My Path in Payments: Laura Treude Director of Group Payment

“I always wanted to work at the heart of a business,” says Laura Treude. “And finance combined with marketing, for me, is the heart of a business.” Balancing operations, customer needs, and strategy, her first role at DOUGLAS was a natural fit for Laura, whose meteoric rise through one of Europe’s most successful beauty retailers began with a simple curiosity for numbers and customers. After graduating with a BSc in Economics and Business, Laura became a trainee at DOUGLAS, not knowing she would become its Director of Group Payment less than a decade later.

When Laura joined DOUGLAS in 2015, her role was to analyze the retailer’s strategic initiatives from a P&L point of view. At that time, DOUGLAS was in the process of migrating its payment services provider (PSP), and Laura quickly recognized that payments were not a back-office function but a commercial lever: influencing conversion, expansion, risk, and customer experience.

Less than a year after joining, Laura took on project management of the new PSP structure for nine countries in Europe, overseeing the technological updates that brought tactical advantages for business expansion. She rose through the ranks of leadership roles in online and offline payments until she was promoted to Head of International Payment in 2021, and Director in 2023.

Having spent over a decade in the world of payments, Laura’s perspective is clear: payments are a strategic capability that connects customer expectations, fraud prevention, data, compliance, and commercial performance. Her work today is about building the structures, teams, and decision-making frameworks that allow an international retailer to turn that capability into measurable business value.

Payments are increasingly central to understanding the customer

It’s the tangible influence of technology on human experience that inspires Laura the most. “Payments, for me, combine financial knowledge with customer impact,” she says with excitement, adding that the constant technical innovations mean it’s important to watch the latest trends.

As agentic commerce takes shape, and we greet a world where AI agents make purchases on a customer’s behalf, Laura sees payments data as growing in importance. Speaking generally on the possible workflows of agent-led transactions, she says: “We know there is a risk of losing customers’ interaction with the brand between asking the agent to place an order and the purchase. You can’t really observe customers searching for any type of product or clicking on different things.

“And that’s where payments will still play the biggest role: there needs to be something authorized in the end, right? I can imagine in five years, the payment department will be asked about any kind of CRM touchpoints because that will be where the customer data lies.”

Raising the profile of payments

Although the world of payments can be full of buzzy new topics to get excited about, Laura believes strategic leadership requires discipline as much as curiosity. “One of the disciplines you need to get familiar with is not to go with the hype all the time,” says Laura. “There will always be new things that you can optimize. You should find the right mix between getting innovations live in your online shop but also stabilizing your operational business.”

The position and importance of the payment and fraud teams are not usually well understood in a typical organization, Laura feels. But this means missed opportunities for customer insights, operational efficiency, and additional revenue.

Laura sees her role today as raising the profile of payments, showcasing the positive impact of her payments and fraud teams’ efforts. As with any new idea, the value is in the result. “That is really what it’s about, right? You need to show the outcome of your innovation in figures, and prove that you are crucial for the business.” 

Along the way, Laura has learned the importance of including fraud analysis alongside payments metric optimization. “Some people tend to think that these are two disciplines, but what about combining these disciplines as closely as possible?” she says. One reason is the important link between acceptance rate and changing risk score; it’s extremely difficult to work out the impact of one on the other unless you have the full picture. Even if teams are separate, Laura believes they should be connected as much as possible.

When working across a large organization, Laura knows that not every stakeholder will understand the technical details of payments and fraud. Laura recommends creating transparency without overwhelming the business: establish a shared language, provide reporting that connects activity to outcomes, and keep asking where the team can remove friction or unlock value.

 “Try to generate as much transparency as possible, maybe via reporting or project updates, or just keep asking, ‘is there anything that you need from our side?’”

Project managing innovation

In the early days of her career, Laura witnessed a sudden sea-change in ecommerce. “Before 2015, ecommerce players were focused on creating as much traffic as possible on their website. And in 2016, it changed quite rapidly to ‘How can we convert these customers?’ At that point the whole market realized that maybe payment is one of the crucial factors that decides whether a customer converts at checkout.”

As the industry grappled with this new inflection point, Laura became the Team Lead Online Payment in 2016, and built the first dedicated payment team at DOUGLAS. “We moved to this new setup, and we noticed that we needed more documentation because the payment market was growing so fast – there were so many payment methods coming onto the market.” That meant balancing the rollout of payment upgrades with the documentation and governance needed to make future growth scalable.

Grasping the nuances of customer expectations

Over the years, Laura has noticed the striking variability in consumers’ expectations of payments, depending on the country. In the course of developing regulatory requirements over the years she noticed consumers in Eastern Europe were already familiar with Strong Customer Authentication, even before PSD2 came in. By contrast, German customers can feel more suspicious when there are additional risk checks for online payments. Appreciating these nuances is key to maintaining high conversion alongside industry compliance.

As she took on responsibility for more countries’ payments at DOUGLAS, Laura was promoted to Head of International Payment. Thus began her work to centralize payment, fraud management and digital finance operations. During this time, she learned the importance of adapting payment strategy according to local expectations. 

“The US market as a whole is quite card-heavy. And in Europe it feels like with every country, you need to get used to new payment habits. It’s so heterogenous. There are markets that are quite pay-by-bank heavy, and also markets that prefer to use card.” 

This complexity adds to the challenge and intrigue of Laura’s role in payments leadership. “One of the biggest mistakes you could make is to anticipate that payment preferences of one country can be applied to all others.”

While aligning data from disparate sources is a challenge across the industry, Laura cites the benefits of partnership with dedicated fraud prevention and payments service providers to distill the useful insights from huge amounts of data. When it comes to KPIs, Laura believes in approaching a dataset with a particular aim in mind. “It’s always that we need to focus on what we are looking for. To define one objective, ideally, and then really search for the right lever to achieve that objective.”

Removing friction from the purchase

As Laura took on the role of Director of Group Payment in 2023, she would analyze the differences between online and in-person payments operations. When introducing new payment flows or payment methods online, one only needs to convince the customer to use the new system. However, with in-store payments, the work is in two stages: first to ensure retail staff can use the new system and see the benefit, and secondly to help customers pay in a new way.

Laura draws a parallel between the rise of contactless in-store payments since the pandemic, and the expectations of fast, easy payments online. Just as a customer now expects to tap their card quickly on the POS terminal, the same mindset applies to a purchase online. “That’s how I see payments and conversion: you need to remove friction from the purchase journey. Customers expect payments to be completed in seconds and with as little effort as possible.”

Finding out what customers prefer is not always easy. Consumers rarely ask a merchant for new payment methods, and it’s generally acknowledged that too many options at checkout could cause confusion. 

“Payment for me is always about brand trust, specifically,” emphasizes Laura, who advises collecting customer feedback through dedicated online tools, and A/B testing where possible to understand which payment experiences remove friction without creating confusion.

Developing herself and others

In an industry as niche and complex as payments, colleagues depend on each other to learn how it all works. As many do, Laura experienced an overload of information at the start of her career. “I was trying to get familiar with all these different scheme landscapes, and a four-party system versus a three-party system,” she remembers of her very first staff role at DOUGLAS. “It was quite overwhelming,” she recalls, though she quickly built up her network and held in-depth conversations as often as possible to learn what she needed.

Just as she has learned from others over the years, Laura values the opportunity to build that learning environment for her own team. She first discovered her passion for creating a learning environment during her university studies, when she tutored investment and finance modules. Now, as a leader in the payments space, she sees team development as part of building strategic capability: helping people grow the confidence, judgment and specialist expertise needed to shape the future of payments. 

She has learned that some colleagues will benefit from the responsibility of a large project that’s outside of their comfort zone, while others can learn more effectively from step-by-step opportunities to learn. “I set the scene to let people perform at their best. That’s my biggest goal. And that’s what I like about my job today.” For Laura, strategic leadership is not only about defining the direction of payments. It is also about creating the environment in which people, data, technology, and customer understanding come together to move the business forward.