"One customer, every channel": How to move from disconnected into one interconnected flow of unified commerce

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:00:01]:
This is Everywhere Commerce, where we explore the hidden systems behind global growth. Last week, I saw a notification on my phone from a favorite clothing retailer that they were having a sale. The notification showed me an item that was part of the sale. It was something I'd seen, even put in my cart once or twice, but not purchased then. I bought it, and a couple of other things, in the app, using the sale code, and also applying some loyalty points I had earned on previous purchases. The next morning, I went to pick it all up in the store, because I am impatient and I didn't want to wait for shipping. A few days later, I went back to the counter to return one thing that didn't fit for a refund. Somewhere along the way, I earned a few more loyalty points so I can do it all over again the next time I see something I'd like to wear. To most people, that was one relationship, with one brand. But behind the scenes, it was five or six or ten different systems that may or may not have ever actually been introduced to each other. A credit-card-fraud check here, a loyalty platform there, a point of sale, an app, a payment processor. Every one of them has to work together, in the time it takes to tap a card, to keep the relationship going. Most of the time, it just works the way you expect it to and you don't notice it. The only time you do is when it doesn't.

Steve Vincent [00:00:53]:
You can't quantify what you've lost if you don't know you've lost it.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:01:00]:
That's what we're unpacking today. When a seam between those five, six, or ten systems becomes a crack, the customer doesn't blame the app, or the loyalty-program software, or the payments software. They blame the brand. Today, on Everywhere Commerce: one customer, every channel, and how to move from disconnected into one interconnected flow of unified commerce.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:01:20]:
Before we get to where the money leaks across multiple systems, and why, I wanted to know who I was talking to. So I asked both my guests the same thing I ask everyone at the beginning of each episode. Explain what you do like I'm five.

Mike Farrell [00:01:38]:
So the way I like to tell my daughter is, you know, we all go to restaurants, check into hotels, go to theme parks, you name it. And during these experiences, we want to buy products or services from these companies. And this is a critical moment. We bring out our credit card, our debit card, and we go to the payment terminal to make sure we can pay. And I think this is something that most people take for granted. In the background, there are dozens of companies that have to prove that you have enough money to pay for that meal, for that ride, for that hotel room. And no one really understands what goes on behind the scenes. FreedomPay really makes sure that all those parts in the background come together without us having to worry about, are we able to do that? Or in my kid's eyes, are we going to get in trouble for walking out the door without paying for something.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:02:40]:
That's Mike Farrell. He runs enterprise payments for FreedomPay, which powers the checkout process in a lot of places you would recognize. Restaurants, hotels, stadiums, the kind of places where the line cannot stop moving. Before this, he ran payments at Subway, so he comes at this not just from the payment processor's perspective, but from the merchant's perspective too. My other guest, Steve Vincent, Senior Vice President of North America at Nuvei, sits one layer under all of it.

Steve Vincent [00:03:00]:
There's two ways to look at it. One is from the perspective of a consumer, and the other is from the perspective of a merchant. From a consumer perspective, Nuvei is the last mile of any transaction. So when you're in store purchasing an item, we are the terminal and the payment processor that helps you buy the item, whether it's a tap to pay or insert the card. That few milliseconds where you tap or you insert, we verify the transaction behind the scenes. We make sure you have money in your account. We pass that transaction back and forth between banks and processors and schemes, and we do all of the things that nobody really knows is happening. And then on the merchant perspective, we are the one stop shop for all of their connections. We connect them to banks, we connect them to the card networks, we make sure their local payment methods are handled, their routing, their settlement across in store and online and mobile and marketplaces. So really, when you think of the last mile of buying anything that a consumer wants, that's where Nuvei comes in, and you don't even know we're there, which is the reason why we're great at what we do.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:04:15]:
If Mike builds the moment at the counter, then Steve connects that moment to everything behind it. This single instant is where I wanted to start. Because when leaders say we're moving towards unified commerce as a business strategy, and I hear it a lot, while everyone seems agreed upon the same general definition of what that is, nobody seems to agree on where the hard part actually is. So I asked Mike. When you get past the general definition, into the actual nuts and bolts, what makes unified commerce so complicated?

Mike Farrell [00:04:38]:
I think most people assume it's right there at that checkout experience, right at that terminal. It's getting the customer through, getting their payment completed successfully, quickly. And that is important. But really, if you're talking about unified commerce, it's that massive complexity of all those different systems integrating for a millisecond to make that customer experience happen. Each transaction has a fraud engine, typically a loyalty platform it needs to ping. You have your ERP, you have your acquirer and processor. You have all these different systems and they need to come together without the customer seeing any of it. Unified commerce isn't forcing all of your systems into one single platform.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:05:35]:
So the hard part is buried in all the handshakes. A dozen of them, firing in the time it takes to say the word unified. What's dangerous for a brand is that the customer is never meant to see, or remember seeing, any of that machinery working. They only see it, and remember it, the one time it doesn't. Mike put a number on how often that is, and it's not the one you usually hear quoted.

Mike Farrell [00:05:58]:
Most of the time the conversation relies around just an uptime metric. We're up 99.9% of the time. And that's great, multiple nines. But if you actually took the math on 99.9, that's eight hours of downtime a year.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:06:20]:
That takes an abstract figure and turns it into a timeline. What he said next turns that timeline into a potential time bomb.

Mike Farrell [00:06:30]:
And you don't get to choose when those eight hours are. So for a lunch rush or a World Cup watch party, you can't decide when that is. And frankly your consumers don't know what your uptime SLA is, and they don't care. They just want their transaction to go through.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:06:55]:
Eight hours a year. They lurk, somewhere in your technology stack, and they descend at random, perhaps just in time to torpedo your arena's football-playoff rush, your holiday-weekend music festival, and your Taylor Swift concert. Imagine being the customer who had tickets to all three and by the end of it swore to never set foot in your venue again. You hope it will be one low-risk moment, just one quiet Tuesday morning. Regrettably, it will most certainly not be.

Mike Farrell [00:07:20]:
During an England game that was obviously played in the United States, it was nighttime over the weekend in England, the pubs were pretty full, and the largest provider of payments in England went out. So there was a massive issue occurring across a major country. And if those providers didn't have redundancy baked in, they just lost a lot of revenue. Not just from consumer experience, but frankly, they probably already served the beer and the person was just walking out without paying.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:07:55]:
Free beer for everyone. But jokes aside, this points at something many people forget when they run a global business: there is no such thing as a safe moment for your payments system to die.

Mike Farrell [00:08:10]:
It might be 2am in the United States, and that outage for a lot of people wouldn't hurt too bad. But that's actually prime time in a lot of the rest of the world. So as you're at enterprise scale, you have to think of how the multitude of regions that you're supporting are impacted by potential outages, especially with single providers.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:08:30]:
I saw the human version of this myself. I was in a bar in Culver City during the World Cup, one of the matches, and I think I heard about fourteen different languages being spoken in that room. And all these different cards coming out to pay for everybody's beers and burgers and fries, cards that half the machines in America have probably never seen. And this little machine reads all of it, and it's paid for. It looks like magic from the customer's seat. If you're that business, there's a very long list of things that all have to not break, obviously. That's all operational cost. But Steve, sitting on Nuvei's infrastructure side, sees a second cost, the one that isn't going to show up on your performance dashboard.

Steve Vincent [00:09:15]:
The easiest example is one that we're all familiar with, which is buy online, return in store, or vice versa. Buy in store, return online. If a merchant cannot facilitate that flow with a customer, it's very clear to me that they don't have systems that are connected. And so as I'm talking with that merchant, we're asking, do you have a single unique identification method to know that that's the same person in both places? And a lot of times it comes back to reporting. They're settling in different spots and they're unable to recognize that transactions come from ultimately the same transaction of origin.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:09:55]:
He's talking about what I did last week: try to return online what I bought in store. But this time, when I come back, the company acts like it has never met me.

Steve Vincent [00:10:10]:
I'll touch on two that we see really frequently. One is approvals and one is working capital. So on approvals, you have isolated channels that often don't share intelligence across those channels. So the loyal online customer now shows up in store and they get declined more frequently in one of the two locations. And so you can have false declines cost merchants. We've seen statistics of an upwards of $300 billion per year. It's a massive cost to merchants all over the world. If they're not recognizing their customer base when they show up in person or online, they're going to get a decline when otherwise they might have gotten approval. So you see revenue leakage just by natural approval rates.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:10:50]:
In that first scenario, approvals, three hundred billion dollars in revenue simply walked out of the door as a polite card declined, because two separate locations didn't recognize that they were greeting the same individual customer, one who absolutely had the money to spend. And the worst part is, they have no idea it's happening. This sentence keeps repeating itself on a loop in my head.

Steve Vincent [00:11:00]:
You can't quantify what you've lost if you don't know you've lost it.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:11:08]:
I'm reminded of the old adage, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Today, we're measuring anything and everything, but that giant lake of data we're collecting is shallow and meaningless without a way to manage it: to quickly and accurately make sense of it. This disconnection is what loses the sale you never knew you almost made. Which raises an obvious question, or at least obvious for me. If the consequences of not unifying commerce are this expensive, why do so many seem to just ignore it? And the answer has less to do with technology than with how we all feel about the moment we decide to pay.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:11:40]:
Here is the strange thing about the most expensive moment in your business: most companies file it under petty cash. It's true. I asked Mike about this: how do payments usually get treated inside a big enterprise?

Mike Farrell [00:11:55]:
In nearly every single enterprise, payments is typically considered somewhere like a back office function or a cost center, something that is typically a part of treasury. And it's, how do we lower our costs as much as possible, because at an enterprise scale they truthfully can add up. But this is a critical piece of the customer's view of the brand. They don't separate that piece of their journey from the rest of their journey. It is all just one journey.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:12:35]:
So in some companies, payments is a line item somebody is always trying to shrink. But to the customer, it's a part of how they feel about you. The gap between those two views may as well be a canyon, and down in that no-man's land is where reputations go up in flames. I'll start with a personal anecdote about a technology retailer here in the US that I won't name: one that seems to take pride in how legendarily bad their payment experience is. Disjointed, error-prone checkout, accidental double charges, false declines, forced account creation instead of a quick guest checkout. When a payment fails, customers have no idea what happened. I personally know at least fifty people who had a bad experience with their payments process and will never buy anything from them again. Do businesses underestimate how much trust is tied directly to that?

Mike Farrell [00:13:35]:
Absolutely, without a doubt. Most of these brands are spending millions or billions of dollars on loyalty programs and marketing and experience design and A/B testing, all of which is very good and very valid. But if you get that failed experience on the payment side, you've just wasted all that money. That customer gets so frustrated they're not coming back. They may be a member of your loyalty program, but they're certainly not an active member going forward. So when you realize that customers don't separate the payments experience from the brand, that's when you realize this is more than just a cost center where we need to drive costs to zero. This is a trust event with the customer, especially with their financial information and their credit cards.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:14:35]:
A trust event. I like that phrase, because it's exactly right. And while we talk about trust a lot in brand building, almost nobody in finance does. I have personally watched clients I love spend a fortune making customers love them, and proceed to lose them for good over one screen at the end, featuring the spinning ball of death. Steve explained why that screen carries so much weight, and what the frequency in which customers see it has to do with it.

Steve Vincent [00:14:55]:
A payment is the most repeated moment in any relationship that a customer has with a brand. And if you have one that's clunky or fails during checkout, that is remembered long after the product that you actually were trying to consume. And so you have nearly a third of shoppers that abandon their order specifically because of the checkout process. And when that happens, they don't come back most of the time.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:15:35]:
Louder, for the people in the back: the most-repeated moment you have with a customer is the payment. More than the ad, more than the app. So a bad payment moment is not a blip, it's uniquely memorable, and not in a good way. So much, in fact, that nearly a third of people will walk away for good over it. Now, why do they walk? Part of it, Steve says, is that people are loyal to something most brands don't even think about. Not the brand. But the way they pay.

Steve Vincent [00:16:00]:
A lot of times consumers don't just trust the brand that they're buying with, they trust the payment method that they're buying with. Outside of the US there's very few markets where credit cards is the number one used payment method. Usually it's some other version, an alternative payment method like Pix in Brazil, or something like buy now, pay later, like Klarna in Europe, which is used very frequently. If you're not offering up those payment methods, then you're going to lose potential transactions that otherwise might have been valuable to you.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:16:45]:
If you listened to our first episode, this will sound familiar. If you haven't, go back. It's okay. I'll wait. We heard almost the same thing from Adina Pop at Nuvei: that people will trust their payment method more than the store they are standing in. Two different guests, weeks apart, landing on the same slightly wild idea. The most trusted element in your checkout may well be shown right next to the choose a payment method button. Complicating the matter is that customer behavior is driven not only by what people trust, but also by how fast their expectations move. Mike made the point that you can't measure how you're meeting customer expectations against your own industry anymore.

Mike Farrell [00:17:25]:
It's customer expectations, probably hands down. Technology always moves fast, and it's probably moving faster than ever, especially with the advancements in AI. But with that comes continued evolving of the customer expectations. You can't just benchmark yourself against others in your same category anymore. It's kind of weird to think, but Amazon changed the way we think about how groceries should get to our house. Those consumer expectations are adapting to the technology, and they're applying it across all of their commerce experiences, not just the ones within the same industry.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:18:05]:
My first online grocery order was HomeGrocer, back in the late 90s, which was quite a novelty but hopelessly impractical: long wait times, poor scheduling tools, and really bad produce. It was my first same-day delivery grocery order from Amazon, in 2013, that really took. And that is why I was suddenly annoyed that a certain clothing retailer I love couldn't get something delivered to me in the same day when there was a store a mile and a half away, a feature they didn't launch until six years later, in 2019. That is how my two-hour grocery delivery became the reason your checkout feels slow. And while all of this is happening out front, there's something else putting pressure on the back office.

Steve Vincent [00:18:30]:
On a working capital front, you have treasury departments who want to maximize cash. And when you have cash that's difficult to track, treasury can't see a single cash position. We've seen services where 83% of corporate treasurers name cash visibility as their top challenge. If they can see the cash, they can reinvest it, they can buy new product, they can acquire new customers. But if they can't see the cash, that hidden cash, if it's not accessible, it becomes a cost to them, or at least a lost opportunity cost.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:19:10]:
So the same disconnection that annoys the customer out front is also stranding real money out back, where the finance team can't even find it to use it. Which brings us to the part everyone actually wants the answer to, or at least I do. How do you fix it? How do you close the gap between customer expectations and the disconnected systems? Mike has a strong opinion here, and it's the opposite of what most executives try first.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:19:45]:
When a business finally decides to fix their disjointed payment systems, the instinct is usually to tear it all out and start fresh. Sounds reasonable to me: what got you here won't get you there, right? Mike, I was surprised to learn, spends a lot of his time talking people out of that.

Mike Farrell [00:20:05]:
We talk to clients who are looking for, should we rip it out and just replace it fresh? And while there's obvious benefits, that's a massive undertaking, and frankly, you would be building it to today's needs, so pretty quickly that becomes legacy infrastructure as well. So typically we talk about, don't bring out your bulldozer and take down the entire legacy tech stack. What we really try to offer is a bridge. You can continue to improve it over time, but don't take the whole business down to build something for today's experiences. Build that bridge, that connection, that partnership to someone who is consistently doing that updating on their own stack and can provide you a route and avenue to the best providers in each part of your business.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:21:05]:
So the move, as they say these days, is to build a bridge that stays current, so you don't have to rebuild the whole thing every three years. And that leads to Mike's sharpest point in the whole conversation, which is an argument against something almost every executive believes. Most think unifying payments means getting down to one provider. One company, one contract, one single provider. But Mike thinks that's the wrong goal entirely.

Mike Farrell [00:21:30]:
I've heard this in my boardroom and across our clients as well. It's that unifying means reduction in providers, getting down into a do-it-all. And I fully understand the single provider mindset. It simplifies a lot of the conversation. It's that one throat to choke, as people like to say. But in reality it's probably the wrong goal people are chasing. And what most people don't realize is, with that one single provider, you're locked in. If they have an outage, now you have an outage.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:22:05]:
Single point of failure.

Mike Farrell [00:22:08]:
Exactly. And if you want a new payment method to support World Cup watch parties and they don't have it, you're stuck. If they decide to increase pricing through your contract term, you have absolutely no leverage. What I think the goal should be is actually just having a single point of control. You have one place to manage everything, and you get to choose the best in class for each of these different parts of your business. Not to mention you can have redundancy in each of them. So if one goes down, you can go to another, if you do not want to lose payments when you have a rowdy crowd of English fans in your pub.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:22:55]:
And that's just it: one throat to choke sounds economical and tidy right up until it's your throat, on the night of the England game, with no way to route around it. So the thing you're actually after is one place to steer from, a global platform that's built to be payment-method-agnostic, with real choice and backup options for your backup options. Steve sees what happens after a business gets there, and it reaches well past payments.

Steve Vincent [00:23:15]:
There's three that I would touch on. One, your cash yield can grow. Finance isn't fragmented, they can see the cash and reinvest it into acquiring more new customers however they want. Two, customer experience improves. The customer relationship becomes legible. One record, loyalty and personalization that work everywhere instead of just resetting at each touch point. And the third is global expansion. When the business is unified, expanding into those new regions and new countries doesn't require new models and systems. It's an easy flip of the switch, because you've already connected all of your systems, online and offline, in store and eCommerce. So if you need to go into a new country or a new vertical, it's something you've already set up to scale really quickly.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:24:15]:
So having a truly unified payment stack, unified by that single point of control Mike described, pays for itself three ways. The finance team finds the money, the customer stops feeling like a stranger and more like a bestie with the secret passcode every time they show up in a different channel, and a new country becomes a setting you turn on instead of a build you start over from scratch. In fact, that last one matters more every month, because a brand new channel just showed up for everyone at once. The one where a machine does the shopping. I asked both of my guests how agentic commerce, where an AI agent buys on your behalf, changes the picture. Steve's answer was surprisingly even. It's just another channel, he said, with the same old question underneath.

Steve Vincent [00:24:55]:
Agentic commerce is now just another channel. Is that agent acting on behalf of a specific individual? Is that same individual one that we saw in store? Is that same individual one that we saw online, operating independently? When I hear merchants describe that type of difficulty in understanding their customer base, it tells me there's a much larger discussion at stake. This is not just about lowering overall costs and approval rates. It's about building brand loyalty and knowing their customers from the second they show up, in whatever channel they come to them in.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:25:35]:
So the agent just adds one more door the same customer can walk through, and you still have to recognize them through the doorbell camera. Mike takes it one step further. His warning is that the agent makes life simpler for the shopper but harder for the business.

Mike Farrell [00:25:55]:
I don't think there's going to be one AI to rule them all. We have multiple options today and I think that continues going forward. So the companies that do best in the future are not those that just ready themselves to be searched in these functions, but are able to handle the complexity and the multitude of systems that will be involved when we are AI-native commerce, which I think is happening faster than anyone imagines. How do you make sure you can take a payment from all the different AI systems? How do you make sure you're still able to have your fraud checks, your loyalty points added, your real-time offers added? So there's still a lot of that complexity that's not being removed. It's being removed from the consumer, but it's not being removed from the merchant.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:26:45]:
That's another quote on repeat in my head. The complexity doesn't disappear, it moves. It slides off the customer, who expects a simple purchase experience, and lands on the business, which now has to deal with a dozen different AI platforms trying to buy on the customer's behalf. And Mike says that creates a genuinely new shape of problem: one transaction, two customers?

Mike Farrell [00:27:05]:
It's a unique omnichannel experience that I don't think most people have thought through. It's not necessarily the true omnichannel of, is it online or is it in store, but I'm dealing with an AI agent on this side and a consumer on this side, and it's the same transaction. And how do we make that experience line up, get the data flowing appropriately, so we can make sure that both of those consumers in the same transaction are taken care of.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:27:35]:
An AI agent on one side and a human on the other, same purchase, and you owe both of them a good experience. And when the machine gets it wrong, the human doesn't blame the machine.

Mike Farrell [00:27:50]:
We're all going to start working with our own agents more and more and have it understand what we're looking for and when and how to buy it and have the payments automatically a part of that experience, as we mentioned before. That's great from a consumer experience, right, that makes all of our lives easier as it gets to the point where it's smart enough to actually purchase what we want and not like a six pack of tube socks from China that's coming. But as mentioned before, from a merchant perspective, that's a massive infrastructure problem. And you think about that at scale, that is a massive drag on a merchant's business, having to deal with those consumer complaints. And a lot of times they're not going to blame their AI agent, that's their good buddy who's helping them out. A lot of times they're going to blame the merchant. And even if they don't, the merchant still has to deal with the return.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:28:20]:
Nobody breaks up with their own AI agent. They break up with you, the brand selling them things. And I'll admit, the idea of a bot buying things for me makes me a little uneasy. Then I remember I already do a soft version of it. I guess in some ways the subscribe and save feature is a lot like that. We do that with things like cat food and cat litter. We have two cats here and we know how often they go through food and litter and so we've just subscribed to those and every couple of weeks they show up at the door. We don't actually hit the purchase button every time, it just shows up.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:28:45]:
We told the assistant what we wanted once. The only thing that changes with agents is the assistant starts making more of the calls. Which brings us to the idea underneath this whole episode, and Steve said it better than I could. As checkout gets more invisible, you would assume there's less to build for you as a merchant. The opposite is true.

Steve Vincent [00:28:55]:
The more that we see a payment experience move more frictionless, the infrastructure that's required to carry that actually grows. And so companies are going to have to invest more into payments and more into infrastructure than they ever have before. And that's really to build trust, increase consumer security, brand loyalty, and everything that's required for them to ultimately say, yes, I'm going to buy your product.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:29:25]:
That's it, in a nutshell. The closer the payments interaction gets to frictionless at the surface, where the customer interacts with it, that doesn't mean the forces pushing or pulling on it disappear, it just means they get transferred to the infrastructure holding it all together underneath. The tap that feels like nothing for a customer sits on more machinery than ever. Like an iceberg. Invisible on the surface, heavier than ever beneath it. I end every conversation the same way. One question, and each guest gets exactly one word. So here it is. In one word, what is the future of checkout? Mike went first.

Mike Farrell [00:29:55]:
Orchestrated.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:29:58]:
Steve.

Steve Vincent [00:30:00]:
Seamless.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:30:10]:
Thank you both.

Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk [00:30:15]:
So maybe the checkout problem was never really about checkout. You are one customer, moving through a store, an app, a delivery, a loyalty program, and now an AI agent, feeling like one continuous relationship. The businesses that win are the ones whose systems can feel that too. Recognize you at every door, keep the money moving, and hold it all together the one time something breaks. Everything the customer loves about the smooth version out front is paid for by the work nobody sees out back. Thanks to Mike Farrell at FreedomPay and Steve Vincent at Nuvei for walking us through it. If you're building or scaling across more than one channel, follow Everywhere Commerce so you don't miss the next one. Everywhere Commerce is produced by Nuvei, the infrastructure for every payment, everywhere. See you next time.

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