Thomas Tittelbach, Managing Director of aye4fin has achieved unprecedented success owing to his two most distinct qualities—humble and curious. “With a humble approach to the industry you rather listen and digest information compared to telling everyone your opinion,” explains Thomas. “Combined with questioning solutions and services for a long time, one starts to understand the underlying principles of the industry.”According to Thomas, staying curious is the main component of long-term success because products, technology, and also mindsets are changing at a high speed. Similarly, new concepts,such as agile processes and cloud-based operating models,are becoming a part of the daily work.

aye4fin works on similar qualities and are passionate technical, technology, and management consultants, who support from conception to implementation of new solutions. The company supports customers in strategic planning, product development, and internationalization of fast, cost-efficient, and customer-friendly payment processes. Based on a highly diverse team with professional experience from different payment providers,they are able to support customers in all aspects of their payment setup. To start the process,they are always eager to understand the current situation and future targets of the customer, and once the customer situation is fully assessed, aye4fin provides an overview of activities to reach the desired targets.

Leading a Leader

The company also carries out transaction analyzes, comparing global benchmarks with the help of their reporting and support tools. During the last years,aye4fin executed payment audits of several customers with a combined annual revenue of over €5bn. This enabled them to gain insights into the payment performance and setup of different industry verticals. As no global benchmark has previously existed in payments, aye4fin started to analyze customers in a structured way so they were able to create a truly global benchmark. “To measure the payment performance from different perspectives, we focus our analysis on four different aspects: Transactions, Declines, Refunds, and Risk Management,” says Thomas “With our data-based benchmarks, we can then advise customers on opportunities to improve their performance, e.g. to optimize the configuration of existing partners, introduce new payment options, or introduce new technology.”

In an instance, one of the aye4fin customers, a European platform, planned to expand its services from Europe to the US. While the legal setup was done by the client, the aye4fin team was asked to identify and implement a suitable payment provider to support the growth of the customer. During the project, aye4fin created the project description to provide an overview of the client, its business model, future plans, and budget forecast. They also prepared an RFP to identify suitable payment providers, conducted workshops with the shortlisted candidates, and the presentation of the results to the customer. During the project aye4fin acted as the program manager, allowing the customer to successfully enter the biggest economy providing its services.

Towards the Future

For Thomas, one of the biggest challenges he faces as a leader is the balancing act between strategic and operational tasks, which need to be addressed simultaneously. “While I need to work on growing our organization, at the same time, I need to respond to operational aspects of my team,” he says. “To address this issue, as well as to discuss strategic updates and changes, we introduced regular meetings, e.g. yearly and quarterly. In between, and with the support of weekly To do-lists, I am able to address the operational topics.”

During the time of COVID-19 he is using online mediums to keep constant contact with his team of experts. According to Thomas, as the impact of the current pandemiconly started and will affect us for the next several years, establishing initiatives to promote touchless commerce will be critical for the environment and humans. “One of the most important trends for our future allows me to enter, collect the goods I need, and leave a physical store without meeting the cashier – payment is done automatically,” he explains. “From a technical point of view, this is all possible today but still hard to achieve due to required investments, a change in the mentality of the customers, and more. Once achieved, touchless activities provide several advantages: a growing focus on advice during shopping instead of moving goods over the counter, removal of queues, and enablement of distance shopping, which, in times of COVID-19, is especially relevant.” As a company, aye4fin is delighted to be involved in projects supporting touchless commerce activities, enabling customers to complete purchases with image recognition instead of touching different products several times.