Whether you’re new to payments, stepping into the role from another part of the business, or continuing in the role at a new company, your first few months will shape how you’re seen. This article combines practical advice with insights from industry leaders to help you focus on what counts, and position both yourself and your team for long-term impact.
You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. However, you do need to build credibility, secure some early wins, and begin shaping a roadmap for what comes next.
It’s essential to lead with focus from the outset. Payments have evolved from back-office infrastructure into a strategic growth driver. Some businesses have even introduced Chief Payments Officer roles, reflecting the growing centrality of payments leadership to overall strategy.
What you do in the first 90 days will define how you’re perceived, what you influence, and the value you deliver. Get this right, and you position yourself as a key strategic contributor.
Regardless of whether it’s your first payments role, a promotion, or a move to a new company, the question is the same: where should you focus, and how do you build the right foundation?
Think of this as your blueprint. Start with curiosity. Listen. Learn. Build trust. Prioritize what matters, build momentum, and set a vision your team can rally behind.
Days 1–30: Listen, learn, and build trust
Your first month is about gaining context and setting the tone. Payments touch every part of the business – from finance to product, fraud to compliance, and customer experience. Success here comes less from individual brilliance and more from collaboration.
Here’s how to make your first 30 days count:
Meet your payments team straight away
Schedule one-to-ones with direct reports and key collaborators. Ask open questions:
- What excites them?
- What frustrates them
- What would change if they could?
These conversations surface hidden challenges and show your team that their input matters. Making these early connections also provides a clear picture of team dynamics, helping you understand where communication or collaboration may need improvement.
Build cultural awareness
Every organization operates differently. Pay attention to how your company makes decisions, where influence sits, and how information flows. Strategy decks and mission statements can set the baseline, but culture shows up in the day-to-day:
- How people interact
- How quickly they move
- Which priorities carry weight
Ask people what they value, how they work together, and where things get stuck. The better your understanding of internal culture, the better you can position payments as a source of impact and momentum.
Listen across the business
The temptation may be to prove yourself with sweeping changes from day one. Instead, take the time to listen. Meet with stakeholders across the business – product, marketing, sales, finance – and ask what’s working, where frustrations lie, and what they’d change if they could.
As Chris Uriarte, Partner at Glenbrook Partners, puts it:
“Nearly all payments experience is on-the-job training – there’s no degree in payments. You have to be thirsty to learn. Read, read, read. Be observant. Pay attention to how people pay, in your life and around the world. Be curious.”
Curiosity is your most valuable tool. Use it to uncover friction, understand dependencies, and identify where legacy systems may be limiting growth.
Understand your business and its ambitions
Which KPIs matter most to the business? Acceptance rates, chargebacks, cost of acceptance, and customer conversion all matter. Know how success is measured and align your strategy with those outcomes.
Spend time reviewing past performance reports, and connect with finance and strategy leaders to understand how payments KPIs tie directly to the business model. Benchmarking against industry standards can help you spot areas for quick improvement and frame priorities in terms leadership will recognize.
Carmen Caballero, Digital Payments Group Manager at Nestlé, shares:
“Payment performance is one of our key KPIs – particularly acceptance and authorization rates – because we want our customers to have the best experience.”
Do your research before and after day one
Every company has its own story, and the sooner you understand it, the faster you can make an impact. Dig into the business’s history, strategy, and values. Look at how it talks about itself internally and externally. Review past payments performance reports and transaction data to spot trends, inconsistencies, or missed opportunities.
Attend company-wide meetings, listen to earnings calls, and pay attention to the signals – what gets celebrated, what gets questioned, and what gets overlooked. These early observations will sharpen your instincts later, helping you connect the dots faster and position payments where it can deliver the most value.
Strengthen your technical and regulatory knowledge
Understanding the regulatory and technological landscape – PSD2, SCA, identity verification, tokenization – helps you spot risks early and see what opportunities others might miss. You don’t need to be hands-on, but you do need to be credible. When you know what’s possible (and what’s not), you can move faster, challenge blockers, and build trust with compliance and tech teams.
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Days 31–60: Align strategy and relationships
By your second month, the focus shifts from listening to aligning. You’ve built a picture of the payments landscape; now it’s time to connect strategy with relationships and lay the foundations for change.
Align with executive leadership
Payments influence some of the company’s most critical metrics – revenue, margin, working capital, and customer experience. That’s why alignment with executive leadership is essential.
Spend time with the CEO, CFO, and commercial leads to understand how the business makes money, where it’s growing, and what success looks like. This context will sharpen your roadmap and help you prioritize the initiatives that matter most – whether that’s reducing fraud, accelerating settlement, improving conversion, or scaling to new markets.
The closer you tie payments to business goals, the more influence your strategy will carry, and the easier it becomes to secure buy, budget, and backing.
Establish clear success metrics
Without defined metrics, it’s challenging to prioritize, even harder to demonstrate progress, and nearly impossible to influence upstream decisions. Set clear KPIs that link operational performance to commercial outcomes.
That might mean improving acceptance rates, reducing fraud losses, increasing checkout conversion, or lowering the cost of acceptance. What matters is that your metrics reflect business impact and make progress visible.
Ensure that your goals are understood throughout the organization. When leadership sees how payments drive growth, it’s easier to get the backing you need.
Evaluate your vendor ecosystem
Most payments teams rely on third-party providers for everything from processing to fraud prevention. But not every partner will be the right fit for where your business is heading. Early in your tenure, audit your vendor landscape:
- Who are you working with?
- What are you paying for?
- Are they meeting your performance targets and helping you move faster?
The right partners will help you stay ahead by adapting fast, scaling with your needs, and taking complexity off your plate.
Build your business case for change
By now, you’ll have a clearer view of what’s underperforming – whether it’s low acceptance rates, manual processes, or outdated fraud tooling. But identifying issues is only half the job. The other half is turning these insights into a commercial argument for change.
Focus on the metrics that matter: acceptance rates, authorization performance, and fraud ratios all influence core business outcomes: revenue, margin, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency.
As Carmen Caballero puts it:
“The good thing about payments and fraud is that it’s very data-driven. CFOs love data. When you present a strong business case, showing what you could unlock in terms of basis points in the acceptance rate, it becomes super clear. Everything can be translated into money, into revenue.”
Use this data to show stakeholders where performance is falling short, and what’s at stake. Whether you’re proposing new hires, better tooling, or a change in provider, framing the opportunity in commercial terms gives your plan both credibility and momentum.
Strengthen internal alliances
Payments cuts across product, engineering, compliance, marketing, and more. Each of these teams affects how payments are delivered and experienced, but they may not consider it a priority.
That’s why early collaboration matters. The better you understand their goals and pressures, the more effectively you can align and move together.
Strong alliances make everything faster. They clear blockers, create shared ownership, and increase the chances that your strategy will actually be delivered.
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Days 61–90: Deliver quick wins, set long-term direction
By your third month, it’s time to show progress. Small, visible improvements build credibility and give your team and stakeholders confidence that you’re not just setting direction, but delivering on it.
Prioritize changes that move the numbers
By now, you’ve spotted areas where payments could perform better. This is the moment to act on them and show what you can deliver.
Focus on the metrics that matter most: reduce checkout abandonment, improve acceptance rates, tighten fraud controls, accelerate settlement. These are clear signals that payments can increase revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer experience.
Your job at this stage is to show what ‘better’ looks like. Remove friction that blocks transactions, surface small changes that make a big difference, and ensure the impact is visible to your team, peers, and executive sponsors.
Be the customer’s advocate
Now that you’ve had time to dig into systems and strategy, it’s just as important to look outward. A failed transaction, clunky checkout, or delayed refund can damage trust. As you start rolling out changes, evaluate every decision through the eyes of the customer:
As Dr. Lea Siering notes:
“Each country has a go-to payment method. Understanding and adapting to these preferences is key to providing a great customer experience.”
And Andres Treviño, AVP Zone Payments Management at L’Oréal, emphasizes:
“The moment of truth is when your customer clicks check out. If your customer tries to pay and gets declined, 45% of them will say ‘bye’ and you’ve lost the sale. Good customer experience means providing the payment method the customer is looking for. Strong authorization strategy means mapping declines correctly. Reliable fraud prevention means recognizing the good guys from the bad guys.”
Master the fundamentals
As you start to show impact, it’s easy to get pulled toward new features or high-visibility projects. But long-term success depends on strong foundations. Without accuracy, reliability and compliance, even the best optimization efforts will eventually falter.
Use this stage to pressure-test your systems. Are payments being processed correctly? Are fraud rules protecting the business and the customer? Are you staying ahead of regulatory requirements?
As Carmen Caballero at Nestlé, stresses, strong fundamentals start with visibility:
“You need to get data on all the KPIs. Look at the entire funnel, identify the friction points, and determine where you’re losing customers. The wrong fraud configurations can block genuine customers – and lose revenue.”
That visibility should drive smart decisions across the full payments stack, from how you manage risk, to how you support customer preferences.
Andres Treviño at L’Oréal, reinforces the importance of joined-up thinking:
“Good customer experience means providing the payment method the customer is looking for. Strong authorization strategy means mapping declines correctly. Reliable fraud prevention means recognizing the good guys from the bad guys.”
And while you're focused on performance and customer experience, don’t let compliance fall through the cracks. Regulations are evolving fast, and they’re resource-intensive to keep up with. As Dr. Lea Siering puts it:
“A challenge that we’re all facing is the rising complexity of regulation. It eats up a lot of internal resources and requires extensive documentation, checks, and controls.”
Nail the foundations now, and you’ll build the resilience to make better decisions down the line.
Communicate your findings
By this stage, you should be ready to present a clear update to senior stakeholders, or even the board. Demonstrate how payments are driving value, where risks persist, and where your roadmap is already yielding results.
Be transparent, show momentum, and connect actions to outcomes. This is your shift from observer to operator – and it’s where you prove that payments has a role to play in core business strategy.
Set your long-term payments vision
With credibility building and early results in hand, now’s the time to introduce a longer-term view. Your roadmap doesn’t need to be final, but it should show direction, ambition, and alignment with the company’s priorities.
Whether it’s adopting network tokens, investing in fraud detection, or expanding into new markets, this is your moment to show you’re building for scale, not just for quick fixes.
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Beyond the first 90 days: Building for scale and influence
The first 90 days are about earning trust and showing impact. What comes next is about scale. As your credibility grows, so does your responsibility to lead transformation, anticipate change, and shape how payments supports the business long term.
Build a multidisciplinary team
High-performing payments teams are built for change. This means bringing together people from across various disciplines, including technologists, data scientists, fraud analysts, compliance leads, customer experience specialists, and, increasingly, experts in crypto, embedded finance, and AI-driven insights.
You don’t need to hire all at once. But you do need a vision. What capabilities will matter in a year? What structure will support the business as it expands into new markets or launches new products?
As Carmen Caballero, Digital Payments Group Manager at Nestlé, explains:
“There’s a space for everyone: contracts, data analytics, innovation, product management, software engineering. Payments needs people who are curious, adaptable, and thrive in uncertainty.”
The skill mix will evolve. However, the need for adaptability, insight, and cross-functional thinking will continue to grow. If you’re building a long-term roadmap, this is where to start. Our article on building a great payments team outlines the key roles – from analytics to product management – that will define your long-term success.
Create pathways for growth
Leadership is about enabling people to succeed. And in fast-moving multidisciplinary teams like payments, that means offering more than one way to progress.
Too often, advancement only comes through management. However, high-performing teams thrive when they support different growth paths, whether that involves becoming a technical specialist, transitioning into cross-functional roles, or advancing to a team leader. Your job is to help people grow in ways that play to their strengths.
As Chris Uriarte, Partner at Glenbrook Partners, puts it:
“A leader needs to develop a culture of trust and empowerment. You have to trust your team and their ability to execute. Without trust, people become very conservative and cautious, which stifles innovation.”
That trust becomes the foundation for growth. When leaders step back, teams step up.
“When a leader thinks they can do all the heavy lifting themselves, their team generally doesn’t succeed. You really need to empower your people to succeed.”
Creating structured, flexible career paths helps you retain great talent, build institutional knowledge, and develop a function that can scale sustainably.
Position payments as strategic
As Heads of Payments, your role extends beyond managing a function. You’re advocating for the idea that payments can drive business performance, not just support it.
Payments impact some of the company’s most critical outcomes including revenue, customer retention, cost management, even brand perception.
Staying relevant in this role means being curious, forward-thinking, and adaptable.
As Chris Uriarte, Partner at Glenbrook Partners, puts it:
“One of the biggest challenges is regulation. The US is seeing pending rules on open banking, digital wallets, recurring payments, and card fees, while Europe is evolving PSD2 and introducing the Digital Markets Act. Regulation eats resources, but it’s essential to get right.”
That’s the challenge, but also the opportunity. The most effective payments leaders strike a balance between the commercial lens that drives growth and the operational mindset required to deliver change.
As Rasmus Rolén, CEO of Avarda, explains:
“How I believe we need to stay innovative is the fact that we are payment nerds. We always want to keep up on trends, understand each micro piece of the customer journey, and make it better. Then it’s about prioritizing what to start with and being able to course-correct rather quickly because this landscape changes so drastically.”
Lead with confidence and purpose
The first 90 days as a Head of Payments are about proving you know what matters. They’re your chance to listen with intent, align with leadership, deliver visible wins, and show where payments can take the business.
The leaders who stand out are those who treat this phase as more than just a ramp-up. They use it to prove that payments are a driver of growth, customer experience, and long-term advantage.
Your leadership in these early months can set the tone for years to come. Lead the way, and your first 90 days will become the foundation for lasting success.
Ready to strengthen your payments performance? Get the guide: How to maximize your acceptance rates.
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