Worldpay: Seamless UX in Invisible Transactions

Sudev Balakrishnan at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/ZUEYLoyYl-k

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The value drop, and why I'm on this stage

[00:00:00] Good morning everyone. First off, the video that played behind me. The reason I wanted to play that is, it's the first time we reveal this. This is not a snazzy marketing video, this is actually our product roadmap. This is Worldpay's roadmap. We describe this in terms of a concept we call the value drop, and we developed this concept a couple of years ago very simply because it's really hard for us, we all work in product, in UX, it's really hard for us sometimes to empathize about what we do. So we defined a very simple concept. We said, okay, we're not going to talk about Gantt charts and roadmaps and things like that, we're going to talk about value drops. What is a value drop? There was a question. I said a value drop is something that a customer will jump with joy for. So this is our roadmap, this is the format we use internally, and it's stuck.

[00:00:54] Now I'm following a really nice great presentation from Pam and Ricardo talking about responsible AI. I have great hope in AI, by the way. I love it. I think there's definitely opportunity, but we're building a technology at a time when you're cognizant of it. It's a great topic, it was stretching my mind. I can tell you the stage, by the way, has implicit bias, because that side of the stage has less light. As a brown skinned person I have to stay on this side so that the pictures look great.

[00:01:25] So who am I? I run product for Worldpay. I was here five years ago, and I'm both excited and nervous, and I'll tell you in a bit why I'm nervous, because I had a thought that came to my mind as I was invited back. Five years ago I used to work for a company called Stash, which is a consumer facing app that teaches people responsible investing and banking, fairly standard from a design perspective. But for the last two and a half years I've been working in a company called Worldpay. Now, I will get into what Worldpay is in a second, but it's a fairly embedded company, and I said to myself, do I have the right to be here on stage in front of an audience of extremely talented people building user design? And the more I thought about it, I said yes, I do want to come here, I do want to stand here and talk about what I'm doing.

Is Worldpay a great design company?

[00:02:20] So let's start off with this very simple question. Can we just flip to the slides? Okay, perfect. Let's start with a simple question. Who here in the audience thinks that Apple is a great design company? Rory had it, but we don't have to agree with them. How many people think Apple makes great design? All right, fairly. How many people think Netflix makes great design? All right, a slightly lesser number. All right, how many of you think that Worldpay is one of the world's leading design companies? All right, maybe two hands there. I'm not going to take offense, totally okay.

[00:02:54] This presentation is more about convincing you that there is design that happens in payments, but like the best of designs, perhaps you need to observe to see it. So I'll start with a quote. The quote is by a really famous leader in design, Don Norman. He talks about how bad design is easy to spot. We are as humans centered on generally things that are bad. Bad news, that thing grabs attention. Good design is really hard to spot, and the best design can almost be invisible.

Two scenarios to keep in mind

[00:03:32] So let's start with our thesis of saying that great design can go beyond just being observable to actually having you to work extra hard to even observe it. I'm going to pick two scenarios. I want you to imagine yourself in one of the scenarios. You can pick either one.

[00:03:50] The first scenario is that you have been shopping online. Maybe you have a party to go to, maybe there's a wedding, whatever it is, you have a shopping experience going on. You spent hours looking through stuff, you picked the right color, you found the right texture, you're definitely sure that your friends and family are going to think you're the bomb after buying this thing, and you're looking at this button which says check out. Scenario one, you could pick that.

[00:04:22] Scenario two, you've been working your ass off, you've been working really hard, you're tired, you're heading home, you're hungry. And when you're hungry, I used to work in the food business so I know, you're cranky. All you want to do is enter the restaurant on the way home. You ordered something, you're at the till, and you're seeing a little device that says swipe or tap card to finish it. Pick the scenario, and whichever one you pick, keep this in mind as I go through the presentation. I'll come back to it.

Who Worldpay is, and the scale of the transactions

[00:04:53] Let me talk about who Worldpay is. Now we are in Dublin, I spent yesterday with three of our customers here. Worldpay is a little bit well known in the UK. We have customers, but we actually have customers around the world, and most of the places where we operate we are pretty invisible. Sam knows us well because we work together, and we operate in hundreds of countries.

[00:05:19] This slide gives you the data. This is not a slide to tell you that we are big. We are big, we are the world's number one acquirer, we do billions of transactions. But it is to emphasize to you where design comes from, where the thoughts of design come from. So when we talk about transactions, you see we have 300 plus payment methods, over 2 million merchants, that's businesses using us to finish their transactions. And when you think about us, you'll say, okay, most businesses, they talk about maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe 10,000 transactions a day. That's typically the volume that goes through businesses. When you are in Worldpay, we are typically talking about thousands of transactions every second.

[00:06:06] And that's because all of us participate in the digital revolution. You are all going online doing stuff, and we have all kinds of businesses out there. From businesses like in the US where I'm from, you have events like Black Friday, you have Christmas shopping coming up, you have steady state businesses. The world of digital is growing. So when you add up all those businesses, behind them is Worldpay. When that little spinner is going on on your website as you're buying the dress, or whether you're at the shop, you have a spinner and you have an anticipation that spinner has to finish in three seconds. By the way, from a design perspective I think spinners are one of the most hated things in our ecosystem. Over the years I've seen it spin, and no matter how much it spins, how fast it spins, or how delightful the spin is, it's just a bad thing.

[00:06:58] So when you think about Worldpay, think of size and scale. But the more important thing from a design perspective is none of that size and scale matters, because each one of those transactions is typically a human, and that human has a need for an experience to conclude like that. If that's the case, you have to design for that. Most of us participate through life consuming the services we want, making the transactions we want to happen, but we look at payments as saying that just needs to work. We don't want to call our bank back and say, hey, my card got declined, or my credit needs. We don't want to do these things, we want to finish what we were doing. So Worldpay is the largest acquirer but needs to think in terms of singular transactions to make experiences great.

Behind the scenes: the four-party card model

[00:07:47] Let me give you a little bit of background to what happens behind the scenes. I have to do this because payments is not in everyone's space. Now, 80% of the world today works off something called cards. Visa, Mastercard, traditional payment methods that have been run for a long time. They operate in a fairly complicated model. There are at least three, four people who have to dance together to make the dance happen. So it's not like it takes two to dance, it's like it takes four to make the dance.

[00:08:14] Two of the dancers you definitely see. You see the business you're interacting with. You're giving a card out, you're typing a card, you see them. And you know where you got that card from, the bank that determined that you are creditworthy and you will stay within the limits of your spending power. So you know two of them. The other two, Visa and Mastercard, you typically know the logos just because they advertise in every possible place you go, whether it's FIFA, they put their branding out there, but you don't necessarily interact with them on a daily basis. And the last one is someone like Worldpay, an acquirer. We are the ones who make that connectivity. When you have that spinner, that goes to all the remaining three places to say yes, this transaction is okay, let it go through, or it needs a double check. So typical card systems are fairly complex, have to span the four actors. That four person dance has to happen. We call it a four person model for how we do cards.

The 20% that is growing fastest: non-card payments

[00:09:15] Now that's only 80% of the story. The remaining 20% of the story is actually the larger growth explosion in payments. As you travel the world, as we operate in these different countries, we call them non-card payments or alternate payment methods, and they're exploding because of their convenience, the ease factor. They involve quite a few things.

[00:09:39] One of the first ones is wallets. All of us know Apple Pay, Google Pay. You have PayPal, which has been running a long time. You can load up your payment instruments into that and you can use that to pay, and it's become even more convenient now that you can take out your phone and tap it, you can use your watch and tap it. So wallets are a fast growing phenomenon, and it's even faster in places like APAC. There is a leapfrogging of technology happening in payments where they've not adopted cards necessarily. Every region is slightly different. If you picked the US, for example, it's a huge credit card based system. If you picked India, for example, it's actually a QR code based UPI system. So there's huge growth in that area.

[00:10:23] The second one is account to account. Fancy term. All it means is we can reach your bank account in a faster, quicker way, more reliable, and you will be guaranteed the transaction. Examples of this around the world: in Brazil you have Pix, if you went down there. And you have it all over Europe, by the way, open banking is mandated. If it's not yet seen the adoption seen perhaps in India or in Australia or in Brazil, it's coming, because it offers so many benefits. For example, customers like to make sure they stay on top of their finances, and this is more real time. You're not taking a card out.

[00:11:04] And the last one is local schemes, alternates to the schemes. All the governments around the world want to make sure consumers are well protected, have choice, so they create their own schemes. That could be, for example, in Germany you have Girocard, in France you have CB [?]. So from a global perspective, payments is a fascinating, interesting space that's exploding in the non-card ecosystem.

Three trends in payments: choice, speed, usability

[00:11:27] Now this is payments. What are the trends in it? The first trend is the one of choice. All of you, each one of you, loves choice, and you love the things that you love a lot. We all claim to be fairly neutral and balanced in life, but the truth might surprise a lot of you, because when you do A/B testing and look at what you like, you tend to go back to your choices. And people really love choice in payments. If I am in the US, a younger generation might opt for the debit card system. The traditional system of cards is also very sticky, because people love being able to challenge a transaction and being protected by law. Some people like the banking apps, so they like open banking, getting that interaction through.

[00:12:18] And choice is not just in payment method, it's also in payment style. All of you have possibly tried, maybe some of you have tried, BNPL systems. Not a new invention, people had them more than 12, 15 years ago, but of late it exploded. The ability to partition your money and periodically pay in small installments back for a higher value purchase, buy now pay later. So choice is huge, that's a trend. And the customer is always right, is always right, so you have to pick that.

[00:12:50] The second one is speed. If there was one thematic that I've seen as I've spanned industries, whether payments or otherwise, speed just wins. We use it in such a cliche way in so many of our business presentations that we sometimes turn ourselves off and say, oh no, speed wins. But the truth is, it truly does win. No one likes waiting, and that's true of the merchants in the ecosystem, it's true of the schemes, it's true of the banks, it's true of all of you. Speed is something that wins. Let's say assume you have a car that's broken down. How fast do you want the money to come to you to be able to pay that bill, from perhaps an insurance company, after it broke down? You want it instantaneously. So speed wins.

[00:13:34] And the third one is usability. This is a user design phenomenon that's happening across the globe, where you have seen the rise of things like super apps. APAC has a lot of them, but it's true even here. You have Cash App in the US. Out here I'm not sure which one of the challenger banks are going to start, but I know they're all aspiring to build up super apps. It is a common inspiration. Even Elon Musk wants to take X into a super app. And the reason for that is very simple. Convergence, usability. You don't want to spend your time across 50 things, 50 apps, downloading them, fixing them, getting yourself right. So usability is huge, and the trend line is strong in there. So three strong trends in payments that are influencing payments.

The first principle: multi-layer design

[00:14:23] These are trends. Let's get into what does this all mean for design. Design in the B2B2C space, that's us, is not single layer. It's what I personally call the multi-layer design concept, because you have multiple actors, and each layer is not discrete and distinct, it's actually layered to complement each other.

[00:14:53] At the top of the layer is the consumer. The consumer drives design for payments in the biggest proportion, and that's true. You have seen these trends where your consumer preferences have gone even into your office context. So consumers, as I mentioned, things like speed, choice, they drive stuff. I'm not going to pull out my wallet, I'm not going to carry a single card. I'm slightly older, so I still have cash. I keep like a couple of hundred dollars, like an emergency fund, because when I was a little child I was taught that I must carry a little money in my wallet for an emergency. So I still have that. But then I have spoken to people who look at me and say, you carry cash? I said, yes, it's not for the reasons that you think I carry it for, it's more like a psychological security thing to have, that I might suddenly be in a place where I need this money. By the way, this psychology trick does not work for me everywhere, because I'm carrying American dollars in Dublin and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I still have it.

[00:15:59] So if you think about it, consumer choice. But that sits on top of the second layer, the merchant, the business that you're interacting with. They have preferences too in the payment. If you actually get into the nitty gritty of how payments is executed, it all looks like it's all real time and jazzy and stuff, but there's a lot that goes on in terms of, the transaction never finishes in the moment. It actually has a full cycle. Traditionally card systems go over a full day, and that's when the merchant actually gets paid out. So they have a huge amount of interest in not just converting you, converting you fast, but making sure they control the amount of conversion.

[00:16:36] One thing you'll realize if you are in the finance industry is you are always going to walk around with like a bullseye on your back for fraud. We talked about AI responsibility. AI is a huge field, it's a scary field for the financial industry, because we've created all these beautiful walls to protect consumers, by necessity, to make sure you don't have fraud. I can't tell you how many times we get attacks coming in, or people with terminals hacked. You can buy on the dark web, you can buy cards, scary stuff. But the finance industry is probably the pinnacle of where you'll see a convergence of these kinds of technologies. So merchants do not want that to happen to them. If I took a one pound transaction today, I want to reliably be told that I will get one pound in my bank account. It's not like I shipped my good and suddenly I'm out 100 pounds. You don't want that to happen.

[00:17:29] And the third layer, which may not be immediately obvious, is when we offer out our services they tend to go through channels. So you have Toast, I think, in the audience somewhere, they're a partner of ours. What happens is, traditionally services being offered to consumers are packaged in software. So my hair tends to grow messy really fast, so I tend to get a haircut a lot. Ages ago I just walked in. Covid changed everything, you had to schedule yourself into pretty much everything these days. I like it though, I like the spot, I don't like waiting. And now if you go to a hair salon you have scheduling software that gives you an appointment, and payments becomes a part of your scheduling software as opposed to being a discrete separate thing out there.

[00:18:18] So when you think about the third layer, the third layer is software integrators. The third layer could also be the channel through which you operate. A lot of the services that merchants take for payments comes through their banks. We call them the financial institutions, merchant solutions of financial institutions. So when they come through a bank you might have to fine-tune your solution to make sure that the bank's tendencies are also respected. A good example of this: if you're offering lending, financing, the bank might want to have a say in how that experience is offered. The software integrators are the same. When they create their workflow, they want to integrate in the world. So each layer here shapes experience in a way that's appropriate for them, and as a service provider Worldpay has to make sure we have multi-layer design. Our products need to be flexible enough to span these layers and allow them to complement each other.

The second principle: evolutionary thinking

[00:19:17] The second part of design, principle of design, in a company like Worldpay, is what I call evolutionary thinking. Evolutionary thinking in my mind is when you have an asset estate, and I'm using the word asset liberally, let's call it capabilities, that's fairly broad, you start pretty much burying yourself in complexity.

[00:19:43] So taking payments, I put up an example here of a Polish insurer. The person is going to say, I have to take my payments from my customer, I have monthly recurring payments for insurance, I need to be able to take them. That could be cards, the traditional cards you're used to. It could also be wallets, it could be local open banking like systems, BLIK [?] is an example in Poland of a system. So you have a fair amount of capabilities in how you want to take payments, to create that portfolio that's appropriate for a business in Poland.

[00:20:17] Then you want to be able to make payments. So let's say I'm an insurance company, I want to have a differentiator, I want to have the best customer experience, which means if I have a policy paying person and they are in a tough spot, I want to make sure they get their money really fast to handle the emergency they're in. So when you talk of methods in there, we call them push to card. These are like fast rails to send the money to your account instantaneously, in seconds. We have capabilities in that.

[00:20:45] And the last one could be in managing payments. As I said, payments is not about payments alone, it's about guaranteeing, having certainty that that payment transaction is going to conclude. So we have a fair amount of products in being able to tell, for example, our merchants, you do not have to worry about the chargebacks, or we can risk manage it for you, the right profile. We have a fair amount of data we use on our cards to be able to predict them.

[00:21:12] So you have layers, but these layers add complexity. So evolutionary thinking is a concept of moving from capabilities to simplifying your proposition based on your customer. And all of you probably have varying degrees of complexity. The more complex you get, the more important it becomes for you to evolve thinking and simplify it. So you want to reduce it down to exactly the core business. That allows you also to be ready for new needs, by the way. You can get your capabilities into the market better. So this person might have a need for payouts and you're offering that.

The third principle: simplicity

[00:21:53] The third principle, I think we'll be here, the things that stand the test of time. Simplicity. We talk about it a lot. I think Rory earlier on mentioned that bad software, hopefully bad software doesn't stay forever. But simplicity, I think, is one of those principles that just works. Hardest problem in our jobs.

[00:22:18] I'm sure each one of you has tens of what we call stakeholders who are giving you stuff that they want done, stuff added in because it's important. Maybe it's incremental revenue, maybe it's an incremental function, maybe it is, I spent time building this thing, I need to get it out to our customers. Whatever it is, when you deal with an estate of assets, as you increase the size of that, it becomes even more important that you have simplicity in the ecosystem. That comes from pulling back. Pulling back, taking your capabilities down, and perhaps sometimes reducing the size of your estate too. These are conscious choices that you should actively be looking at.

[00:23:06] So when I'm in the payments industry, this is one of the biggest things that I constantly grapple with. We have tech stacks that span the globe. I like to joke inside Worldpay that I learned payments not once but three times, based on the tech systems we have across the world. So I learned payments in the US, I've learned payments in Europe, I've learned payments in the rest of the world, because we have actually tech stacks and tech capabilities in there. So each one of you will probably be in a stage where you talk about, okay, do I look at my ecosystem holistically? And maybe you don't get to do that every day, just because sometimes you do have to get into the details, you have to get your hands dirty. But it's frequently important to give yourself the time to pull back and think of your problem holistically.

The fourth principle: regulation as a differentiator

[00:23:51] The last one is my favorite. Regulation. Payments is one of the most regulated entities. As a product person early on in my career, I used to hate anywhere I used to get things that would be offered up either from a restriction. It felt like handcuffs. The handcuffs are necessary, by the way, so full disclosure, all the regulation is intended to protect the consumers. There's a vast amount of regulation. We operate in so many countries, under US jurisdiction, UK, Europe, Singapore. We have lots and lots of regulations put on us to ensure that money movement around the world fits local government needs, so money doesn't flow into perhaps people who shouldn't be getting their money. You have sanction screening, you have transaction screening, fraudulent actors. There's a lot of regulation for protecting consumers. We still want to be able to make it work for you. In fact, many times I wonder how do we actually get this all to work, because of the amount of inspection that needs to happen as money moves.

[00:25:01] But I realized after working in payments that my way of thinking was outdated. Regulation is not a constraint. Regulation can be a differentiator. I'll let you think about that for a minute, because you all possibly work with those teams that are, we call them legal, compliance, we bracket humans into groups and give them names. They are a differentiator, and they're a differentiator because, especially if your field is an evolving field, if it's a field which is constantly blossoming and changing, what happens is whenever a regulatory change or system happens, and if you are not in a place where your product or your service can adapt to it quickly enough, you are going to fall behind very quickly. Because each one of these regulations, I can tell you, to play catch up can be not weeks. We talked about a two week agile sprint. I love how all of you think so optimistically about your ecosystems. I can tell you in the regulation world it's typically months to years sometimes, when things get moved forward into something that can be actioned.

[00:26:09] So when you think about regulation in design, regulation, the way you build it, can create the possibility for you to actually leapfrog whenever the market evolves and you catch up. So if you are routing transactions through it, if you're creating user friendly notifications that follow the full scope of data and complexity that is needed to catch user preferences. So those are the four principles that apply in Worldpay today.

Back to the two scenarios

[00:26:38] I honestly don't know how I'm doing on time, but let's get to where I wanted to get to, which was to summarize. Now I want to go back to that hypothetical scenario that I played out. You had to pick one. Hopefully it gives you that minute to reflect that, wait a second, perhaps I did not think of what happens as I'm doing this particular thing. When that card is tapped, when my phone is tapped, or I hit that click button and the spinner happens. But you realize that there's a lot of emotion in us as we interact with transactions, and our focus is not perhaps on the payment or the money, which it should not be. It's on the experience that the business gives us. It's about the delight on the service that will be consumed.

[00:27:29] And pulling back a little bit and observing is something that will help our design skills, that will increase our design skills. So I did ask the question if Worldpay was one of the world's leading companies, and I can guarantee you that almost all of you on a daily basis, if not a weekly basis, are interacting with Worldpay. Perhaps you didn't realize it. Perhaps you just assume that when you go up at the screen and you tap it. And I'll tell you, full disclosure, I'm in the same camp, because still, I joined this company about two and a half years ago, I just assumed it. But now I look a little weird when I go into shops, because I started examining their little device. I look at the names on it, and frequently the business owner is like, I don't know what this guy is, odd for sure. So that's my behavior today.

[00:28:16] So hopefully you saw the thesis of, there are fields which offer extraordinary design, and design is not a new field, but there are fields which have been creating simplicity for you over time. They are fields from which you can take away several takeaways, key one of which is the nature to observe. That gives you a natural better design.

[00:28:40] The second bit that I walked you through was the principles of design. I'll recap them back to you. Multi-layer design, when you're working in an ecosystem which has many actors and they all need to work together, they layer, they complement each other. Evolutionary thinking, the ability to go from features. This is the hardest one for me personally. People say, yesterday, we're a product person, and I'm like, what did you define was a product? It's weird to have a job title that you can't really define well, that a school doesn't give you a degree for. It is the hardest job I have. By the way, on that note, my official title, including on LinkedIn, is not chief product officer, it's product intern. I changed it just for my own benefit.

[00:29:27] But the reason is, when you think of a product, everyone defines it slightly differently. There are physical products, there are capabilities. But the second principle of design, to evolve to evolutionary design, is to look at services. You're all in the business of offering services of some kind. I think the best way to think on a daily basis is to think like a small business person, because they have a high degree of service concept and excellence of service concept, and they realize that if they do not offer that service really well, they'll be out of business. That's where I go to. So I'm going to wind up. Thank you everyone for your time, hopefully this was insightful in some way.

Q&A

[00:30:02] Host: So a lot of what you design is behind the scenes. What are the biggest challenges you have designing a process that people usually don't see?

[00:30:11] Sudev: The biggest problem we have is, as all of us use the term customer centricity, which is putting the customer in the middle, and that for us involves being able to take our design, our product teams and get them in front of the customer to see consumer level experiences. That would be the biggest one in my mind, because we have layers, and we sometimes have to partner with the layers to get in front of the consumers.

[00:30:33] Host: Fantastic. Thank you for answering this question, and thank you to Sudev, everyone. Round of applause.