Christy Johnson, Chief Product Officer at Versapay talks about the latest trends defining the current payments landscape while sharing her vision for Versapay’s product roadmap in this short chat with Global Fintech Series:
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Hi Christy, tell us about yourself and your experience in the tech market, what are you most looking forward to in your role as CPO at Versapay?
I feel lucky to say that I have worked in product and technology my entire career. I didn’t know what product management was in college or my early 20s, but I am very grateful to have fallen forward into it and worked on great teams to solve interesting problems. As a D1 NCAA track and field athlete for four years studying business at the University of North Carolina, I learned that a strong sense of discipline, teamwork and grit is needed for a career in technology.
While my undergraduate business school peers were going into management consulting or investment banking, I started my career with EMC2 in technology consulting focused on financial services. While at EMC2, I learned the art of rearchitecting experiences, interviewing users and building complex systems. Product management had not yet emerged as the role we know today, but I found that there was a need for some who could translate what the business was trying to achieve, what users said they needed and what was technically sound.
Later I joined Ernst & Young (EY) via acquihire to start their financial services digital practice. It was a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment to build out the new business line while enabling our clients in their digital transformation and product endeavors globally. Then I became a product leader at Capital One Consumer Retail Bank in payments experiences and served on the Early Warning Advisory Committee for Zelle. I then led the Growth product management team responsible for delivering new savings products, growth experiments and acquisition experiences.
I came to Versapay because the market has untapped opportunities; the company has a great team of people who really care about their customers and a comprehensive suite of products to facilitate invoice-to-cash. The AR automation market is continuing to grow, and according to several studies, most AP and AR teams plan to expand their usage of automation software in the next few years. What I am most looking forward to in my role at Versapay is having a hand in helping businesses protect against tough times by improving cash flow and contributing to their overall growth. We can do this by relentlessly focusing on AR teams and making their customers’ jobs easier by eliminating friction in the tools they use daily. I am also excited about seeing us take our products to market through new channels that give us further scale.
What are some of the top AR and B2B payment trends from the global fintech market that have piqued your interest of late?
Business resiliency and the ability to accelerate the Invoice-to-Cash process has never as critical as now. COVID-19 was a real-life example of this: cash didn’t flow through the ‘system’ with checks literally sitting on desks in empty offices waiting to be cashed. Yet, the move from offline to online payments in business-to-business is still check-heavy due to several reasons ranging from inertia to cost. I am interested to see how customers’ demand for choice and options that they are used to in daily consumer life extends to business context and how that accelerates further digital payment adoption – virtual cards, mobile point of sale, and eWallets are all on my mind. Virtual cards are a good example of this because adoption has been slower than expected; 80% of buyers favor virtual cards but use them for just 2% of their AP transactions. Willingness of supplier acceptance and the understanding of the value proposition are hurdles to overcome as well as the perception of fees being higher than ACH/check fees (because they are not).
In getting to know Versapay’s customers, I’ve become very aware of the desire for more efficiencies and collaboration in the collections process to improve customer relationships and protect their businesses. Collections teams constantly need to know who to chase and when, often relying on complicated manual processes and spreadsheets to enable their workflows. Poor collections processes drive up Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and put constant pressure on working capital. Other areas of fintech, and frankly outside of fintech—like CRM—have examined similar workflows and successfully solved for infusing data-driven automation to move away from traditional manual, multi-tool processes to unburden time in knowing who to call first and what to do when. The future of collections is enabling teams to be more efficient, tailoring and customizing dunning strategies for each customer, optimizing their propensity to pay and improving overall financial performance.
One more force driving what’s next in AR and B2B payments that’s on my mind is Generation Z. Gen Z employees and customers will shape the products they use and what they expect from them. We saw this in consumer banking, and I expect this to play a role in business-to-business payments. Gen Z-ers were born into a digital world with smartphones and expect fast, seamless experiences. When encountering friction, they have the highest checkout abandonment rate, which is significant for Versapay because Gen Z will comprise 32% of the workforce within the next couple of years. With this will come expectations of a fast, completely digital, and frictionless experience that will extend beyond their consumer experiences into business-to-business payments.
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Can you share a few observations on how AI has been redefining the global payments landscape?
AI is having and will continue to have a big impact across global payments because there is still a lot of user pain navigating and connecting the legacy ecosystem (ERPs; payment processors; financial institutions; spreadsheets). This can be addressed by better use of data by using AI as a layer between systems, and even between people and your payment data, as a new more efficient way of getting the answers you want. You can think of it as a different way to interact with your data. Rather than clicking around and looking at information, you’re going to be able to interact with AI more like a person than a platform. For example, instead of manually pulling and running analysis on your customer base every day to prioritize where to start, you could ask an AI-powered tool question and get faster answers. The potential power of this is very exciting when you think about the currently complicated web of moving, reconciling and optimizing money. Simply having a layer of AI in the mix to figure things out with very little oversight results in effectively extending the life of legacy systems, including legacy ERP systems or various payment networks, bridging the rate of change.
While AI is a game-changer for our customers, it’s a lever for scaling our business. We have a highly specialized team that’s identifying hypotheses; validating impact and guiding the way to where and when we deploy AI—from underwriting decisions; internal workflows and knowledge sharing; value added customer experiences—excited to pass the benefits on to our customers.
At the same time, banks and fintechs are having to move fast to fight cybercriminals who are using their own AI tools to social engineer attacks on customers and process fraudulent transactions. What this means for Versapay is that we need to keep an eye on the ball and not let up in using AI and ML-based tools to enforce identity verification and buyer authentication to mitigate risk and prevent losses. However, it is a balance. I’ve learned from consumer experience is that you must do this in a tactful, transparent way that does not get in the way of the sale or payment. Trustworthy efficiency is the key.
What precautionary measures do you think industry leaders should take when driving product development in the payments landscape with AI?
It starts with having a user problem first mentality: For us, we are trying to really focus on the top user problems that can be solved with different data and AI that we should prioritize first. The top pain points are around how do I better find information and leverage the knowledge archive? How do I create focus and reduce the noise? How do I know which customer is best to reach out to? We want to put our energy towards solving the things that we hear repeatedly from customers. Then hopefully we will have opportunistic things that are delightful to bring into the customer experience and provide more value to AR teams.
Controls around the data integrity and usage: While AI introduces very powerful capabilities in simplifying complex workflows, it also introduces data access across various systems and data stores. Anytime you are making a recommendation or a decision using data, you need to ensure that there are controls in place to make sure that the data is coming from (or going to) a trusted, secure place, it’s not sensitive information and have measures to prevent bias. These controls can’t be an afterthought and really need to be built up front in the use case exploration. This is particularly true in financial services and payments where it impacts financial access or financial transactions.
Balance time to market and getting the user experience 100% right: We know that it is important to get users that value quickly and often we learn the most by putting products in customers’ hands; however, the boundaries around AI are still being tested. Often as a Product Manager, you obsess over the detail and want to get the product as perfect as you can. However, with data and AI powered products, you must be okay with it not being 100% right in order to get it out there in a safe way and get more user data input. So, while I said earlier, I have a passion for running, when it comes to ushering in new features, let alone new technologies, those of us at the front of the pack must constantly balance speed with quality—not bringing progress to a halt but finding ways to scale new ideas and new experiences with the utmost integrity.
Tell us a little about the product vision you have for Versapay? Do you rely on product-led growth to achieve end goals in a CPO role?
Businesses are central to our society, and they require working capital. The cycles of cash flow can sometimes mean the difference between a business in distress or one that is thriving. This is why, at Versapay, we believe getting paid for the goods or services you provide shouldn’t be a hardship… it should be easy.
While 96% of executives agree that their AR department has work to do to digitize, Accounts Receivable teams have tolerated pain because they must bring money into their business. And the pain is real: accepting late payments, facing increasing DSO, inability to predict cash flow, unable to gauge buyer sentiment, credit default, and difficulty in recognizing/matching remittance.
We want our customers to get paid and get paid quickly. Embracing technical trends and deploying advancements not only streamline operations, but also empower businesses with the insights and tools they need to make informed decisions and maintain healthy cash flows. We don’t just do payments, and software without the ability to move the money isn’t as effective. The real value is automating and reconciling; it is what you wrap around the payment, how to leverage the data around the payment to optimize the flow of money by reducing friction across the many invoice-to-cash handoffs.
Versapay’s commitment is to provide our customers with the most innovative solutions that drive growth and efficiency. Our vision is that the cloud will run the business, a future where we empower AR teams to collect payments on their terms, purpose-built for their business and technological readiness. Some will want little to no manual intervention from the start, but others may be earlier in digital transformation or digital trust, and we can take strides together to modernize. Ultimately, we want AR teams to shift focus to the things that matter most – overall AR health, adapting collection strategies and managing their customer relationships. We know we won’t be experts at everything and place deep value in partnerships to meet customers where they are and unlock growth. To achieve end business goals, I know that growth can come from several strategies, and it is about finding the right market fit and timing. For example, right now we are focused on product experience optimizations and automating our own processes, adding new products to the suite to serve customers’ evolving needs, and market expansion. We know we won’t be experts at everything and place deep value in partnerships to meet customers where they are and unlock growth. We would like to explore ways to incorporate LLMs which are very effective tools for minimizing heavy labor tasks on the path to scale.
As the digital B2B payments segment evolves, what do you feel businesses should be taking into account as they invest in new methods and systems?
There are practical details to take into account—like local and global regulatory changes—but for me, the crux is taking your current and future supplier and buyer into account. Be infinitely curious about the people your business serves, not just in their professional roles but in their daily lives. Work-life existence is so blurred today that it’s hard to expect anyone to have preferences from work that don’t influence their personal life and vice versa. This reminds me of one of my first customer interviews where the team leader passionately said they just wanted to stop having to do these collections tasks at night and shared how tired they were. Put that in your mind then ask, how can we help business owners and their teams to stop working on invoice-to-cash activities at night? Where are target customers and their customers changing or needing to change payment behaviors? How would this new method fit into their existing processes? What is hard today? What might they no longer have patience for tomorrow?
Can you share five thoughts on the future of fintech and digital payments?
All levels to playing field: We believe that AI will level the playing field by allowing smaller players with less funding to compete with larger players by allowing for the delivery of promises and simplification of payments. Historically, you had Stripe and Square displace based on large amounts of funding and a tech led strategy. AI reduces the funding requirement such that the leveraging of technology is table stakes. For example, historically it would take a significant investment to develop a model and system to handle least cost routing. Now, we can build that in a week with a few subject matter experts and an AI resource.
Realizing the value of B2B financial networks: In 4-7 years, we will see real value provided to buyers and suppliers on the network because we will have more data to create profiles of participants. Like consumer payment networks, B2B will be able to offer instant payments and security. A step beyond that is the ability for the network to value added services such as payment terms and lending.
Tailored User Experience in B2B Finance: Businesses and their users in the B2B payments ecosystem will demand better user experiences that are more akin to what they experience every day in consumer apps. We believe that the opportunity is in creating tailored, role-driven experiences that serve up what the AR department or buyer needs are.
Power of Choice in Payments: Businesses will need to offer more payment choices to meet buyer preferences and configurable payment customizations to keep up with fees, regulations changes and surcharges. We predict that payment options will become a need and differentiator for suppliers with their buyers.
Real-Time payments adoption: The financial industry will experience a significant shift towards real-time payments. This trend, marked by faster payment processing, will revolutionize cash flow management and operational efficiency. Traditional methods like ACH and checks will diminish in importance.
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[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
For growing businesses that need to accomplish more with less, Versapay’s Accounts Receivable Efficiency Suite simplifies the invoice-to-cash process by automating invoicing, facilitating B2B payments, and streamlining cash application with AI. Owned by Great Hill Partners, Versapay’s employee base spans the U.S. and Canada with offices in Atlanta and Miami. With 10,000 customers and 5M+ companies transacting, Versapay facilitates 110M+ transactions and $170B+ in payments volume annually.
Christy brings to Versapay over a decade of experience in product strategy, product design and end-to-end product delivery, with specialized experience in payments and financial services. Christy has been a successful product transformation agent at Capital One, Ernst & Young, and Dell. Most recently, Christy served as the Growth Product Leader at Capital One, where she led a large product team responsible for the bank’s strategic acquisitions, onboarding & deposit growth product experiences agenda. Prior to Capital One, Christy worked as a Senior Manager at Ernst & Young digital consulting, where she was part of the founding team for their digital business line. Outside of work, Christy spends a lot of her time with her husband and son, and their Labradoodle. In what spare time she has left, she enjoys running, skiing, and cheering for her alma mater, the University of North Carolina.
