Payments Unpacked: The Consumerization of Commercial Payments

In this episode of Payments Unpacked, Yuno Chief Business Officer Carol Grunberg sits down with Gloria Colgan, SVP and Global Head of Product, Commercial Solutions at Visa, former Chief Marketing Officer for Velo Payments, and former President of PYMNTS.com. She is also a Founding LP in How Women Invest and an Executive Board Member for How Women Lead.

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Throughout her impressive career in the payments industry, Gloria has helped champion a fundamental shift in the way people think about payments. Now, as Head of Product for Visa Commercial Solutions, she wants to create a future where passwords are a relic of the past, payments teams leverage AI to maximize productivity, and businesses can expand seamlessly across the world. Most importantly, she is helping to drive the "consumerization of commercial payments" - empowering businesses to experience the same fast, frictionless and secure payment experiences consumers enjoy.

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Watch the full episode below as Carol and Gloria explore the major trends reshaping the payments industry, the importance of bringing diversity into the boardroom, and much more.

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Transcript:

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Carol Grunberg:
Hello, everyone, I'm Carol Grunberg, your host and the Chief Business Officer at Yuno. Yuno is a global payment infrastructure platform. We use payment orchestration to make it easy for businesses to accept and manage payments all over the world. And I'm super excited today because my guest is an industry expert and a close friend, Gloria Colgan.

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She is currently the SVP and Global Head of Product for Gloria was also the Chief Marketing Officer for Velo Payments. She was also the president for PYMNTS.com She's also a founding LP in How Women Invest and she's an executive board member for How Women Lead. So that's not enough.

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We first connected to what is now Paytech Women. And we've been business partners. And as I said, most and more importantly, we've been friends for quite a long time, for well over a decade. She's been championing global payments and women-led initiatives for quite a while and really making a huge impact out there in our industry. So Gloria, thank you so much. And as I mentioned, lastly, that you serve on the executive board of How Women Lead and as a founding LP of How Women Invest made huge, huge impact in a lot of things happening across our industry, not just in payments, but in the investment world as well. So it's such a pleasure. Thank you for doing this with me today.

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Gloria Colgan:
Thank you for having me, Carol. It's my pleasure.

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Carol Grunberg:
All right. So should we jump right into it?

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Gloria Colgan:
Yeah, yeah, let's go.

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Carol Grunberg:
All right, so you've been at the forefront of a lot of things within payments. You've been with incumbents, you've been with FinTech, all over the world, quite frankly, done a lot of good domestic stuff, cross-border. So I'm going to start kind of in the earlier days, right? So when you were at Chase, is, and now actually at Visa, which is really the world's first and largest FinTech, right? Before FinTech was FinTech, but there was FinTech, right?

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Gloria Colgan:
Right?

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Carol Grunberg:
And it's the largest FinTech globally. So it's quite phenomenal.

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Gloria Colgan:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

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Carol Grunberg:
So you've seen massive growth of this industry, right? As I said, domestically, internationally. Can you tell me a little bit more about the payment innovations you've seen and the things that really have excited you through the years?

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Gloria Colgan:
Yeah. You know, one of the things that like excites me and you know, I actually could talk about this for like an hour. So have to try to figure out like to focus on like the big ones. But and it's still an innovation today, which is authentication. It's authentication of the individual. So you you know, who you're getting a payment from was who you believe it to be right or the request that you're getting it from is who you believe it to be, which is getting harder now all the time. Fraud, et cetera. And we've come a long way in that authentication process, but there's still further to go. And it's trying to eliminate that ultimate friction. I want to be able to get rid of passwords, know, ubiquitously across the entire ecosystem. And we're on our way for that, to be able to do that with biometrics and really being able to use facial recognition and fingerprints and just things that eliminate all that friction. But it's still a process and it's still something that's been an evolutionary process for sure.

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Carol Grunberg:
You took me back. I love that you said authentication because it is so important and it's been persistent and the need to figure out how to make this easier for everyone. Around 2012, I remember Larry Page at the time was CEO of Google and he gave us the seed and he said, get rid of passwords. Like get rid of passwords. And so, and I think we've all been trying to figure out how to do that. And especially in financial services, as you said, it's so critical.

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Gloria:
Yeah. Yes.

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It's so critical and it there are things we're doing but introduce additional steps, which is why there's new innovations with pass keys as example. And you see pass keys coming up now. We've got our own pass key to really have that be like a one and done. And so you don't have to leave another location. don't, but it, yeah, it's a constant challenge. And it's, it's something that I think you can't stop trying to invest in and trying to like get further.

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You know, the other big one that really happened, I think it started happening in the early 2000s, maybe late 2000s was embedded payments. You know, the classic case of Uber, right? Taking away the friction of having to take out your money and pay for a cab or like when you're done with the ride, you're done with the ride. And the payment is automatically happening in the background. And that's just like continuing to come on even stronger. And so now you're actually starting to see it also within commercial payments, right? So embedding credentials within ERP solutions. So if I'm paying an invoice, I don't have to stop, figure out if it's all like matched up and then go somewhere else to like make the payment. can automatically seamlessly embed a credential in the background and pay say with a Visa account while you're sitting in your ERP. So those kinds of things, again, it's all about eliminating friction.

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But there's so many different elements that you live and work that it takes a while to work this way through the ecosystem. So I think that that's another really fascinating one that's been started for quite a while. But again, it's going to continue to accelerate.

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Carol Grunberg:
Right. And this is one where we're excited. So at Yuno as you know, we're partners and we're trying to solve this together. And so this has been really excited in our journey. And I think, you know, it's interesting you brought up kind of on the ERP side, so on enterprise accounts, which is, well, we work a lot with enterprise clients, but across SMB as well. whatever the form factor is, like you said, whether it's an in-app payment or it's, you know, a QSR and it's a point of sale or any form factor this is, it's continuously evolving and across small businesses and large enterprises, authentication and the ability to eliminate the friction is really important. And so I love what you guys are doing. I love that we're partnering on this as well together. So this is great.

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Gloria Colgan:
And maybe I'll bring this up in the last one. I'm sure we'll probably end up talking about this a lot today in variety forms. But it's you know, it's AI for sure. And the shocking thing is that this has been around for a long time. I think it's kind of starting to become a household word now, right. But you know, the Alexa and Siri and all those that operates off of AI and it's been but even like fraud tools. We've been investing in AI for like over 60 years.

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And so it's just taking on new capabilities and acceleration with like Gen.ai is all together different, which is why I think it's like super exciting. I can't imagine a world where if we hadn't had AI to attack fraud over the past few decades where we would be, right? So I think that those are really game changing kind of applications.

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Carol Grunberg:
In that vein, can you talk a little bit more about what Commercial Solutions is at Visa?

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Gloria Colgan:
People kind of think about like Visa as like when you're like, I'm going out and buying a pair of shoes and I'm using my Visa card to pay. that's when I'm like a consumer, right? A consumer is like doing the shopping. Commercial Solutions is when an entity, any kind of company, whether you're a creator and an influencer, you're running your own company, a sole proprietor, mid-market company or the really large multinationals when they're using a visa product to either make or receive their payments. So our Commercial Solutions is the business that manages all those products that companies use to make their visa payments with. It's pretty big because that's vast. It's an enormous global network going from like a small to a very large, they very different needs, right? So the things that we kind of build and deliver for them are very different. And then of course, we work with partners like Yuno and financial institutions to distribute those products everywhere in the ecosystem. But we are global. It's across all regions. And so it's a pretty complex business. But it's really fun, really fun, really dynamic.

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Carol Grunberg:
It always keeps everyone on their toes, that's for sure. I think that's why we've stayed in this industry for so long. It's always changing, it's great.

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So I think, OK, so one of the fascinating trends is the evolution of digital payments, which you touched on a bit already. And it's moving, you said, eliminating the friction, but the movement towards more convenient, transparent, efficient. And so things like real-time payments, integration of AI for fraud deterrent purposes, et cetera. What do you see as kind of the things that you're

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Do you see changes within regions or do you see kind more of a global innovations that need to transpire?

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Gloria Colgan:
That's a great question. I'd say they're global trends, but they're in different degrees and in different stages. So the big one, again, back on the commercial side is, let say, the consumerization of commercial payments, which is the things that we've grown to be very accustomed to, highly digital, beautiful, elegant interfaces, do everything on my phone, make it easy on my phone. That's taken a long time to be able to use those kinds of tools in your work, your work experience, right? And it's clunky and it's pain in the neck. That's finally like changing. And so all of the learnings that we've built on the consumer side are really starting to be used and adapted and the commercials, including like really large and it's moving pretty fast. So I think that that's going to continue and that's going to be a big one.

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But the other way, mean, coming back to like AI, one of the things that's just a little mind blowing now is as we talk about like, um, agentic commerce and agentic AI. So no longer having to like run models necessarily to like come up with ideas, but there's actual agents that can perform those tasks that a human used to.

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So I used to have to do search myself. And then once I figured out where I something that I liked, then I'd look into it further. And then I'd say, okay, I want to buy it. And then I have to put in all my payment. I mean, now you can have, I mean, this is coming. It's not mass adoption yet. Right. But it's ability to like have parameters on what you're looking for. then let the agent just go look for it and come back and like, say, Hey, you want this? And I say, yes. And then they execute everything behind the scenes. They're like, buy it and it shows up at your door. It's pretty astonishing when you think about it.

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Carol Grunberg:
Yeah, the learning curve and the execution speed is just phenomenal. Yeah.

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Gloria Colgan:
It's unbelievable. And I think that's the other thing is just understanding how rapidly this stuff is moving. I used to think that the smartphone adoption was a fast adoption rate and it's everything that's happening within AI today blows that away.

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Carol Grunberg:
But it's the confluence of everything happening at once, which makes it the perfect environment for all of this coexistence scale. So really interesting.

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Gloria Colgan:
Yes. Yes. That's right. That's right.

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Now, going back to like, whether it's global or regional, I think it's some In a lot of the emerging markets and countries, they can kind of start de novo. Right. And That's sometimes where we see the real innovation happening. Like in Asia Pacific, you're really you're very familiar with that region. What's happening there? And they didn't have a lot of old legacy that they had to like work with. They could just start with a mobile first, digital first application. Unlike the US and the UK, has lot of older, which are very big, very efficient, very digitized, but newness might take a while because you have to like ingrain it across so many different entities. sometimes you see adoption happening faster or that spark of innovation happening faster. The emerging countries and then being adopted by the more mature.

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Carol Grunberg:
True. And I think you're right. think the lack of legacy systems makes it easier to leapfrog, right, is the term we always hear. But I think also the mass population sizes, right? Everyone is able to test things so rapidly because so many people are on your systems. And I think that goes to what you were saying a little bit about enterprise now in commercial solutions, trying to bring the best of the consumer world into the enterprise or commercial world. It is kind of like it gets tested out with the mass populations, right? With lower volume, higher frequency of transactions, higher number. And now it could get applied over to enterprise.

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Gloria Colgan:

That's exactly right. Great point. Great point. It is fascinating. It is fascinating. And it constantly keeps you on your toes to think about not having the walls. And you're like, well, that's my personal life and what I experience. And this is my work life. No, merge those together. What do you like? What works? What doesn't work? And apply it across the board.

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Carol Grunberg:
It's fascinating.

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Right. Interesting. Okay. I'm going to pivot a little bit. A lot of people that are going to be listening, that are listening to this podcast, are payment leaders or either CFOs, product leaders, and they're trying to understand in many ways how to focus their payment strategy. And so based on how quickly consumer behavior evolves, right, in one market you could be doing something and another one, it's a completely different, you know, form of payment.
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So, you know, what is your advice to those leaders trying to do a global payment strategy with kind of localization embedded?

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Gloria Colgan:
Mm, it's hard. But it is. I mean, I think you do really have to keep up with technology, at least in my not be applying it, but understand what's happening, right? Really do try to keep tuned in to trends and applications around the world, you know, Brazil, India, China. Not just UK, if you're in the US, not just UK, US, because a lot of the things that are happening there are things that we will ultimately adopt in the US, right? So it's kind of like constant listening and learning is number one. But then I Try to move as much as you can to configurability.

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Have your core like in your basis from a tech perspective and like the base stack, but then like make things as configurable as you can at the edges so that you're not having to completely rewrite and do something completely custom in a particular market, particularly if you're a global company. Sometimes that's easier said than done, but with today's modern tech and with also an API focus and eliminating like a UI, can get a lot of mileage out of a global solution.

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I mean, we do, we try to make everything globally available. And then just has to be like tweaked locally. And I'd say if you do that thoughtfully, you can probably accomplish a huge majority of what you're trying to build again, with an eye of like where things are going and having like a good vision and strategy state for where you're trying to go. And within that, I'd also say you really, you absolutely have to have a digital strategy, right? You can't do this without a digital strategy.

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Really an interesting statistic to me in it. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but I I'm continually surprised by this is The percent of the population that is digital native. So they grew up with digital devices and technology is now 43 % globally. 43% of either consumers or employees or your clients are digitally native. So, they just won't accept old clunky stuff anymore. So you have to like think about how to either become digitally native, transform or start out that way in the first place.

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Carol Grunberg:
Yeah. And you know, when you think about some regions of Africa where the average population is 18 or Philippines, I think it's 26, right? Indonesia, 28. They're almost a generation younger. The consumers are a generation younger or more than in the US and Europe. So, and these are the ones making purchasing decisions and they're, right, they're digitally native. So that's a completely different way to attract these consumers and to go after them as organizations. So, yeah.

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Two strategies have to coexist at this.

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Gloria Colgan:‍

Yeah. They have to exactly right. They absolutely have to bring them along and yeah, yeah. Again, easier said than done. It makes the job exciting. You have to let you have to really like change and excitement as you're thinking about this, but it's also funny. You know, and I think no matter who you are, you also have to consider and understand your social media impact.

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There's so much happening around social media between like influencers and their ability to ramp quickly that you need to think about everything from whether or not you're a marketer and how you like speak and either use influencers or use social media to get your message out and apply it again in the environment, right? And people's everyday lives to make it practical and understandable. Not just, it's not like the old TV ads like go away, but yeah, that's very, very broad. And now today it's like very micro and you can like have this impact on social media like you never could before. So really think about whether you're going to get affected by social media or you can affect the message that you want to display, whether or not it's product or it's just cultural and brand messaging, right? To like say who and what you are, cause that also matters to the generation of digitally natives.

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Carol Grunberg:
That's right. That's right. And I think what's interesting too is in the same vein as the app downloads and watching what apps get downloaded in which region, as a glimpse of changing consumer behavior, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

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Gloria Colgan:
Yes. Yes. Fascinating.

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Carol Grunberg:
So I'm going go a little bit to the personal side and go into a little bit. Can you share maybe a pivotal moment that really made you realize how much you love this industry, that maybe shaped you in a way or made you realize, you know, payments is why. I mean, you spent such an interesting amount of time across different facets of it though, right?

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From your network days, your financial decisions, to Fintech, to overall payments, what was it that held you on so tightly?

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Gloria Colgan:
I had, that's a, that's a really good question. Sometimes I think about this a lot. I, ironically, I actually started in tech. Um, it's a long time ago, but I started in tech, but I wanted to be more at the time tech was much more of like the order takers, right? And I knew that there was going to be particularly financial services. It was the enablement. I mean, that's all we are is tech, right? We're bits and bytes.  

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We don't build a product that comes off of the manufacturing line or something. We are only bits and bytes. But still, at that point, it was much more of order taking. And I wanted to help influence the impact on the ecosystem. And once I hit commercial payments, commercial gets really technical in a hurry, right? Because you have to understand the data and you understand the transactions and all the pieces that are flowing and where those pieces flow throughout the ecosystem.

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And I think that's what kind of grabbed me into being the payment side as opposed to just the lending side, you know, not the consumer lending balance sheet, APR and like reward-driven side. That's fascinating, but how money really moved. And I actually have an economics background too from like way back in undergrad. And so money movement always fascinated me. And so commercial and the payments side of moving that money is what really like.

tripped it, which is, and this is way back when I was like at Sears and starting to work on commercial. And it was kind of like the ugly stepchild of like, you know, the sexy consumer payments, the consumer lending side. But now all the change is just happening so fast on the payment side, which so it just has gotten even more more exciting.

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Carol Grunberg:
And I think you answered kind of something I was thinking about earlier, which is, what do you wish more people knew about payments? But I think the fact that it's such a behavior change, or it's an insight into behavior, you just kind of answer that.

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Gloria Colgan:
Yes, yeah. You get to see everything of what's happening, the trends, the fraud, know, good and bad, and help influence that to make people's lives better and simpler and easier, right? Take away some of that pain. it's, it is exciting.

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Carol Grunberg"
So I know you're working on solving a lot of things, but there's one more thing you could focus on solving in your spare time, of course. What do you that would be?

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Gloria Colgan:

What would I solve in my spare time? It does come back to like the investment side and women and trying to make things much more ubiquitous. I think it comes to information and kind of equal playing field and equal access to capital. That's if I could just like really solve that it's payments is one, but it's getting that money to the companies that can really change and make a difference on an even playing field, right? And sometimes access gets limited in different ways. And so that's the big net I would crack to just make it like universally acceptable to get access to capital.

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Carol Grunberg:
And so that's some of what you're working on as part of how women invest. Is that right?

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Gloria Colgan:
Right, that's right. Yeah, we created our own, basically created our own fund to say, we'll create a fund to invest in women. And because 2 % of venture cap goes to women entrepreneurs, 2%. And so we're going to change the needle in order to do that, you got to play. And so we're actually in our third fund, which is a great statistic because so many funds, they can't go on to like another round. They're kind of one and done and maybe eke out two, but we're now actually in our third fundraise and a big one. And the more money you have, the more you can invest too and really start to make a difference, right? Because there's one thing to like invest and be able to write a check for a million or two. It's another to be able to write a check for 25, $50 million. And that's where the big guns play. So yeah, it's really exciting.

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And then simultaneously, also, it's, How Women Lead, is getting more women on boards. Again, this comes back to just having like, it gets very passionate for me back to what I do day by day, which is like product and like payments, because if you're gonna build solutions, you're building solutions for everybody. And you need to have diversity of thought, I think, in order to know how to do that well. And so having like multiple voices at the table.

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So that's where comes back to how women lead and having multiple voices, and particularly women at the table on board seats and senior positions to help bring that voice.

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Carol Grunberg:
Yeah, that's great. And I know you're also strategic, so you give an enormous amount of also support, mentorship, network connections to a lot of the companies that you work with. that's much needed as well.

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Gloria Colgan:
Yeah, yes. Well, it also keeps you like abreast of what's happening, right? And on the ground and asking questions, right? And working with all kinds of partners and listening around the globe. It's you can't like stay in one spot in your own little world. Sometimes that's easier. But just like you have to get out and hear what are people doing? What are the pains that they're trying to solve? What are, how are they running their business? What's working, what's not working?

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Carol Grunberg:
And having known you for such a long time, personally and professionally, I think that's one of the things. You're curious. You're just a really curious individual. And that's probably also goes why with why payments and financial services has dipped you. How'd you want for so long? Because it's never the same, right?

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Gloria Colgan:
Yeah. That's great point. That's a great point. That's also why you and I have such incredible conversations because we're always talking. You're that well. But it is. It's always at some points I said that I think that if I could have gotten paid to like stay in college forever, I probably would have like chosen that path because I love learning. And it's like, you know, curious, but then having to apply it, of course. But yeah, it's helpful to always be curious and I am by nature. Sometimes I can make my team a little crazy. But you do, you have to keep stretching yourself.

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Carol Grunberg:

Right. And I think that goes to one of the last questions I had on the personal side, which is, what is one piece of advice you would give to someone that wants to go into this field?

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Gloria Colgan:
It is, I think, always keep your options and opportunities open and being curious, right? Because you don't know what is there to just take you to another level. I've had so many different, even though I've been in payments and financial services, I've taken on so many different roles and different opportunities and feel like allowed myself to be present and take advantage of new big things that were like happening and changing. And so what I do today doesn't look like what I did when I started, but I feel like there was always still a path to get here, but you gotta be open to it and you have to listen and be curious and be open and be willing to listen to opportunities and new things as they come up.

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Carol Grunberg:
That's great. OK. Let me attempt to recap. This has been fantastic. Visa Commercial Solutions is really focused on eliminating friction. You guys have done an enormous on this. You continue to put out new solutions around the world and making it easier for consumers and businesses to do business. And you're really focused on the consumerization of commercial payments. Specifically, Replacing passwords, leveraging pass keys, really just making it very easy and ultimately the most secure possible.

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AI will enable new levels of growth. AI agents are evolving super, super quickly. And so keeping abreast and understanding that and leveraging them is very important. Emerging markets are leading the way in digital innovation because the legacy infrastructure wasn't always there.

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The mass number of the population, young consumers, able to have a huge test bed. Let's see, we've got a note here. You also talked a lot about leveraging social media, influencers to connect with global audiences and build a brand and build affinity in ways that we never did before in marketing, segmenting and really localizing in different ways, leveraging influencers is very important. And diversity of thought is necessary to support innovation. So well put. I think those were your exact words, and I think that's spot on if you need to obviously represent the people that you're trying to write both solutions for. so asking the right questions to always influence your payment or any other strategy you're focused on is really critical.

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Gloria Colgan:
Well done. Great rap.

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Carol Grunberg:
Yeah, thank you. This was fantastic, Gloria. I know I don't have you. Your time is very limited and precious. I appreciate this. This is great.

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Gloria Colgan:
I loved it. I always love our conversations of any nature. And so this is my pleasure.

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Carol Grunberg:
It's great to see you, Gloria. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

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Gloria Colgan:
You too.

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