In this exclusive interview, finera.’s CPO Artur Savle shares how intelligent orchestration, compliance-by-design, and global payments are redefining FinTech.
Artur, can you share your professional journey and the key experiences that shaped your career in technology and fintech?
My journey is a 25-year evolution from a passionate technologist to a Chief Product Officer in FinTech. It’s defined by three core phases:
1. The Operational Foundation (Early Career)
I started in core IT and enterprise systems, first managing a Help Desk and leading large-scale retail software rollouts. This quickly led to my deep dive into finance at a major card Issuer and Acquirer in Italy, where I managed the Authorisations & Fraud function. This was pivotal, as I directly implemented systems that led to a 40% reduction in operational deficiencies, teaching me early on how to use technology to protect revenue and drive efficiency.
2. The FinTech Platform Expert
For nearly 15 years, I was immersed in the world of payment processing platforms. My roles, ranging from Senior Project Manager to Director of Business Operations and Sales at major payments processors, gave me a 360-degree view:
- Product Implementation: I designed, developed, and launched major processing platforms for different schemes, Diners Club, MasterCard, and VISA—mastering the end-to-end lifecycle.
- Strategic Growth: I actively drove business development, focusing on market needs, monetisation strategies, and delivering key innovations like the first virtual card solution.
3. Dedicated Product Leadership (Today)
This hands-on history, combining technical depth, an understanding of financial risk, and an appreciation for commercial strategy, is the engine for my current role as CPO at finera. I’m not just managing products; I’m leveraging decades of payment and platform expertise to define vision, build agile teams, and ensure our roadmap directly translates into market-leading financial solutions.
How has the rapid growth of global eCommerce increased operational complexity for businesses, particularly around payment systems?
1. Fragmentation and Localisation
Global sales demand that businesses accept dozens of localised payment methods, like iDEAL in the Netherlands or Pix in Brazil, not just major cards. This introduces massive complexity in processing logic and back-end settlement, especially when dealing with multiple currencies and fluctuating FX rates.
2. Heightened Risk and Compliance
International, card-not-present transactions are prime targets for fraud. As a former Fraud Manager, I know this requires constant, sophisticated monitoring to protect revenue while avoiding false declines. Simultaneously, the platform must comply with the varied and constantly shifting regulatory mandates (KYC/AML, GDPR) across every single market.
3. Integration Sprawl
To handle the above, companies often stitch together a fragmented stack of processors, gateways and fraud tools. The challenge is then managing the integration of these disparate APIs and, crucially, reconciling the complex web of cross-border transactions and fees for accurate financial reporting.
In short, global eCommerce turns a simple domestic process into a highly sophisticated, regulated, and fragmented IT challenge.
finera. emphasizes dynamic transaction routing to improve approval rates and reduce costs. From your perspective, how critical is intelligent routing in maximizing payment efficiency and minimizing operational overhead?
Dynamic transaction routing is the most critical strategic component for maximising payment efficiency and minimizing operational overhead for a modern, global FinTech. My experience building international processing platforms shows static routing is a direct path to lost revenue.
I see its criticality in two areas:
1. Revenue Uplift through Maximised Approvals
The core benefit is recovering lost sales. The intelligent engine acts as an “air traffic controller,” analysing the issuing bank, card type, and geography to route the payment to the acquirer with the highest historical success rate for that specific transaction. Crucially, it uses Intelligent Cascading to automatically retry soft declines via alternative processors, directly turning failure into recovered revenue.
2. Operational Resilience and Agility
Intelligent routing provides essential stability. If an acquirer experiences a technical outage or poor performance, the system automatically reroutes traffic to a healthy provider. This guarantees business continuity, a consistent customer experience and allows the business to enforce different risk and compliance strategies simultaneously (e.g., routing high-risk transactions to specific processors).
With increasing regulatory demands such as PCI DSS, PSD2, and GDPR, what strategies should companies adopt to maintain secure and compliant payment operations while scaling globally?
This is a fundamental challenge for any global FinTech, and one that I’ve managed directly when implementing platforms and ensuring operational compliance in multiple jurisdictions.
The core strategy for maintaining secure and compliant payment operations while scaling globally is to move away from a piecemeal, manual approach and adopt a centralised, automated, and “security-by-design” methodology.
Here are the key strategies I would advocate for:
1. Centralised Compliance as a Product Requirement
Compliance cannot be an afterthought managed by a separate team, it must be ingrained into the product development lifecycle:
- Treat Compliance as a Feature: Instead of viewing PCI DSS or GDPR as an obstacle, they should be defined as non-negotiable requirements for any new product or market expansion.
- Decouple Compliance: The best way to manage complexity, especially PCI DSS, is to limit the scope of cardholder data. We must aim to ensure finera. itself never touches sensitive data if possible, or fully tokenises it at the earliest possible stage. This drastically reduces the attack surface and the cost of maintaining certification.
- Centralised Compliance Monitoring: Implement a single, unified compliance and governance framework that serves as the blueprint for all regional operations, ensuring consistency across varying regulations (e.g., meeting GDPR’s high bar sets the standard for other data privacy regulations).
2. Modular Architecture (API-First and Microservices)
Our technical design must support global agility and compliance:
- API-First Design: A modular, API-driven architecture allows us to rapidly swap in and out localised services (like new processors, local payment methods, or regulatory screens) without disrupting the core platform. This is essential for quickly adapting to regulations like PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements in Europe, which may differ from market to market.
- Geo-Fencing and Data Residency: Use microservices and cloud infrastructure to architect solutions that respect data localisation laws. For example, ensuring European customer data is only processed and stored within the EU to comply with GDPR, while transactions are still routed globally.
3. Continuous Education and Auditing
Finally, technology must be supported by process and culture:
- Continuous Auditing: Implement continuous monitoring tools, not just annual audits, to track compliance status, access controls, and vulnerability management across all environments.
- Cross-Functional Compliance: Ensure product, engineering, legal, and operational teams have regular, cross-functional training on the implications of PCI DSS and new regulations. Everyone must understand their role in maintaining compliance.
By adopting these strategies, finera. can ensure that regulatory compliance and security become enablers of global scale and agility, rather than inhibitors.
How do you see payment orchestration evolving to integrate emerging technologies, such as crypto payments or open banking, while ensuring reliability and customer trust?
The evolution of payment orchestration is a transition from a simple routing service for cards and APMs to becoming the Universal Financial Translator, the central intelligence that enables commerce to embrace emerging financial rails like Open Banking and Crypto, all while guaranteeing reliability and customer trust.
We must see the orchestrator as the seamless bridge. When integrating Open Banking (Account-to-Account payments), the platform’s role is to manage the complex, fragmented connectivity across hundreds of different bank APIs. It must intelligently route the transaction and, if a connection fails, automatically fall back to a traditional card method. Crucially, it builds customer trust by leveraging the bank’s own high-security authentication standards, such as those mandated by PSD2 (SCA).
For Crypto Payments, the orchestrator tackles complexity by managing the bridge itself—optimising fiat-to-stablecoin conversion rates and working with licensed partners to provide the merchant with instant, guaranteed funds. This mitigates the inherent delays and finality concerns of certain blockchains, ensuring the transaction is reliable for the commerce environment.
To maintain security and trust throughout this evolution, the orchestration layer must enforce a unified strategy. This involves consolidating tokens for all payment methods (card, bank, crypto) to maintain a minimal PCI DSS scope for the merchant and feeding all transaction data into a single, AI-driven fraud engine. This holistic security view prevents new payment methods from introducing new risks. Ultimately, the future is Contextual Orchestration, where routing goes beyond simple cost and success rate to deliver the most appropriate payment option—Open Banking for large transfers, crypto for global speed, or a card for convenience—making revolutionary payments feel reliable and effortless.
finera. provides a single platform for payment processing, fraud prevention, and compliance management. How important is a unified payment infrastructure in reducing complexity and driving operational efficiency for modern enterprises?
A unified payment infrastructure is absolutely critical for modern enterprises. It’s the shift that turns payment operations from a cost-consuming bottleneck into a streamlined, strategic asset.
The most immediate gain is the drastic reduction of complexity and cost. By providing a single platform for processing, fraud prevention, and compliance, finera. eliminates the painful “integration sprawl”. Enterprises no longer need to manage multiple contracts, disparate APIs, and endless maintenance fees for different vendors. Furthermore, centralising this function dramatically minimises their PCI DSS compliance scope, freeing up significant time and resources currently spent on auditing and system maintenance.
Beyond cost, a unified platform delivers a single source of truth for data. When processing, fraud, and settlement information reside in one place, the platform can instantly correlate a decline reason with a risk score or a compliance alert. This holistic, real-time view enables smarter, automated decisions like dynamic routing adjustments, which are impossible when data is fragmented across separate tools.
Finally, this approach drives unmatched agility. The infrastructure becomes standardised across all global markets. Integrating a new region or a localised payment method is no longer a massive project to integrate three new external systems; it’s simply a configuration within the existing platform. This consistency ensures faster time-to-market and reduces the operational risk inherent in non-standardised regional processes.
What role do multi-currency payments and a global acquirer network play in enabling seamless cross-border commerce, and how can orchestration platforms accelerate international growth?
Multi-currency payments and a global acquirer network are not simply beneficial—they are the non-negotiable prerequisites for enabling truly seamless cross-border commerce. Without them, businesses face high decline rates and astronomical costs; with them, they gain a competitive edge.
The role of multi-currency payments is to eliminate customer friction. By presenting and accepting payments in the shopper’s local currency, you dramatically increase trust and conversion at the point of sale. This is foundational to customer experience, but it also simplifies the process for us by consolidating foreign exchange exposure and management.
The global acquirer network is the engine of operational efficiency. Cross-border transactions are inherently risky and often rejected by local banks because the international acquirer appears suspicious. To combat this, a global network allows us to employ Local Acquiring—processing the payment through an acquirer physically located in the customer’s region. This simple step significantly reduces decline rates, lowers interchange fees, and ensures a transaction is treated as a trusted, domestic payment, not a foreign risk.
The orchestration platform is what ties these two components together and accelerates international growth. It provides the Smart Routing Engine that instantly decides, for every transaction, which acquirer in the global network—local or international—will yield the highest approval rate at the lowest cost. By centralising this complex logic, we remove the need for enterprises to undertake costly, manual integrations for every new market. The orchestration platform enables rapid global expansion by providing a single, compliant, and cost-optimised layer that unlocks every region a merchant wants to enter.
Given the expected growth of the payment orchestration market, do you believe that investing in intelligent orchestration is now a necessity rather than a choice for eCommerce businesses? Why?
The cost of not orchestrating is simply too high today. Without it, you are locked into a static setup that guarantees revenue loss—you lose sales to soft declines that intelligent systems would have instantly recovered via cascading, and you miss opportunities for Least-Cost Routing, unnecessarily paying high international fees and eroding profit margins. Furthermore, you risk total revenue loss during processor downtime, as you lack resilience.
Intelligent orchestration is the engine of global competitiveness. It transforms payments into a proactive tool for revenue optimisation, ensuring the highest possible approval rate and lowest friction at checkout. It provides the architectural agility required to rapidly adopt new payment methods, comply with complex regulations like PSD2, and quickly enter new markets without massive IT overhauls. Essentially, it is the fundamental infrastructure investment required to eliminate hidden losses and maintain a competitive conversion rate in the demanding global market.
Looking ahead, what are the most significant trends or innovations you foresee shaping the global payment landscape over the next 5–10 years, and how should businesses prepare?
The global payment landscape is being redefined by intelligence moving to the transaction itself.
1. AI-Driven Commerce
Generative AI and Machine Learning are moving beyond just fraud checks; they are becoming active agents that initiate, route, and settle transactions autonomously. The checkout page is disappearing, replaced by payments embedded in smart devices and B2B workflows.
- The Preparation: Businesses must invest in orchestration that makes this possible. The platform must be the central brain that instantly selects the optimal payment method, the lowest-cost acquirer, and manages compliance, all based on real-time AI insights.
2. Money Becomes Programmable
The world is embracing instant payments (like FedNow or SEPA Instant) and new digital assets like Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and regulated stablecoins. These introduce the concept of “programmable money,” where funds can be automatically released when specific conditions are met.
The Preparation: Businesses need a multi-rail strategy. Your payment orchestrator must be the bridge, connecting traditional cards, bank-to-bank transfers (Open Banking), and these new digital currencies reliably and compliantly.
3. Compliance is Code, Not Paper
While technology strives for global seamlessness, regulatory bodies are increasing fragmentation with new data governance rules (like stricter GDPR iterations) and local payment mandates. The cost of managing compliance manually will become unsustainable.
- The Preparation: Compliance must be coded directly into the architecture. Businesses must retire siloed systems and adopt a composable, API-first approach that allows localized rules and compliance checks (e.g., regional data storage) to be swapped in and out instantly without disrupting the core platform.
What key advice would you give to businesses looking to optimize their payment strategies and thrive in an increasingly complex and digital commerce landscape?
1. Treat Payments as a Revenue Engine, Not a Cost
Stop accepting guaranteed revenue loss from static setups. Your priority must be implementing Intelligent Orchestration. This means using Dynamic Routing to instantly choose the highest-converting acquirer for every transaction and using Intelligent Cascading to automatically retry soft declines. This single step turns failures into recovered revenue and unlocks global market entry instantly.
2. Unify Security, Risk, and Compliance
Fragmented payment stacks breed vulnerability and compliance headaches. You must centralise. Consolidate fraud prevention, processing, and compliance data into a single platform. This delivers a holistic view, enabling an AI-driven fraud engine to make smarter, real-time decisions, which lowers false declines. Furthermore, adopting an API-First, modular architecture allows you to “code” compliance, making rapid adaptation to complex rules like PSD2 possible without a massive IT overhaul.
3. Demand a Single Source of Truth for Data
Your payment data is your most valuable strategic asset. Insist on a platform that aggregates all key metrics—approval rates, costs, decline reasons, and fraud scores—into one unified dashboard. This standardised data fuels automated reconciliation, drastically cutting operational overhead, and gives leadership the visibility needed to make immediate, data-driven decisions on where to route volume and how to grow profitably.
Stay Ahead of the Financial Curve with Our Latest Fintech News Updates!
