The Green Sheet Online Edition
March 23, 2026 • 26:03:02
Assessing banking and payment strategies with non-financial KPIs
Businesses are conscious that every small amendment and tweak can turn healthy margins into painful losses or push a scaling business into a serious liquidity crisis. We live in a world of innovation, expansion, new products and new markets, which are always at the center of every strategic discussion.
However, for some unknown reason, building a payment and banking strategy is still ignored, and payments and banking are still considered a back-office function of finance.
Every business has faced problems with payments and banking at least once, but hardly any professionals know how to resolve them, simply because the ones who manage payment and banking tasks are not adequately trained to do so. Key areas, such as how payments and banking affect technology, UX, compliance and other essential aspects in a business are absent from accounting, economics courses, and MBAs.
Payment and banking today impact customer experience, risk management, technology, product development, data security, compliance, finance and more. It should be considered a standalone function, an essential element of the business strategy, not just a part of finance.
But unfortunately, today only a few organizations deliberately choose and interpret KPIs to diagnose whether their payment and banking setup is truly effective, and how resilient the structure is against risk events.
If payment and banking flows are poorly structured, the first warning signs are already visible in the KPIs. The problem is that the ones reading them often do not know where to look.
Here I will list, other than the obvious, the cost KPIs. Based on my personal experience, ignoring these non-financial KPIs can cost far more than the financial ones, but they happen more often than we might think.
- The customer experience KPI
Customer experience KPIs tell a simple story: how smoothly payments integrate into the user journey, and where friction turns into lost revenue. But behind these metrics there are deeper signals we should all pay closer attention to.
- Payment abandonment rate versus conversion: A company may show strong overall conversion on its sales funnel but struggle with payment abandonment. When cart completion is high while payment drop-offs remain elevated or volatile, this is rarely accidental. It often signals confusing checkout flows, limited payment methods, slow authorization times, unclear descriptors on statements or even technical glitches in mobile responsiveness.
Revenue can look promising at the top of the funnel, but the related cash may evaporate if customers abandon due to outdated UX or unsupported local wallets. This gap increases churn pressure and distorts growth projections.
If a payment gateway lacks seamless integration for preferred methods like QR codes or open banking, the KPIs will not clearly reflect this restriction. The customer experience metrics, however, will immediately show tightening engagement.
Many organizations interpret this as a marketing problem. But in reality, marketers are usually not trained in alternative payment methods, dynamic routing, cross-border UX adaptations or API-driven checkout structures. The root cause is often embedded in the payment architecture itself, not in user acquisition at all.
- Rising customer complaints on payments: If payment-related complaints grow faster than transaction volume, it is necessary to question why satisfaction is not aligning with scale. Slow settlements visible to customers, delayed refunds due to disputes, fraud flags triggering unnecessary holds or scheme monitoring programs such as VAMP can directly affect how quickly trust is maintained. The KPIs reflect the symptom, but the payment structure often contains the explanation.
Compliance documentation is another frequent trigger. Banks and payment providers can temporarily restrict or delay user-facing processes if corporate documents, source-of-funds explanations or regulatory confirmations are incomplete or under review.
From a metrics perspective, this appears as spiking complaints, but from a payment perspective, it reflects regulatory friction and provider risk management. Without structured oversight, these issues accumulate and distort the real customer loyalty position of the business.
- The risk management KPIs
Risk management KPIs are often analyzed for compliance and fraud control, but payment-related risks are usually aggregated under the wrong categories such as "financial risk." This lack of specification can mask huge inefficiencies: who is actually holding your funds, and whether that entity is properly licensed and authorized to do so.
- Provider license and safeguarding risk: To truly assess payment risk, organizations must include KPIs that also include the evaluation of the financial license of the provider holding the funds. Is it a full banking license, an e-money institution, an ISO aggregator, a payment institution or money service business, or some other license in a less regulated environment?
Regular metrics should track the safety of the funds and the enforceability of the customer protection rights: regulatory standing, capital adequacy, segregated versus pooled funds, audit frequency, etc.
Without this dedicated KPI, vulnerabilities remain invisible until they trigger freezes or restrictions. Many setups appear diversified through gateways, but funds often route to the same (or under-licensed) entity. Evaluating the license holder proactively turns risk management from reactive to resilient.
- Account stability warnings and threats: Frequent threats of account closure, delayed transfers or compliance reviews, even without fraud spikes, often signal portfolio reassessment, VAMP penalties, cross-border compliance issues, or license or safeguarding hiccups of the fund holder. These warnings capture symptoms, as the root cause always lies in the system architecture and regulatory standing.
- Days with blocked transfers, holds or frozen accounts: Rising blocked days or frozen funds are usually the result of the regulatory misalignment or concerns over the license, capital adequacy or safeguarding integrity of the entity controlling the money. Without explicit KPIs tracking license-related exposure, these events appear random when they are predictable and preventable with proper oversight.
Until organizations measure the regulatory standing of whoever holds their funds as a core risk KPI, payment and banking risk will stay reactive, and this is far more expensive than it needs to be.
When the risk KPIs show increasing instability, finance will usually focus on contingency planning or insurance but will not examine whether the root cause is actually within the banking and payment flow design, provider selection or risk treatment, simply because they were never trained to look there.
- The technology and data security KPIs
Technology KPIs are often seen as a static snapshot, where in reality, they reveal structural exposure in payment and banking issues. This is where the vulnerabilities add up, even when daily operations appear stable.
Downtime metrics, security incidents, and integration failures all reflect how systems are built, who controls them and under what conditions they can be relied upon. When the reader doesn't know where to look, this can be easily ignored … but how comfortable are we really to park critical operations on a provider whose tech we have never even stress-tested.
- Payment processor downtime and operational damage: If downtime days increase or operational damage from outages grows, the organization carries integration risk, regardless of how many backup routes appear on paper. Many companies believe they are resilient because they use orchestration layers or multiple gateways.
However, these often rely on the same underlying infrastructure or correspondent networks to process and secure the data. (Often, ISOs, for example, usually just aggregate the big acquirer's channels, which means simply adding more ISOs to the payment mix will not add contingency in case the one big underlying provider fails).
- The tech layer risks: Many mid-market fintech providers rely on the same handful of SaaS/BaaS or white-label platforms, creating hidden concentration even when front-ends appear different. If that core system faces overload, cyber scrutiny or decides to throttle high-risk traffic, access to seamless processing can be disrupted overnight.
The KPIs will show escalating damage, but in practice the company may not have full control over it. True resilience is about understanding who ultimately handles the base codes, how data is secured and whether alternative routes exist.
This needs expertise and understanding of how the payment and banking infrastructure actually works—but this is a unique and special skill. Without this clarity, the technology KPIs can give a false sense of security while the real exposure remains concentrated in one place.
- Data security KPIs
Large or increasing incidents under data breaches can signal weak encryption, unmonitored API vulnerabilities, or even reconciliation mismatches in sensitive payment data. These metrics often become warning signs for unresolved security gaps. Without a structured review, they easily escalate and distort the true operational integrity.
- Off-metric exposure: Contingent risks related to cyber threats, fines or scheme penalties are often not recorded in core KPIs until they materialize. Until that moment, they remain outside the numbers, even though the vulnerability is already building. The early warning signs are usually visible elsewhere: rising fraud flags, increasing security audits, higher monitoring fees or stricter data protocols imposed by the provider.
KPIs are by nature backward looking. They show what has already happened. Payment risk, however, builds in real time. By the time a breach, downtime penalty or forced migration is formally reflected in the metrics, the structural issue has often been present for months.
For example, if a processor starts flagging elevated cyber risks at portfolio level, the merchant may first experience higher holds or warning alerts before any formal incident appears. If management reacts only when the damage hits the KPIs, it is already too late to prevent operational disruption.
From metrics to strategy
The fundamental issue is not that companies lack data but that they have no one to interpret it well. KPIs are usually kept in isolation from payment and banking mechanics.
Finance looks at numbers, risks checks the "what if" scenarios, legal handles compliance, tech teams integrate and secure flows, but there is no single role that connects how everything is connected.
A simple UX setting, routing logic or a security clause eventually can appear as a customer complaint. Or if a company fails to do its regular due diligence on its provider, its funds might be facing threats, blocked days or even data breaches. KPIs provide the evidence of inefficiency, but without ownership of the underlying flows, the organization stays in reactive mode.
The role of the chief payment officer
Every international company will face a payment and banking issue soon or later: this is clearly a governance gap, but very few organizations recognize it as such. There are still no clear standards, no widely accepted best practices and no commonly recognized certification that properly trains decision makers on the nuances of payments, banking and fintech.
Today, critical decisions are made without structured knowledge, and that lack of expertise can become an extremely expensive mistake. This is exactly where the chief payment officer becomes essential.
A dedicated executive function with full visibility over fund flows, provider relationships, fee structures, reserves, descriptors, routing logic and settlement timelines can read KPIs differently.
Instead of seeing customer complaints as a UX flaw, the CPayO evaluates them against method availability and industry benchmarks. Instead of accepting risk warnings as seasonal, the CPayO traces them back to provider risk treatment and portfolio design. Instead of treating downtime as a tech choice, the CPayO questions infrastructure dependencies and security protocols.
A CPayO, for example, would not accept 12 percent abandonment as a UX issue, but would trace it to missing local APMs and force routing changes. The role bridges the gap between the various operational functions that payment and banking affects, and can flag repeated license reviews as upstream exposure, not just a compliance hiccup, and diversify fund holders accordingly.
Payment and banking are already difficult to manage in a global environment, but if the most vulnerable operational bottleneck, which is payment and banking, is ignored at the level of KPI analysis, the business will keep firefighting symptoms instead of correcting root causes from the beginning. 
Viktoria Soltesz is the CEO and founder of PSP Angels and The Soltesz Institute. She is a leading advocate for strategy-led financial operations, ethical industry practices, and structured education in an area too often overlooked in traditional business training. PSP Angels is a globally awarded, independent payment and banking consultancy that has supported over 1,000 companies in building scalable, secure financial infrastructures. The Soltesz Institute is the first and only independent online organization offering EU-accredited training and certifications focused exclusively on payments and banking. To contact Viktoria, please email viktoria@pspangels.com.
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