Software engineer-turned-payments leader Carmen Caballero has always loved technology. Her path in payments began in IT consulting, moved through engineering team leadership, and landed as heading up fraud and payments.
Today, Carmen is leading digital transformation in Nestlé’s payments which, for the next year, involves expansion into Eastern Europe, migrating ecommerce engines, and upgrading point-of-sale software. In this interview, she shares her reflections on the shifting priorities of the payments industry, her approach to digital payments strategy, and advice on raising revenue.
First, let’s look at where it all started.
Beginning with engineering
In her youth, Carmen knew she wanted to study engineering of some kind, and settled on a degree in computer science. She’s always been drawn to the hands-on craft of programming, a passion that arose in the early years after the invention of the World Wide Web.
“I was not the typical nerd,” opines Carmen. “But I really like the software engineering part [of computer science], the creativity, and the ability to work in any company.” Twenty years into her career, she would become Digital Payments Group Manager at Nestlé – but Carmen began her path in payments with a curiosity for computers. She chose to study at La Universidad del País Vasco (EHU) in her hometown of San Sebastián, northern Spain, with one year at the University of Aberdeen.
After graduating, she became a consultant on internet projects at a firm in Madrid, later bought by HP – back in the days when “Internet” was spelled with a capital “I”. Carmen recalls working “crazy hours” but embraced the opportunity to manage web projects and “learn super quick”. After three years, she moved to Dublin, Ireland, to lead a software development team for Citibank (moving back to Spain after one year, for personal reasons).
Over the next decade, Carmen built her experience as a Java engineer, business analyst, and project manager in Barcelona. She then took a career break to raise a child before entering the world of ecommerce.
Tackling fraud with machine learning
Carmen’s first encounter with payments came unexpectedly while she was overseeing software development projects at one of Europe’s largest ecommerce retailers: eDreams ODIGEO.
Under its post-IPO restructure in 2014, eDreams (as it was known at the time) needed a leader on fraud. When Carmen was promoted from IT Technical Team Leader to Head of Fraud, she was surprised to have been chosen, and felt daunted by the task. Yet, her systems-oriented mindset soon proved she was ideal for the position.
At the start, Carmen was in charge of a large team of staff manually reviewing chargebacks flagged as fraudulent. It was a human-heavy workload that operated 24/7. “I thought, ‘Why are we using those super old rules-based systems? This doesn't scale, right? If spam emails were solved many years ago with machine learning models, why can't we do the same here?’”
Rallying a team of data scientists and a third-party machine learning partner, Carmen automated chargeback reviews. “I mainly made myself redundant,” she laughs, adding that she redeployed her team to handle the few chargeback disputes that needed human review.
Foiling fraudsters at Nestlé
As Head of Fraud at eDreams, Carmen needed the freshest findings in fraud trends and techniques. She began attending events run by the Merchant Risk Council (MRC), and found herself discussing the finer points of fraud strategy with a payments leader at Nespresso (Nestlé). “After a few months, this person called me and said, ‘You need to come over here!’ so I started leading on fraud prevention for Nespresso,” Carmen recounts. That was at the end of 2017. Shortly after she joined Nestlé, the head of payments left her role, and Carmen took on payments as well as fraud for the brand.
Over the next four years, Carmen scaled up the payment strategy for Nespresso, and negotiated better contracts for Nestlé’s smaller direct-to-consumer brands, which wouldn’t have had the volume or the resources to achieve this alone.
Driving payment performance with fintech partners
Carmen is excited by the pace of change in the payments industry. Just a few decades ago, digital payments almost always meant credit cards. Now, she notes, consumers want to pay with digital wallets, instant payments, and stablecoins.
“There are over 700 payment methods in Asia, alone,” she explains, noting that it can be difficult to know which ones will become popular and which will fade away. Nespresso takes payments offline and online in 40 countries, which makes for a shifting kaleidoscope of desired payment methods in each market.
“The biggest challenge a large merchant has is keeping up with all the payment methods coming out. Then they need upgrading sooner or later. Merchants need help from partners to do the heavy lifting – it would be impossible if we needed to integrate hundreds of different payment methods.”
Carmen observes that the institutions who move money are changing, too. These newer electronic money institutions pay closer attention to the user experience of making a payment. “We started with the regular banks helping merchants with acquiring consumers’ money. Now you have these fintechs, like Checkout.com, improving performance greatly. So it’s super exciting.”
Carmen is sensitive to the impact of the payment experience on customer satisfaction overall. A failed payment could nudge consumers away from Nestlé. “Payment performance is one of our KPIs: the acceptance rate and the authorization rate,” she explains, “because we want our customers to have the best experience.”
An eye on agentic commerce
Carmen and her team are curious about AI-powered shopping. “We’re looking into agentic commerce, and how we need to prepare ourselves for this.” She reflects that a new marketing approach may be needed for selling on platforms where AI agents make purchases for the consumer. AI agents skip the website phase of shopping, and present products to web users directly within an AI app. This poses new challenges for product visibility.
Carmen opines it’s the merchant who’s ultimately responsible for protecting the consumer against fraudulent spending. That’s one reason agentic commerce poses new questions about authentication, and merchants must consider how they will approach this when it’s a bot at checkout, not a person. With AI agents in the picture, the industry will have to rethink customer profile behavior, and how to build new flows for fraud prevention.
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Last thing you bought online: My favorite Nespresso coffee, what else?
Favorite hobby: Reading
Favorite sport: Tennis
Office or hybrid: Hybrid
Digital wallet or physical wallet: Digital wallet, I don’t carry around my physical wallet anymore, if I can avoid it.
Early bird or night owl: Early bird
In-store or online: Both, but mainly online
You’re the biggest fan of: My dog, who is the happiest being and brings my family immense joy
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Nurturing in-person subscription payments
Many Nespresso customers are subscribers, with coffee pods delivered straight to their homes each month. Of course, subscriptions mean regular, predictable revenue for Nestlé, so it’s a boon to sign up as many new subscribers as possible. As the newly-appointed Digital Payments Group Manager at Nestlé, Carmen began to work on an easy way for coffee lovers to subscribe at the cash register.
Supported by her team, Carmen issued an RFP for a cloud API provider to offer sign-ups for coffee subscriptions in-store at the Nespresso boutiques. “We were able to tokenize the consumer’s card in the payment terminal, and then process recurring payments. The customer could sign up in under two minutes – it was a great project for the business.”
Proving the value of payments to the wider business
Having worked at a variety of business types, Carmen has noticed a variation in payments awareness at the C-suite level. How does she prove the value of payments initiatives to the CFO, for instance?
“For me, it’s getting access to the data. The good thing about payments and fraud is that it’s very data-driven. CFOs love data. When you present a good business case, showing what you could unlock in terms of basis points in the acceptance rate, then it’s super clear. Everything can be translated into money, into revenue.”
Advice on raising payments revenues
Given her decades of experience, Carmen is well positioned to pass on her wisdom to those newer to payments; she presents regularly at MRC conferences, where she benefitted from high-quality training on all things payments and fraud.
And for our readers: “My advice is data, data, data, data. You need to get data on all the KPIs. Look at the whole funnel, identify the friction, and see where you’re losing customers.” She illustrates the importance of careful fraud monitoring with the example that the wrong configurations can block genuine customers – and lose revenue.
Data visibility so you can monitor any issues and spot potential improvements, she reasons. “Your payment service provider can help with that data. You could also ask your partners about benchmarks – how you are performing in that market on different payment methods.” Carmen adds that local acquiring can have a good impact on acceptance rates, too.
Calling future payments leaders
Carmen encourages all kinds of professionals to consider a role in payments. “There’s a space for everyone: we have people creating contracts with partners, those in data analytics, others in innovation, product management, and software engineering.” Overall, she feels those who are curious, able to adapt quickly, and thrive in uncertainty are best suited to the world of payments. “Apart from that, anybody could work in payments. Why not?”
