Globalising payment platforms: Interview with Claire Gates, CCO at PPRO

By Gaia Lamperti

The world of payments is changing quickly and PPRO, the leading global provider of local payments infrastructure, is supporting merchants and payment service providers to keep up with evolving alternative payment methods.

As the former CEO of Paysafe and the ‘Most Influential Women in Payments in 2019’, Claire Gates has recently been appointed Chief Commercial Officer at PPRO. She brings to the role over 25 years of experience in driving strategy for both large financial institutions and start-up disruptors and will be pushing forward new commercial initiatives and partnerships to drive the company’s growth.

IBS Intelligence met Claire Gates to speak with her about her new role, PPRO’s expansion plans and the industry’s new focus on inclusion and diversity.

Let’s start with your personal journey, from the beginning to becoming an industry leader, and what led you to join PPRO. 

It’s sort of fun because I entered financial services by chance to some extent. I studied chemical process engineering, and my first job was actually in research. I did it for a year, and then I worked for my family’s chemical business. I basically started from the bottom and did everything, from working on the production line to sales for a period of 8 years. After that, I did an MBA and ended up working for the management consultancy company Roland Berger for 5 years, but I realised pretty quickly that you either decide you’re going to stay in consultancy or you get out at a certain level, and that’s what I did. Only after that, I started my career in financial services and payments, with my first job at American Express. That has been an excellent opportunity to learn. American Express has a phenomenal value proposition and a depth of understanding of what is key to consumers and merchants alike when it comes to payments. I covered a number of roles at American Express and then eventually got headhunted by Citi; after that, I joined GE, and then over the last 10 years I’ve worked more closely with start-ups. More recently, I served as CEO of Paysafe Pay Later – a Buy Now, Pay Later company – where I was responsible for the growth, expansion and successful exit of Pay Later to Unzer.

As to what drove me to PPRO – simply put it was the proposition, which is very relevant to e-commerce companies globally as it offers integration into their online storefronts to accept any method of payment preferred by consumers, removing the need to build or maintain this infrastructure themselves. PPRO provides the infrastructure to connect to local payment methods (LPMs), maintains that connection, and provides payment companies with the ability to instead use precious resources on what I call the “front-end value add.” And this means making UX optimal and bringing in all the most appropriate products and services relevant to the end consumer.

Working with local payment methods takes a lot of tailoring and implementing different market solutions. How is PPRO mastering that? 

Very, very valid point, actually. We realised that the one-solution-satisfies-everyone model really doesn’t work. We need to have local market expertise, whether from a regulatory, compliance, or technical development perspective because two integrations are never the same. Therefore, having that local team can ensure that we develop the best-in-class integration wherever we are. Whether it’s Latin America, North America, Asia or Europe, we’ve got teams of experts crossing all the multiple functions in each region.

PPRO is expanding quickly, and one of your most recent partnerships was in Indonesia. Which are some of the markets the company is looking at and are growing the fastest in PPRO’s network?

Absolutely. We’re still developing and enhancing our proposition in APAC, and it’s really a relevant opportunity from a development perspective, mainly because of the concentration of super-savvy consumers when it comes to alternative payments or local payment methods. On the other side, Latin America is also an exciting market where we have, and will continue, to invest a lot, but also a complex one to operate in because of regulatory compliance and high levels of fraud risk. We will also be continuing our expansion in EMEA, partnering with NIPL for India and we are still looking at how to address the growing demand in North Africa.

Beyond geographical expansion, what are some other focus areas for PPRO right now? 

One of the things to look out for in our medium-term strategy is that we will be focusing a lot on building incremental features and benefits over and above our direct connection. Many of our customers say they would use PPRO until they get a certain tipping point in volume and then will go directly to the scheme. But ultimately what PPRO is doing is offering much more with our integration than just the connection – so that there will never be a good enough reason to go directly to a scheme. We will be spending the next 12months to 3 years defining the ‘gold standard’ for LPMs and enriching them with additional features. We are working on building out our business intelligence on local payment methods. As we’re already a global player with the most connections and access to local payment knowledge, tapping into our business intelligence is the natural next step.

Claire, I would be curious to hear your views on the industry as a whole in terms of inclusion, diversity and ESG goals. Since your experience spans big corporates to start-ups, could you offer an overview of some of the changes you’ve seen over the years?

Local payment methods themselves have opened up financial services to people who historically didn’t have access to more traditional methods of payment such as cards. Too many demographics were isolated in that way before, especially from the e-commerce sphere. So, that in itself is really important from the inclusivity aspect.

Over the years, I have also seen the diversity element being addressed internally within companies. When I first joined payments, there was a very small number of females. I think that over the last 5 years, that has dramatically changed and, excitingly, we now see way more women and minorities in different areas within the business. Traditionally, women in this sector used to cover HR or marketing functions, but that’s just not the case anymore, and I think organisations have done an excellent job at pushing the agenda and encouraging us to get people engaged in all the areas of the business.

Do you think the FinTech industry is also keeping up by catering to its female customer base, a traditionally overlooked demographic, in a better way?

There are still significant opportunities to cater for the female customer base across FinTech. There just aren’t enough products out there that are really tailored to address the evolving needs of the female consumer. I am also aware that women find it much harder to raise investments for their businesses than males do, although this has improved over the last few years. Sometimes it’s frustrating when traditional financial institutions naturally assume that as a successful woman you want the same products as your male counterpart, or even worse when they bypass you as a consumer. I think they are really missing the opportunity to tap into a powerful, important demographic. We need to support female entrepreneurs focused on developing FinTech products specifically for females.