Payments product strategy
Deciding what to build, for whom, on which rails and at what price, with a business case a CFO will actually sign off.
- Merchant acquiring
- Digital & POS channels
- Cross-border
- Pricing & P&L
- Go-to-market
Independent product leadership , London
Product leadership for the places where money moves.
I help banks, payment providers and fintechs turn messy payment problems into products that ship, and build the product teams and processes that keep shipping after I leave.
Initiate
Authorise
Clear
Settle
Reconcile
Most roadmaps stop at launch. In payments, nothing is real until it reconciles. That gap , between shipped and settled , is where I do my best work.
Built and shipped inside
Bank ofEngland
Open Banking
BP
The practice
Three problems clients bring me.
Usually some combination of all three: a proposition that has stalled, a platform that has to change underneath it, and a product function that was never really set up to run either.
Transformation delivery
Getting large, unglamorous change over the line: standards migrations, channel rebuilds and cloud moves, without breaking the money.
- ISO 20022
- ISO 8583
- PSD2 / Open Banking
- API banking
- Cloud migration
Product operating model
Setting up how product actually runs: discovery cadence, spec standards, prioritisation that survives sales pressure, and metrics that tell the truth.
- Discovery cadence
- Spec standards
- Prioritisation
- Product metrics
- Team coaching
A field manual for real product teams
The Product Manager’s Field Manual
How product management actually works where money moves.
Payments · Data · Launches · Stakeholders · Product judgment
Published, available on Amazon
The Product Manager’s Field Manual
Product management is not about the perfect framework. It is about making better bets under pressure.
Most product books describe an ideal company: empowered teams, clear strategy, easy access to users, clean data, and executives who make patient decisions. Most product managers work somewhere else, inside sales pressure, legacy systems, regulation, unclear ownership and metrics that do not always tell the truth.
Using payments and financial services as the operating ground, the book covers how to frame messy problems, gather evidence when user access is limited, prioritise without theatre, write sharper specs, launch with discipline, and build judgment that compounds over a career.
- → Turn feature demands into clear product problems
- → Assess opportunities in a way a CFO can respect
- → Work better with engineering, design, compliance and sales
- → Define real metrics for activation, settlement, reconciliation and fraud
- → Launch without spending customer trust carelessly
Selected work
A decade of work where the money is live.
Product and consulting roles across UK and Indian financial services: retail banks, corporate banking, and a telco building payments from scratch.
Accenture Strategy and Consulting
Payments transformation for global financial institutions
Management consulting across payments modernisation programmes: target operating models, platform strategy, standards migration and delivery leadership for large banking clients.
YES BANK
Digital Banking Lead
Owning digital banking propositions end to end, from customer journey through to reconciliation, reliability and the P&L behind them.
ICICI Bank
Digital payments and merchant acquiring
Product management across digital and POS payment channels: merchant acquiring propositions, new product development and channel launches at national scale.
Kotak Mahindra Bank
Transaction banking product and strategy
Corporate payments and transaction banking: API banking propositions, host to host integrations and the messaging standards work underneath them.
Vodafone Idea
Payments strategy for a mobile money business
Building payments propositions inside a telco. The fastest education available in distribution economics, unit costs and what customers will actually pay for.
How engagements run
Evidence first. Then decisions. Then build.
No 80-slide diagnostic that nobody reads. Every engagement is designed to leave behind a decision your team can defend six months later.
Week 1
Frame the actual problem
Interviews with the people closest to the money: ops, risk, sales, engineering. Most stalled payment products are a framing failure, not an execution one.
Weeks 2 and 3
Get evidence you can act on
Transaction data, funnel and failure analysis, competitor and rail comparison, and whatever customer access exists. Sized so it informs a decision rather than delaying one.
Week 4
Make the call, in writing
A recommendation with the trade-offs, the commercial case, the regulatory constraints and the things we chose not to do , written so a CFO, a CRO and a tech lead all recognise their concerns in it.
Ongoing
Ship it, and leave the process behind
Delivery alongside your team, then handover: the specs, the metric definitions, the prioritisation ritual and the decision record. The point is that it keeps running without me.
Engagements & fees
Clear pricing, so we can talk about the work.
Three ways to work together. Most clients start with a diagnostic and continue into fractional leadership or delivery once the direction is agreed.
Product diagnostic
Fixed price · 3 to 4 weeks
from £12,000Fixed fee, agreed up front
A hard look at one product, proposition or team, and a written recommendation you can take to a board.
- Stakeholder and customer interviews
- Data, funnel and failure analysis
- Written recommendation with commercial case
- Readout to your leadership team
Fractional product leadership
Monthly retainer · 3 months minimum
from £8,500Per month · two days a week
I run the product function while you build or hire one: strategy, roadmap, team, and the process that outlives the engagement.
- Product strategy and roadmap ownership
- Operating model and rituals set up
- Coaching for your PMs
- Hiring support for the permanent lead
Programme delivery
Day rate · scoped per programme
£1,150Per day · outside IR35 engagements
Hands-on product leadership on a live transformation , migrations, replatforming, launches. For teams that need someone accountable, not advisory.
- Embedded with your delivery teams
- Specs, decisions and trade-off calls
- Vendor and scheme management
- Weekly steering-level reporting
Workshops and speaking: from £3,000 per day, including preparation and materials.
All fees exclude VAT. Travel outside Greater London billed at cost.
Not-for-profit and early-stage rates available on request.
About
BaseLondon, UK
Experience10+ years
MBAWelingkar
Product strategyKellogg
B.Tech CSJaypee Institute
GMAT760
I have spent over a decade building payment and banking products, first inside Indian banks at national scale, then consulting for global financial institutions from London.
The pattern I kept seeing was the same everywhere. The hard part is rarely the idea. It is the settlement file that does not balance, the compliance question nobody owns, the sales commitment made before discovery, the metric that looks healthy because it is measuring the wrong thing. Good product work in financial services is mostly the discipline of finding those things early and being honest about them in front of people who would rather not hear it.
My work covers payment product strategy and go-to-market, merchant acquiring, digital and POS channels, ISO 8583 / 15022 / 20022 messaging, PSD2 and open banking, API banking, and cloud transformation, alongside the less visible work of setting up how a product team actually operates.
I wrote The Product Manager’s Field Manual because the books I wanted early in my career did not exist: something written for product managers working inside real constraints rather than ideal ones.
Book a call
Tell me what has stalled.
A 30-minute call, no charge. Bring the problem as it actually is. Half formed is fine. You will leave with a straight view on whether I am the right person for it, and what I would do first.