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Insights and Expertise

A tribute to the inventory of who to call, what to check first and whether
there is any chance this resolves itself. Here's to the quiet
unsung heroes of the heroism of those who roll up their sleeves and get to work.
The skills nobody talks about
payments industry The payments industry loves to celebrate innovation.
Conferences are built around it. Press releases announce
it. Keynotes speak with deep passion about it.
What conferences do not celebrate is the ability to
troubleshoot a settlement discrepancy across three systems
that were not designed to talk to each other, under time
pressure, with incomplete documentation, at midnight.
That skill does not have a catchy name. It does not get a
panel discussion. But it is, in its own way, as impressive as
anything happening on the front end of the industry.

Back-office professionals carry a kind of institutional
knowledge that is genuinely irreplaceable. They know
where the bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking.
By Kate Knudsen They know which processes have hidden dependencies,
BHMI which systems have quirks that are not in any manual,
and which "quick fixes" from years ago are actually still
very day, billions of transactions occur with running in production.
a reliability that most people take entirely for
granted. Consumers tap their phones, mer- They are the people who can look at an error code and
E chants get paid, banks settle, and the world know, from experience alone, exactly what it means and
keeps turning. It looks effortless. exactly what needs to happen next.

It is not effortless. Not even close. That knowledge was not learned in a classroom. It was
learned late night by late night, exception by exception,
Behind every successful transaction, every accurate over years of keeping systems running that had no
settlement, every correctly assessed fee, there is a person, business running as smoothly as they did.
or more likely a small, overworked team that made it
happen. They did not do it with cutting-edge tools or What is actually at stake
elegantly modern systems. They did it with expertise, The part that sometimes gets lost in the day-to-day grind
determination, and an almost superhuman tolerance for is that the work back-office teams do is not administrative.
the chaos that legacy payments infrastructure specializes It is foundational.
in delivering, usually at the worst possible moment.
When a settlement fails, merchants do not get paid. When
This article is for them. reconciliation breaks down, financial positions become
A day in the life unreliable. When fees are assessed incorrectly, revenue
leaks quietly out of the business, often going unnoticed
Let us be honest about what working in the payments back until it adds up to something that cannot be ignored. When
office actually looks like. disputes are not managed properly, write-offs mount and
relationships fray.
It looks like reconciliation files that almost balance. It
looks like exception queues that grow faster than they The back office is not the background of the payments
shrink. It looks like workarounds that were supposed to story. It is the infrastructure on which the entire story
be temporary in 2018 and have since become load-bearing depends. Every seamless customer experience that a
parts of the operation. bank or processor proudly showcases starts with back-
office systems and back-office people who ensured the
It looks like a spreadsheet that nobody fully understands underlying mechanics were sound.
anymore but that everyone is quietly terrified to touch.
And sometimes, it looks like finding a batch error at A few things back-office
11p.m. and wondering if tonight is the night the whole professionals deserve to hear
thing finally breaks.
You deserve to hear that the work is hard, and that the
Anyone who has been there knows exactly what these difficulty is real, not a reflection of any failure on your
moments feel like. The feeling of dread. The rapid mental part. Legacy systems are hard. Manual workarounds are
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