Payments
High volume, thin margin, and a cost base that grows with exceptions rather than with revenue. The economics reward automation and the regulation demands you can still explain every decision.
Where we get brought in.
Exception and dispute handling
The part of the operation that scales with growth instead of against it, and the part most likely to be automated as-is rather than redesigned.
Merchant and customer onboarding
Where risk appetite, financial crime obligations and commercial pressure meet, and where guardrails have to be testable rather than described in a policy document.
Build versus buy
Routing each prioritised use case honestly: the platform already in the estate, a specialist platform, skills built on an existing AI environment, or a genuinely bespoke build where the judgement is uniquely yours.
Machine readability
Whether a customer's or a partner's AI agent can accurately represent what you offer, without a person in the middle.
What tends to be true here
Payments organisations usually know their unit economics precisely and their exception economics barely at all.
The baseline is where that changes, because it makes visible how much expert time is absorbed by cases the system was never specified to handle.
That number is normally the business case.
CASE STUDYNEEDS A CASE STUDY.
Risk
tbd
Decision
tbd
“
tbd
person title
Outcome
z
y
steps
client servicing cut from 37 steps
a+
x
steps
onboarding cut
from 164 steps
hours saved per client
new clients
per year
“
Payments businesses know their cost per transaction to four decimal places. But ask what an exception costs and the room goes quiet. It’s rare that nobody has looked. Rather, the number sits across three teams and a shared inbox. When we do pin down the figure, the business case usually stops needing to be argued.
Moritz Dinger, Strategy Director
