Navigating the Evolving Payment Landscape

Laura Treude, Director of Group Payment at DOUGLAS

Laura Treude, Director of Group Payment at DOUGLAS

Laura Treude oversees payment operations across all countries and channels in DOUGLAS. With a background in marketing and finance, she has developed a strategic vision for seamless transactions and state-of-the-art payment solutions. Passionate about enhancing customer experience and driving financial performance, Laura's team optimises payment features, credit scoring, fraud prevention and cash management, significantly contributing to DOUGLAS's global success in the beauty retail industry.

Through this article, Laura Treude shares her insights on her journey from marketing and finance to overseeing payment operations. She highlights the importance of integrating AI and machine learning in credit scoring and fraud prevention. Laura stresses the need for a holistic approach to payment management, encompassing interdisciplinary knowledge and adapting to regulatory changes.

How did your career path lead you to your current role at DOUGLAS?

Many people say there is no straight option to start your career in payments. I would fully agree with this. My first career steps, though, took place exactly in a surrounding that from today’s point of view, prepared me perfectly for my payment career: marketing and finance.

Without knowing that my way would guide me in the direction where I am today (as also payment management simply was not popular at all about one decade ago), I was convinced, however, that there exists something somewhere where I can combine the skills of understanding customers’ behaviour and having a good feeling for financials and their interconnections and patterns.

Having said this, I did my first career steps in a private bank but was responsible for e.g. ideas to stimulate local retail structures more or less at the same time.

What are your primary roles and responsibilities as the Director of Group Payment at DOUGLAS?

In the year 2015, I started a traineeship with a focus on finance and project management at DOUGLAS. Up from then, I have been climbing up the classical career ladder, I would say: I got my first own team in 2016 in the field of online payment with a strong focus on technical IT processes: In 2021, I took over all the so-called payment “satellites” (credit scoring, fraud prevention, accounting interfaces, etc.) for DOUGLAS international online shops and had the chance to enrich my remit by our instore business (e.g. cash logistics, terminal management) last year.

What are the most prevalent challenges in your sector? How do you attempt to mitigate them?

The payment sector is distinguished by its speed and inherent steadily needed changes. That is basically the source for the biggest challenge: Being as curious and thinking as disruptively as necessary but at the same being time as data-driven and cautious as needed to make the right decisions of going for payment innovations or not. So do not miss any promising window of opportunity but do not risk any too high bad investments. There are so many buzzwords that you can find on the payment market: AI (as everywhere), open banking, decentralised finance, cryptocurrencies and hundreds more. You must be very careful to not get lost in this jungle of possibilities.

“To navigate the complexities of the payment management sector, it's crucial to see the big picture, understand the interconnections of your processes and ensure your teams are strategically aligned to manage payments holistically.”

When it comes to operational business, I think that fraud prevention, securing stable interfaces and reconciliation are still the topics that you normally spend the most time on. This depends on the payment mix you offer to your customers, the size of the company, the products you sell (in case of retailers) and, of course, your capabilities.

How have modern technologies influenced the payment management landscape in recent years? Can you share specific examples of technologies that have had a significant impact?

The answer to this question is likely the same for many industries: machine learning and artificial intelligence. Using such technology in fields of e.g. credit scoring and fraud prevention but also observation of customers’ preferences for different payment options makes life easier a lot.

The rise in the quality of interfaces has also made a difference: Introducing a state-of-the-art API to enable a payment feature today is much less time-consuming than a few years ago. That, furthermore, has made possible a lot of forms of consolidations that we find today: gateways by which you can channel the connection of payment’s components through one interface–no matter if we speak about payment features, authorisation requests or reconciliation files.

One thing you must not forget about is the nature of the high regulatory standard of payment–what, I think, differentiates this field from other innovative areas. Every one of these new technologies normally comes along with a risk of misuse, which means in payment language misuse of data and loss of money. For this reason, there is normally no innovation coming onto the payment market without an innovation also of the legal basis (e.g. PSD2, credit consumer directive, the whole payment licensing system, etc.).

What future do you envision for payment management in the ever-evolving business landscape? How are you preparing DOUGLAS to embrace and leverage this future?

Payment management has always been a massively interdisciplinary task, lasting from IT over legal to marketing and financial aspects. This fact will be strengthened in future by innovations we just talked about. A well-versed person working in the payment space will need to get trained more and more in technical fields, not only but also to understand what is going on in the daily business when looking at all the different data flows through interfaces. But the fields of payment management are wide: For me, disciplines like fraud prevention or cash logistics have always been a part of it. So, it depends on what exactly you are responsible for. But in the end, the world will get more and more digital and, therefore, physical things like coins and notes are already continuously vanishing and even if they do not disappear completely, there will be ways to manage them via virtual systems. In this sense, it will be crucial to not lean back and trust in one skill you have, e.g. fraud detection or classical feature management. Payment managers should get familiar with the term payment as holistically as possible. That is the reason why the organisational home of payment is often located in product management nowadays–sometimes maybe with a too heavy technical focus as it is still all about money.

All these thoughts are the foundation for my department structure and how I manage my team and all topics at DOUGLAS.

What advice would you give to other senior leaders and CXOs on navigating the complexities of the payment management sector?

Give yourself to chance to see the big picture. With that, I do not mean all great innovations rushing onto the market today. I rather mean the interconnection of topics that I have just mentioned in the prior question. I still see a lot of companies where the fraud team is located somewhere in finance or customer service whereas the so-called payment team sits in IT or vice versa. This cuts the full view enormously. To only mention a few examples: Know how your fraud tools interfere with your authorisation and capture processes. Know how new payment methods change your existing shares. Know how these shares are affected by your acceptance rates. Speaking simply, know how to manage your payments as a whole. And last but not least, of course, keep track of your major provider contracts. And a personal wish, give payment the space in your company that it–data-driven wise - deserves and your people the chance to grow in these fields as the payment niche still suffers from a lack of talent.