The payments sector has undergone substantial transformation in recent years, and the rate of change is only accelerating. Building an agile workforce that can drive growth and innovation in this evolving landscape requires reimagining your talent agenda. In this report, as part of our Paytech series, we are exploring what the talent agenda in payments should look like.

Previously, banks and payment service providers (PSPs) favored deep technical skills to build products and maintain services. Today, firms are concentrating on human-centered skills, with adaptability and curiosity cited as the most critical attributes by payments experts.

Many high growth payments firms are entering the scale-up phase which brings increasing demands on teams linked to rapid commercialization and product growth. This phase brings both significant opportunities for personal development as well as requirements for firms to deepen skillsets across areas including payments regulation and commercial acumen that support increasingly complex, global businesses.

Our latest payments report, The Future of Talent Agenda in Payments, identifies several key building blocks to creating a successful and forward-looking talent agenda. Leveraging our AI platform, the EY Skills Foundry, and conducting numerous industry interviews, we have identified eight specific skills, and several distinct roles, that are critical to success:

1) Adaptability and curiosity

To excel in this new environment, payment firms need individuals who possess a strong innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. This is underpinned by curiosity that drives them to explore technology developments – such as tokenization and cloud-based solutions – and new business models that disrupt the payments value chain.

2) Learning agility

The pace of innovation in payments demands agile learning abilities and a continuous passion for new knowledge. Nurturing a growth mindset, where flexibility and consideration of “what if” scenarios, is also essential.

3) Customer centricity

Creating a superior, seamless customer experience is crucial for PSPs to thrive. Payment innovators often operate within an ecosystem of providers that includes integrators, payments platforms and banking partners, so individuals to be able to set customer centricity in this context of connectivity and partnership.

4) Interpersonal acumen

Strong empathy, listening and communication skills add critical value to how PSPs engage with their teams, ecosystem partners, and most importantly customers.  Authentic partnerships prioritize win-win scenarios among ecosystem participants, whether that entails a shared focus on value creation, volume growth objectives, driving efficiency or fraud reduction metrics.

5) Digital leadership

As consumers and clients continue to shift to digital, PSP leaders must adapt their approach, guiding their teams to a shared purpose, fostering an innovative and collaborative culture, and constantly examining how to improve customer outcomes through digital solutions. This includes bringing an enhanced payments experience to merchants who themselves have been slow to digitize, which requires true leadership that paints a picture of future gains for customers and the merchant through an enhanced proposition.

6) Payments industry and regulation

The payments sector is highly technical, especially in areas such as cross-border payments and digital currencies. Understanding the intricacies of how payments work and navigating global and national regulation is critical. PSPs must hire or train talent to understand the nuance of key regulatory requirements and can make this an integral component of a sustainable scaling story.

7) Commercial acumen

Strong commercial acumen relies on the ability to think strategically about external market factors such as geopolitical and economic conditions, collaborate with other industries, and drive sustainable business growth whilst developing innovative payments solutions.  While some market segments – such as card payments – have a significant regulatory component underpinning pricing, newer segments including open banking payments, require strategic thinking on pricing and how to build sustainable commercial value.

8) Technology and data savvy

A strong understanding of both core and emerging technologies and the subsequent data requirements, including APIs, AI, blockchain, cloud, data management and cyber security expertise, are the bedrock of a successful payments business.

PSPs have transformed from traditional hierarchical structures to pod-based, multidisciplinary teams that work together to create business and customer value. The key to this is agility, an innovative culture, and teaming that brings together key roles into one team.

Here, we’ve identified eight critical roles that are key to success.

1) Product

Product focused roles succeed by innovating, developing, and maintaining payment products and services that align with customer needs.  Many PSPs have successfully differentiated themselves through the speed and extent of product development work.

2) Sales

Sales and business development roles build excitement and trust around those payment products, and act as a strategic advisor on payments solutions. Effective sales teams are able to demonstrate a proposition to customers that meets needs specific to their industry vertical (e.g., travel, insurance or subscription-based businesses).

3) Engineers

Engineers develop, test, implement and improve innovative payments software, from design and architecture, through to the development lifecycle, with increasing leverage of automation and AI co-pilots. Many PayTech firms rely on an extensive ecosystem of partners, including provision of transaction monitoring, pay-in or pay-out capability, delivered through a range of on-premise and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

4) Technology architects

Technology architects design innovative payments solutions and services to better meet the needs of merchants and consumers, working actively with leadership across the value chain – from technical vision to successful implementation.

5) Data enablement

Advanced technology has boosted the availability of payments data, offering PSPs greater opportunities to understand customer behavior patterns and preferences. Data roles facilitate collaboration and maintain data security. These roles allow payments firms to elevate their strategic importance to customers, through providing value-added insights on similar customers and their relative business performance.

6) Risk, regulatory compliance and legal

As payments’ risk, regulatory, compliance and legal obligations have matured, these roles have also increased in number. Legal experts who specialize in technologies such as blockchain and AI have become crucial to payments teams seeking to understand the legal implications of such technologies.

7) Customer operations

Client service roles are increasingly important to support greater financial inclusion, drive adoption, and create more personalized, frictionless customer experiences.

8) Financial crime, operational resilience and cyber security

Including resilience roles in the design and development of products and establishing end-to-end controls to assess threats and protect from financial crime is key to protecting consumers against ongoing threats. As alternative payments methods, such as open banking payments, continue to mature, there is demand for individuals with specific experience of managing controls in the context of these new markets.

The rapid pace of growth within payments, combined with a scarcity of talent means a reactive approach to talent is no longer sufficient. For business leaders in payments, attracting, growing and deploying talent will require proactive communication and a compelling sense of purpose. To become a truly customer-centric firm, they must have a deep understanding of their impact on the financial lives of consumers. They also need to invest in learning and talent mobility to create meaningful career paths, offering strategic upskilling and reskilling opportunities. For those looking for a career within payments or already working in payments, this means an opportunity to embark on a rewarding and purposeful career, making a difference to the everyday lives of consumers.

It is an exciting time to be in payments, especially for those looking to be part of the next phase of innovation, as it transforms the financial landscape with seamless, secure and accessible payments solutions. To attract the right talent, PSPs must promote a highly agile, innovative, and customer-centric operating model across the value chain. Creative autonomy, fast decision-making, collaboration, and clear performance metrics are imperative. To successfully adapt to ongoing change across the industry, PSPs require a talent strategy that unifies the eight critical skills and key roles we’ve identified, to deliver innovation at scale.