The Executive Interview Series provides readers exclusive insights from movers and shakers in the payments industry. The Payments Industry is under continuous transformation. This series offers diverse perspectives on everything from strategy to payments technology and the industry’s future.
In this interview, TSG Marketing team member Rachel Hartley spoke with Klas Bäck, CEO and Co-Founder of Pagos Solutions, to discuss the origins of Pagos and its mission to offer comprehensive solutions to better manage payment flows and promote data-driven decision-making.
Klas Bäck is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pagos Solutions. With prior roles at PayPal and Braintree, Klas has comprehensive product strategy, business development, and international operations expertise. At Pagos, he focuses on building API-driven solutions that provide companies with the necessary payments data and insights to optimize their operations.
Q: Rachel H.
Describe the origins of Pagos. What inspired the need for a company like Pagos in the payments space?
A: Klas B.
Managing payments flows is increasingly complex for many companies. At the same time, most struggle with the type of data-driven decision-making needed to optimize and execute efficient operations while enabling customers to transact and establish successful long-term relationships with a brand. We have repeatedly seen that these challenges lead to lost revenue and higher cost. Pagos was formed to help companies with data-driven insight, monitoring, and tools to take control of their payment stack while leveraging commerce data and making it relevant to how they run their business. All without having to change their payment processing partners.
Q: Rachel H.
How have your prior professional experiences at Braintree and PayPal shaped how you approach your work at Pagos?
A: Klas B.
Leading the payment strategy and international operations for years made it plain that almost all merchants need help with payment optimization and execution. Meanwhile, the industry has historically made “doing better or optimizing” about who their vendors are (switch and all will be well, etc.). The reality is that the most significant opportunity where companies can do better is often in their own infrastructure and strategy. Increasingly more and more companies are also making payments part of their core business strategy (as an example, make payments easy, or “disappear” from the flows, etc.).
Q: Rachel H.
What is the mission of Pagos, and how does your technology benefit businesses?
A: Klas B.
Our goal is to help our customers drive more revenue, reduce cost, and gain valuable business understanding with our easy-to-use no or low-code solutions to drive insight, monitor, and provide tools to better execute on their current payment stack. In addition, we want to deliver our services in a way that makes our customers successful and that they love partnering with us – regardless of the team involved in the relationship.
Q: Rachel H.
What industries and types of businesses are benefiting most from your solutions?
A: Klas B.
We work with enterprise companies selling or billing across almost all verticals (retail, travel, digital goods and services, subscriptions, billing, etc.). In addition, the companies servicing them use us increasingly: fraud providers, PSPs, gateways, marketplaces, vertical SaaS companies, and more.
Q: Rachel H.
How does Pagos approach integrating with clients’ existing financial systems and workflows?
A: Klas B.
For getting data out from Pagos systems, depending on the system and the workflow, we address the integration of our products as either facilitated through access to data via data downloads or data APIs. This covers almost all cases where a user may need to integrate a data point or data series into an existing tool or process (often this is Excel). Data teams benefit from our clean and aggregate data streams via doing a “system-to-system” integration. We can support scheduled reports or API–level access to raw and aggregate data. To get access to Pagos, we provide no-code connectors to many of the biggest acquirers globally. Customers do not have to do any technical work for us to provide our awareness tools.
Q: Rachel H.
How does Pagos plan to utilize the recently raised $34 million in funding to enhance its payment intelligence services and meet the growing demand in the market?
A: Klas B.
We are very focused on working with many of the world’s leading and most innovative brands leveraging our tools to drive better performance and insight from their current operations. As part of this, we are expanding our product and engineering teams to launch faster, with even more services and functionality, supported no-code integrations, and more.
Q: Rachel H.
Can you discuss any key industry trends or developments that you are particularly excited about and how you see these trends shaping the future of the payments industry?
A: Klas B.
We feel the use of AI will help us significantly expand the number of teams and companies able to better optimize their payment operations by making our platform more effective, easier to use and understand so that they also can take full advantage of running a very optimized payment stack. There also continues to be a movement by many payment brands to bring identity and payments together to make it safer and easier to transact in frictionless ways. For example, this could be network tokenization for card payments and the ability for customers to be “in the flow” to authenticate transactions. This should drive fraud down and therefore costs over the coming decade.