chris Uriarte: A lot of practical implications that influence these decisions as well. So maybe finding multiple acquirers to drive local acquiring strategies, as we’ve talked about for global merchants, or using one acquirer versus another for performance or cost reasons.

But this really starts to get complex. Lee, I’m thinking about the panel that you and I did back at MRC, talking about orchestration versus optimization, and we’ve talked about some of these themes here. But I would say just in general, do merchants, do we think that merchants really have the capabilities to handle acquirers effectively? And what sort of investment is really necessary to make this work well? Does this really bring us back to the orchestration discussion?

I think one of the interesting things you noted is you’re dealing with a lot of smaller and mid-size type merchants, and we’re always, sometimes when we generalize things, we’re always thinking about the enterprise merchants that have lots of resources, lots of budgets, and the ROIs there to invest in this. Maybe that’s not the case for a lot of these small, middle-sized folks. Do they have the ability to handle these multiple acquirer architectures?

Lee Clifton: More than you would think. Definitely not everyone has for sure. But I think there’s, and we’re absolutely going further upstream into much larger, kind of household name sort of businesses there. But I think what’s happening now is that obviously when we speak to a customer it’s a different pitch to obviously other providers, and you’re focusing on all the things that you can do hopefully really well and make a difference.

But one of the things that what we’re trying to bring to the table to make it easy for a merchant is that you don’t need to go and work with multiple different providers. Like we can manage that for you. Just through the one bit of connection, we can offer all of those different payment methods I touched on.

We can do the connections to the multiple acquiring banks. You don’t need to go and work with all of those. That can just be managed in-house within my team. And I think obviously that is then making that awareness out for, customers who know about it obviously know about it, but the ones that don’t, my team, other sales teams across the industry are doing their best to try and influence.

When you’ve got 100% of your business, you never talk about obviously multi acquiring and orchestration. You’re just trying to lock that in. And when you don’t have that, that’s your big play, right? To try and get to, to try and win 1% of someone’s business and then prove that you’re trustworthy and you can perform at against the incumbents to try and grow that up into the high double digits of share of wallet.

Drew Edmond: When you enable this, this kind of ease of integration essentially for these merchants to say, “Okay, it’s not this massive integration every single time you want to replace or add a new provider,” what are the implications on that on the provider side?

When we think about kind of the retention of that merchant, like how do those, you’ve been on the provider side, you’ve been on the kind of the enabling of that onboarding piece and that integration piece. Like, how do you think about that change, that shift?

Lee Clifton: I think when you’re trying to forecast, I think that’s quite, quite a tricky thing. For in order, this is the fifth payments company I’ve worked for and you always have the same challenge, which is around forecast and the volume that you’re gonna retain and how you’re gonna grow it.

And obviously that, and I think that’s just got tougher every single year because, if you’ve got a merchant that’s working with us and working with two other providers, and it’s to say we’ve all got 33% each, you’re forecasting that opportunity to, you’re forecasting hopefully you’re not gonna lose, but there is a risk you may lose and there’s an opportunity you may win. And I think you’re just trying to incrementally grow that share of what you’ve got. So I think from a provider, that’s your retention.

It’s, for existing business, it’s really, it’s all about retention and then the products and service you can do and adding value so that you retain and then you grow. And obviously from a new business angle, then you’re tackling it in a way where you’re going after these merchants that are working with just the one provider and you’re selling them the benefits of working with a company like Acquired where we can then route that volume through multiple different acquirers and hopefully get better outcomes.

Or if they’re already using two or three different providers, you’re trying to be the third or a fourth one, or you’re trying to dislodge that one of those incumbents to hopefully turn the lights out with one of them and join you. So I think very different dynamic for existing versus new business.

Chris Uriarte: It’s a tough world out there right now. It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the PSP space. I know, Drew, we often see these press releases that come out that merchant X has chosen provider Y, and then, when we get down to it and we get sort of the inside scoop of what’s going on, very often we see that provider is really maybe just a backup provider or a backup to a backup provider, or just getting a small slice of it.

So contract does not guarantee volume these days, going back to our initial discussion about there’s no such thing as exclusivity anymore, right? And I think this starts to bring up a topic that hits a nerve with a lot of people when we speak to the industry, which is the current state of account management strategies at PSPs.

And Drew and I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn and we’ve got some posts that are total flops and some posts get a lot of thumbs up and likes. And then it seems that there’s some types of posts that just really hit a nerve with people. And I remember a post that Drew did a couple years ago when he talked about our perceived decline in account management quality at PSPs, and this is Drew’s personal post, but I think we at Glenbrook would say we hear this a lot from our merchants.

Merchants are really concerned about the quality of servicing and account management they’re getting. And boy, did folks have a lot to say on that topic, right, Drew?

Drew Edmond: Yeah, it was a spicy one for sure. But I think the reality is, where that post came from was, having come from a merchant background myself before joining Glenbrook, and I had really great relationship managers that I had worked with, when I was at Square and when I was at Etsy, before joining Glenbrook.

And and then coming to Glenbrook and obviously people are coming to us to help support them, whether it’s with their payment strategy or payment operations, whatever it might be. And listening to these merchants talk about kind of the challenges that they’ve had on the account management side, and that really being the driver of why they came to us in the first place, right?

It wasn’t, “Oh, the performance was so bad that I had to leave,” or, “The technical integration was so terrible.” It was, “Hey, my account manager just is slow to respond to me. They don’t even seem like they’re paying attention to me. They don’t seem to understand our business. I found out about a feature that they offer, you know, through somebody else, not even from my account manager.”

It’s like those types of conversations. It’s a very human conversation, right? It’s not even as much a business conversation as, I don’t feel like I’m being heard and listened to and treated with the level of touch that I want. It’s like, this is my job every day that I have to, I’m operating payments for this merchant and this provider is essentially like the foundational critical piece of how I do my job and I’m not being supported in the way I want to be supported in.

And so to me that was just like kind of revelatory in terms of the importance, right? Of you can lose this business that from a provider side is generating a lot of revenue for you and can be very important to you. And if that one account manager isn’t doing a good enough job you can just completely lose that business. And so it is this critical linchpin and this conduit between your customer, the customer and the provider. And if it’s not done well, it can be dramatically bad for the provider.

So Lee, I would just be curious, you’ve been in the shoes on the account management side, you’ve managed those teams, you’ve gone deep on the weeds on the performance piece that’s a very critical component of that account management relationship.

How has that kind of changed over the years? Where do you feel like it just generally stands today in the industry in terms of kind of how providers think about it and treat it?

Lee Clifton: Yeah it’s a great topic. I think after hearing that it’s a bit of a spicy post, I’m not sure I actually want to give any answers now, but I think I’ll give it a go. But I think, for me, it’s always been like a massive passion area, which I think most people say about me around the account management and seeing customers and tackling those challenges.

But I think ultimately, like account management has changed significantly over the years because what a merchant expects from their provider has also changed a hell of a lot. So when I started relationship management, I think the role was much more like relationship-led and you needed to know the customer, understand their business, like be responsive, deal with issues, manage commercial relationships, and make sure that, make sure they felt looked after.

And I think all that obviously absolutely still matters, but I don’t think that’s enough no more. I think the modern day account manager like has to be much more rounded. They need to understand the commercial relationship, but they also need to understand like payments performance, product, technology, data, like fraud, disputes, regulations, schemes. A lot of these things that just weren’t focus areas, years ago.

So I think the role, you definitely hear about good account management and bad account management, but I do, as an account manager fan, I do think that the account manager role has absolutely got harder, and that’s not an excuse, get out of jail clause for everyone, but it’s definitely got harder for people.

And I think like people sitting opposite an account manager, as that bar has got higher as well, because they’re often extremely sophisticated payments professionals, and they might have been in payments for 10, 15, 20 years as well. So if you’ve been an account manager for two or three years and you think you’re doing a good job, and then you sit across the table with someone who’s been there for 20 years, it’s really hard to impress them, right?

So I think they’ve got, if you said Drew, like your background and a lot of these people now on the merchant and on the provider side have got very vast backgrounds of being a merchant, being a gateway, being an acquirer, working on the scheme side. And obviously you just keep bringing in, obviously, and every time from day to day, I feel your CV is getting stronger in terms of like your payments credentials. And that is, I think, is a huge kind of like change in how account management was to how it is today.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. I think you’ve hit on it. I think we do believe that the scope of what’s included with account management has changed dramatically, right? So I remember, for example, how KPIs like auth rates and chargeback rates were just these static values that lived on a PowerPoint slide. And every three months, that PowerPoint slide would show up during a QBR. But now there just seems to be this high demand for real-time assistance and action related to payments, performance, and analytics. And I’d argue it’s even, obviously it’s gotten crazier over the last year with AI, right? Everybody wants access to data. Even the most junior analyst on a payments team has the access to these amazing tools that’s doing these analytics, right?

So I’d argue, right, that the concept of a payments performance management function or payments performance management teams, at least the one that’s client-facing, is something that really didn’t even exist at PSPs years ago, right? How important is this aspect of a PSP’s operation to servicing its merchant customers?

Lee Clifton: I think, I think it’s huge, it’s really important. It ends up being, creating the difference of is it a tick box exercise of having a QBR or are you actually going there and adding value? And I think what’s happened a lot is that like performance was just looked at back in the past what’s happened rather than what we wanna do is you wanna be forward facing and be really proactive and identify what needs to be changed or identify the issue and go to that, to go to the customer and say, “I’ve identified this problem, this is what we’ve done and this is the outcome.”

And I think, as you touched on then, Chris, is that these were like KPIs and I wouldn’t even say they were even KPIs, to be honest, right? Years ago they were just like, they were metrics you put on a PowerPoint, but there weren’t really ones that you were trying to look to improve or even challenge or go deeper past that first stat.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, makes sense.

Drew Edmond: What kind of causes a provider to fall short in the account management space? I think that I wanna first like sympathize with what you were saying before in terms of, sometimes this can be seen as, in some cases, like a more entry-level job, right?

Like you said you got your start as account manager. Maybe you didn’t have a ton of payments experience, and you’re coming in, and you’re all of a sudden you’re expected to manage these relationships with these merchants that have varying needs. The industry’s constantly changing. Your own product set is changing, and so it’s not an easy job by any stretch of the imagination to stay on top of everything and to manage these relationships well.

So how do you think about, I guess, like what causes a team or a company to fall short in that space because of those challenges versus those that do well, and what do they do differently to stay on top of that world?

Lee Clifton: Yeah so I think it’s a few things on that, Drew., I think a lot of it really is like helping, like when you’re on the provider side setting up your team to be successful with, and that means around, that could even be around like the size of the portfolio that you give an account manager or straight relationship manager. And you could give them X amount of accounts and you’ve got too many, and then I’d argue, I used the phrase a while ago, which is, you’re not really in account management, you’re really like doing account administration.

And that’s definitely not adding value, it’s making things like just roll over, but is it really driving the best out of that merchant relationship, which is ultimately like you are earning from that as a business. So I think getting the size right is important. I’m not saying it’s an easy one to solve for, but I think that’s really important.

I think the other thing is that it’s around making sure that you are, for me, like what you want to do is that you want your merchant to want you at the table at every discussion, and they don’t, you don’t want to be the person that’s just like the facilitator to get other people in the room. When you are being pulled to be in that room because you can add value or, whether that’s a QBR or a workshop or an optimization session or just going for a coffee or a beer or a sandwich, you want to be on speed dial, right, for the merchant so that you’re being pulled upon. And I think when you’ve got that relationship, I think obviously you’ve mastered, I’m not saying necessarily you’re going to do that again, but I think that’s where you want to stay.

And I think what a lot of people do is the bad side of it is where you’re not going to the table with insights, right? You’re not providing the expertise of really how to drive that, that performance. You’re not able to articulate what that merchant wants or what they need or what they expect, and you’re not able to even bring like products and services or help move the needle.

Drew Edmond: Yeah, it’s an interesting thing where the individual account manager itself, as they grow in their kind of knowledge and capacity to manage those merchants, sometimes some things happens where, one, now maybe the provider says, “Well, you’re so good now, we’re gonna add more merchants to your portfolio size.” So maybe that degrades your performance on an individual merchant level. Or, “You’ve gotten so darn good, we’re gonna put you on the important accounts now. So now we’re moving you off.” And now these smaller merchants are saying, “Okay, I’ve got this kind of constant churn of different account managers ’cause the one that was doing so well for me gets taken away from me,” right?

But I think what maybe becomes interesting now is as we’re starting to have more conversations with merchants around how they’re starting to leverage AI tools in their own workflows and using AI tools to assist them. Chris mentioned now a lot of merchants that previously would’ve had to go to a data analyst and, you know, wait for a few days to get a report back, you can sit your AI tools on top of your data and get an answer kind of immediately.

Now, if we flip that around and think about that from the provider perspective, how are providers, or how should providers be thinking about leveraging those same kind of AI tools to 10X or kind of force multiply the effectiveness of their account managers to stay at least at pace with what the merchants are starting to do?

Lee Clifton: Obviously, it has to be used, but it has to be used in the right way. And I can think of a couple of examples of where, I know when I first started at JP, and as a relationship manager at the time, AI wasn’t really even a thing, definitely where it were today.

And we were, like, building our own kind of QBR templates and our decks and doing our own data analysis and I was the optimization person for auths and I was the optimization person for chargebacks and fraud. And you were like, you learn it all. So when you went, much it was time-consuming, it probably wasn’t the most effective use of your time. But what happened was when you went to a customer, you had to walk through the data, and you was asked a question about it, you knew the answer because you’d done all the digging and the understanding of really what you had to present.

I think, fast forward those years and everything has just moved on so much forward that it, as you said, it’s like really of a click of a button, you can get the answer now. I’ve seen that work in many occasions, but I’ve also seen that fall over where you’re walking through the, a lot of people can present what’s on the slide, I think what you wanna do is, you’re trying to preempt the question might be asked, and if a question is asked around what’s on slide A and you don’t know the answer because you’ve not really digested the data or done the investigation yourself, you don’t build credibility, right, for that.

So I think it’s trying to find that fine line of how to scale the business, provide the insights, to be able to roll out X amount of hundreds and thousands of presentations. But you’ve got to spend the time learning through what you’re gonna present so that you come across as credible, knowing what it is you’re presenting, but also be able to-

Drew Edmond: That’s such an important point, I think, by the way. It really is. I think everyone’s in this world where we’re using these tools and we can go really fast and it can spit out 20 pages in a second, but do you even know what’s on there and you’re sending it off to somebody, or do you actually know what’s happening? And I think that’s so critical.

Chris Uriarte: You guys have brought up some really interesting points here, that is a great segue, I think, into our next topic. Good unscripted kind of segue and some of the things that you brought up. Like, first of all, talking about just the overall kind of maturity and experience of account managers.

Drew, I think the point that you made is very often like sometimes account management is thought of as like an entry-level role in the payments world, right? There’s a lot of junior people that are first put on sort of smaller and medium-sized accounts, right? And then Lee, you talked about kind of this concept of like account managers being outmatched or outwitted sometimes by their client counterparts because, maybe you do, back to your point, Drew, maybe you’ve got somebody who’s only been in this role for two or three years, but they’re sitting across the table from, a payments analyst or payments manager, partnership manager, that’s has 20 years experience in the industry.

And also at the same time, that point that you guys brought up is you’ve got the payments manager at a merchant who wakes up every day thinking about every aspect of that merchant’s business, where the account manager wakes up and is thinking about 30 or 40 different customers of theirs, right?

So there’s a bandwidth issue here, right? But of course, experience takes a lot of time, but I think this raises a lot of questions about how we’re educating our people in the industry, how that works and, what really matters to merchants and to service providers and the teams that are working for them, right?

So this is probably a good time for us to make a shameless plug here that this is a problem that we identified almost 20 years ago, or more than 20 years ago in the industry when we established our Glenbrook education practice. So we’ve almost got 35,000 professionals now who have gone through our public and our private boot camps, and now we’ve evolved that to online learning and all sorts of other things.

But I wish we could, I wish Glenbrook could educate the entire global industry. We don’t have the bandwidth to do that. So I’ll start by, Lee, getting your philosophy on payments education and professional development because I know this is something that you’re really passionate about and you’ve worked on for years. What have you done? Why is this important to you? What are some of the things that the industry needs to think about here?

Lee Clifton: Yeah. It’s a great, it’s a great question, Chris. I think I’ll give you a quick, real-life kind of example of what happened to me, which is why I think we need obviously great companies like Glenbrook and doing what the great stuff that you guys are doing. But I was about four months into the role at Worldpay and I would say up until then, the roles I’d done back in Royal Bank of Scotland, you know, I felt competent very quickly within those roles.

And four months into the role at Worldpay, having a bad day, my boss said, “Lee, what’s wrong?” And I remember like it was like yesterday and I said, “I just don’t get payments.” And one thing that he said to me that I would happily put a bet on it that I’ve probably said this over 500 times, and he turned around and says “Lee, I’ve been doing this job for over 25 years, and there’s still something that hits my desk every week and I don’t know the answer to.” And I’ve said this 10 years and 12 years and 15 years and now 18 years now, that I’d like to think that I know more answers today than I did 18 years ago, but I absolutely don’t know the answer to everything.”

So I think going back to your point around the education, it’s like, it’s critical. It’s absolutely imperative that you have to keep thinking about what’s next in terms of that learning journey. And what I think you need is you need the mix of both internal and external. ‘Cause I think what internal brings to you a lot of the time is it’ll give you a kind of a 101 generic flavor of what payments is, but also a lot of the time you are talking about the products and services and what makes you stand out as a company better than your competitors, which is really important, obviously, right?

But I think then what Glenbrook and others bring to the table is that you are bringing a much more broader landscape of the industry that can then go into the 201s and 301s and whatever number 101s we wanna call it now. And I think that if you can do work on both, I think that helps.

I think events and conferences also become really important, I think have been a big learning curve for me as I’m going through those years, especially in the earlier days. Because most of these events are done in a collaborative way to learn and a very sharing, you know, kind of environment. And so sitting in a room and listening to a large enterprise merchant or even a large provider, and they’re going deep on tokenization for 45 minutes is like super, super, valuable. So I think it’s a combination of all of those things is what you need.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. And I would really stress that it’s so important that we really try to instill this in our folks in our education practice. It’s not just about learning the specifics about how very specific things work. Like, how exactly does a Faster Payments in the UK or RTP or FedNow work? It’s more about understanding the key concepts behind it. Like, how do faster payment systems in general around the world work? ‘Cause there are important sort of fundamental and theoretical aspects that are really important there.

I always think about this quote that I had, when I studied computer science and engineering in school, I had a professor that opened up the first day of class and said there’s this famous quote by Dijkstra, this famous computer scientist that says, “Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes,” right?

It’s not about sort of the tools specifically you’re using. If you’re gonna be a good payments professional, you need to really understand the theory behind everything. And I think getting really deep into payments education through some of these forums you’re talking about is really important and a really important way for our professionals to get there.

Lee Clifton: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t echo it enough, Chris, on your thoughts there. And so I think, it’s one of the reasons why I’ve always tried to be really active outside of the company I work for as well, whether it be MRC or Money 20/20 or MPE because I feel like then opportunities to just go and have a coffee with someone or a sandwich with someone, like you can also learn a lot through those kind of like off the record type of discussions or even like the non-planned, at the elevator.

And, I think, it’s really about being curious, right, I think is really important and making sure that you spend the right amount of time with all the internal stakeholders but you also make sure that you are, like, trying to push the boundary to improve what you do.

‘Cause I think obviously the more, I do think ultimately, we have a cliche, right, but the more you put into it the more you’re gonna get out of it. But if you don’t do that you’re not gonna, I think it’s incredibly hard to go through the ranks of managing larger merchants without putting in that hard graft initially.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah.

Drew Edmond: How do you think about it from like a team level, from your roles, like leadership roles with account management teams underneath you? You can’t send 50 people to MRC every year ’cause that would probably be a little expensive. but it would be great ’cause they have so much great content and great conversations at those conferences, and those I think are a really critical component of what you’re talking about in terms of what are the opportunities to learn, where is the valuable content coming from.

How do you think about kind of the continuous learning journey and directing your teams and the leaders of your teams to develop kind of the framework for that continuous learning? Like what’s the kind of the best approach to do that?

Lee Clifton: Yeah, I think, well, without trying to plug your own business, that’s where, you know, the 35,000 people that have leveraged Glenbrook over the years and the external resources are really useful. There’s also like a ton of influencers now that are like dropping good insights like every single day. Like you could, spend the entire day just reading LinkedIn, right?

Drew Edmond: Yeah.

Lee Clifton: And I think trying to stay on top of things is, hard. Which I also think like a lot of people beat themself up over like not knowing the answer to everything. And, like you say, that we’ve all been fortunate, been doing it a while, but there’s definitely people that I’ve hired over the years or people have moved from one team to another and been doing a job like two minutes, and they feel like they’re bad at their job, and have not had that chance or opportunity to build it.

So I think it’s a lot of large organizations will obviously have the, like an L&D team that to be able to build this out and roll it out at scale, but that’s not available in every single company obviously you work for. But I still think even if you do have that, you still wanna be leveraging like external resources because you wanna make sure that what you are presenting is the right thing and it’s relevant at that stage and it’s not material that’s been just dusted off for the last 10 years.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah.

Drew Edmond: I think that’s just the reality of the situation. Like we, it’s our jobs at Glenbrook obviously to stay on top of these things, and it’s still very hard for us, right?

Chris Uriarte: It’s very hard and I think one of the greatest tricks that we’ve played on the industry is we hear this all the time where people come to us and they go, “How do you guys know so much about this in the industry?” Well, number one, it’s all we do 24/7. But number two, we’ve tricked people, right, to believe that we have the answers to everything, and we don’t.

It’s not about knowing all the details to everything. It’s about knowing how to get to the answer to a question or get to the answer of a problem, right? So for those of you that think Drew and I and all of our other partners just have this encyclopedia memory, a photographic memory of everything that goes on in the payments world, it’s false. It’s not true.

So, I don’t want people to get discouraged because this is such a complex industry, and you look at something and you go, “Oh my God, how have I not heard of this? How do I not understand this?” This is just really a difficult business, right?

And I would also say that the nature of kind of what we’re calling a payment professional has changed dramatically over the years, right? We’re not just talking about folks that are studying payments every day, right? And I remember about 20 years ago, talk about an old Worldpay name, Lee. Ron Khalife, the former chairman and CEO of Worldpay, there was an analyst call, and the analyst asked something about, what payments companies out there are you targeting or competing against? I don’t know exactly what the question was.

And Ron’s answer at that time was, “Well, every company is a payments company,” right? You might not sell services, right? But everybody needs to get paid, right? And I feel that logic kind of also applies to anyone who’s working even on the periphery of the payments industry these days, right? We used to think that only hardcore payments people like payments managers or product managers or payment partnership managers need to understand the true depth of how payments work. But now we’ve got organizations that are sending, they’re sending lawyers, they’re sending finance people and engineers, UI/UX designers, investment bankers show up at our boot camps, and everybody in between.

So do you think that this definition of a payments professional is really expanding? And how does this change who we need to educate and how we do it?

Lee Clifton: So I think the gaps got bigger and likely will continue to get bigger because of all the different functions that you just said that kind of attend everywhere now. And I think, if you go back to 15, 20 years ago, you likely could have just, it’ll be like a small group of people and like they’re the payments people you’d need to lean on.

Where now, it’s touching so many more functions and, if like you’re an engineer, the decisions you make can directly affect payments performance. If you’re in product, you need to understand how different payment methods behave. If you’re in finance, you need to understand reconciliation, cash flow, and costs.

So I feel like every single function, it’s not just the merchant facing people that need to understand what’s happening. It’s everyone behind the scenes that are making the business successful as well. And I think it’s, as you said, you’re not just getting the head of payments or the head of fraud turn up at these events, you are now starting to get other people with different functions. And then on the provider side, you know, even this week, at MRC there was people, lots of technical people there and a few CTOs, which definitely you would not have seen a lot of CTOs at and fraud conferences.

But there was a lot more, I think, understanding and willingness to try and learn what’s going on because they can bring it back and obviously that makes a lot more sense when you bring it back into the business.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, yeah. In our own business, I think of a few years ago we did a workshop exclusively for engineers for one of the largest banks in Canada, and then we did another one last year or the year before on one specific payment system for all the engineers of a UK-based fintech, and their engineering team was based in India at the time. So it’s not even any payment-specific professionals in there. They’re all engineers, working on this stuff, and I think that was a smart move by those companies.

Hey, we’re running a little short on time, but I wanna end with a few quick hits here. And of course, we can’t end any podcast without speaking about agentic. But just very quickly, agentic commerce, has it been a flop? Is it just a matter of time? What’s the current view on it here in November of 2026 as we record this? If we ask you this question in six weeks, you might have a completely different answer, the way that this is changing. But what’s your view right now?

Lee Clifton: No, it’s definitely not been a flop. But is it evolving super quickly? Absolutely. So I think that, did the hype arrive before the behavior? I would say yes, I think technology is moving really quickly. The different kind of AI tools and resources. I think back now of how I would use one of those tools 6 months ago versus today, and it’s just amazing, right, where I think it’s come to.

It still brings me back to, what I said at 10 or so minutes ago, is around it’s like using it in the right way. And I also heard a comment around just kind of AI, which was around, it’s making good people better and it’s making average people worse. I think it’s good because you want, everybody, we all want speed, don’t we? Right? We all want speed and efficiency. But I think humans still know a lot of the context around why you’ve asked that question, within any sort of AI.

And I think ultimately, a lot of it is still gonna be around trust. And I think that’s like probably the biggest thing. What you wanna do is that, am I gonna trust agentic to make a transaction on my behalf? I do, right? But a lot of people won’t. But it’s only a time thing, isn’t it? Because it’s becoming more day to day for everyone.

Chris Uriarte: For sure. Let’s talk quickly about big mergers and acquisitions. I ask this of you ’cause you’ve worked with a lot of big global companies. We’ve had Global Payments take over Worldpay in the last year. Recent news showing that they actually want to bring that now combined entity private seems like consistent movement with that Worldpay asset.

But we had some continued chatter this year over, Stripe taking over PayPal. These types of mega mergers and acquisitions, are they good for the industry? Are they things that we should be concerned about?

Lee Clifton: I don’t think we should be concerned at this stage. I think it is, like, I think it’s happening, and will it continue to happen? Yes. I think you get a lot of, I think when you look on paper of why one company buys another company, you can absolutely join the dots to see why it makes sense. I think the hard thing still is making sure that, does the customer get that benefit? Does it help you your products easier? Can you provide a better customer service? Can you drive performance? Can you drive a stronger ROI for the business? I think if the answer’s yes to all those, then obviously we’ll still see more of them.

I think with the pure nature of the number of new players that are joining in, whether it’s being a gateway, whether it’s being a dispute provider or a fraud provider, will ultimately end up leading where they’re coming into the market and have an exit strategy. And their goal is obviously to try to find someone that will buy them.

So I think we’ll see more and more of like M&A activity, but I think there will, and there’ll be ones you’ll look back in a few years’ time and go, “That was a great deal,” and you’ll look at some of them and you think, “That was a disaster.” So I don’t think that will particularly change, but I think it’s just natural in the day and age of where we are that will continue to happen.

Chris Uriarte: Great. Drew, Lee, with that, we are out of time today. So I want to thank our guests today, Lee Clifton, the COO at Acquired, and of course my co-host, Drew Edmond, and all our loyal Payments on Fire listeners. Until next time, do good work. Thanks for joining us, and have a great day.