For consumers, the most successful payment is often the one they barely notice.
Money leaves one account, arrives where it is supposed to and the customer continues with their day. Yet, behind that seemingly simple interaction, sits an increasingly complex balance between speed, resilience, fraud prevention and innovation.
For Otto Benz, Director of Customer Technology and Payments at Nationwide Building Society, keeping that balance starts with recognising that the transaction itself is rarely what matters most to the customer.
Having spent much of his career across payments, systems integration and technology, including roles at IBM and Accenture before moving into banking, Benz has spent the last five years at Nationwide, where his responsibilities span payments alongside customer technology functions covering retail, mortgages and customer servicing.
Speaking on Form3’s Payments Cannot Fail podcast, he explained that payment providers need to look beyond the infrastructure supporting a transaction and focus on what the customer is actually trying to achieve.
“Behind every payment that we do, there’s a real reason for that. There’s a demand, a need,” Benz said. “Our customers are either buying something or they are sending money for a purpose. They are borrowing and lending and living their daily lives.”
Crucially, he added, customers “don’t care about the actual payment mechanism”. Instead, they care about “the benefit of the thing, the purpose, the outcome that they’re looking for”.
Success should be invisible
That philosophy has implications for how payments technology is built and operated.
While new products and functionality can generate attention, Benz suggested that one of the clearest signs of a successful implementation is that customers do not notice anything has changed.
He explained: “When you go live with a piece of software, with a new capability, success for us, for my teams, is defined as nobody noticed that. Seamless implementations and resilient operation. So things don’t go wrong.”
However, completely frictionless payments are not always desirable. Benz highlighted Confirmation of Payee as one example of where additional friction can prompt customers to reconsider whether a transaction is legitimate.
“Protection is a balance to that whole kind of smooth and transparent payment,” he said, adding that emerging areas such as AI and agentic payments will require the industry to continually weigh convenience against security.
That trade-off is likely to become important as customers expect transactions to happen almost instantaneously.
Benz described consumers as “massively less forgiving” of delays than in the past, particularly as the UK moves further towards an environment in which account-to-account payments sit alongside cards.
AI: Seizing the opportunity without surrendering control
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension to the challenge.
For Benz, AI in payments is not entirely new. Fraud platforms have been scoring transactions for decades.
Generative AI, however, is creating opportunities in areas ranging from software development to operational processes.
Nationwide is exploring how models can assist coding, identify vulnerabilities and support testing and verification. Operationally, Benz also pointed to experiments around complaints handling, including using technology to interpret what has happened, collect information and provide customers with better responses.
But payments present a particular problem for the technology industry’s familiar mantra of “fail fast”.
“I don’t really want you to fail on payments,” Benz tells his teams. “I actually don’t want the payments to fail.”
The bigger question, therefore, is how financial institutions can innovate safely.
Nationwide is examining areas including tokenised deposits and digital assets, but Benz emphasised that this kind of innovation depends on networks and counterparties working together, rather than any individual institutions acting alone.
Open Banking provides an example of how that ecosystem can develop, but fundamental requirements of a payment remain unchanged.
He asked: “How do you make sure that the payment is authorised, is authenticated, is not too slow, is still protected? None of these fundamental problems go away just because you want to do some innovation.”
Delivering change securely
Importantly, Benz does not view the challenge of balancing control and innovation as something banks and payment companies can solve independently.
Building societies, fintechs, regulators and other participants all have roles to play, while the origins of scams can extend into social media and telecommunications. AI further complicates that environment by making impersonation increasingly sophisticated.
Ultimately, Benz argued, responsibility extends beyond financial services.
He concluded: “How do you improve the way that we react to the social interactions that create a fraudulent environment? That’s not just a payments or a banking thing. That’s a society thing as well.”
