Pagos is a Payments Data Platform that provides data aggregation, visualization, and monitoring solutions for both merchants and for companies processing payments for merchants. Pagos also operates as a Network Token Service Provider, and equips businesses with the tools needed to drive better outcomes from their payments data; this includes Benchmarking, Data Streaming, Global Account Updater, and BIN Data Services. The company was founded in 2021 by Klas Bäck and Albert Drouartand is backed by Infinity Ventures, Point 72 Ventures, Arbor Ventures, Tarsadia Capital, and Underscore VC. Pagos’ client portfolio includes Adobe, Crocs, Eventbrite, GoFundMe, McAfee, StubHub, and Warner Bros.
Almost all companies struggle to be data driven when it comes to their payments and billing operations. As such, they often lose revenue, operate at a higher cost than necessary, run too many manual processes, and have no way to hold their vendors accountable. For those that already see the value in making their payments data a strategic asset, the only effective way to do so without incurring high costs is to acquire better tools that can help them take control to drive the outcomes they want.
Pagos work with two types of customers today:
Merchants typically rely on Pagos to help them aggregate, normalize, visualize, and monitor all their payments data with the intent to baseline their performance, track vital metrics, find issues and optimization opportunities, and benchmark against their peers. A key focus area for most Pagos users is tracking and improving all of the following: payments approval rates, fraud rule effectiveness, chargeback mitigation, payment acceptance cost management, routing,retry strategies and so much more. The data Pagos aggregates and normalizes can also be streamed back to a customers' data warehouses or data lakes and used to hold their vendors accountable. Pagos even provide tools to help merchant’s enrich and use their payments data to drive better outcomes such as increased sales and lower costs.
Pagos enable companies processing payments for others to expand their platforms with critical functionality. With Pagos in their toolkit, they can help their merchant customers process payments better, gain critical insight about their own customers and platforms, and even proactively monitor for opportunities, issues, and risk. Practical examples include transaction monitoring and visualization, network tokenization, account updater, and BIN data services.
Almost all companies are suffering from not being able to effectively use their payments data to drive better outcomes. A few have built internal systems or processes to analyze and act on payments data, but even they can partner with Pagos to do so more efficiently and on a grander scale. For the majority of businesses, they haven’t been able to access modular tools like these—much less build something themselves—before Pagos entered the market, and therefore operate at a much higher cost and with more friction than they should.
While knowing how hard it is for almost all companies to leverage their payments data was the driver for us to launch Pagos in the first place, it has been very surprising how little almost everyone has been able to do on their own. Payments are hard to do well, and most companies are flying completely blind in driving payments processes or operations—something they likely find unacceptable for all other parts of the company but accept as status quo for payments. While some businesses have tried to take on payments optimization and data analysis on their own, they’re often operating on stale or incomplete data and need additional assistance and tools.
It also always amazes us how opaque the payments industry is. As a result, it’s very hard for most companies to determine what they should do and what good or great performance actually looks like. Most of their processing vendors and partners are unable or unwilling to help generate the clarity and insight to what needs to be done or provide the flexibility to help their customers do what is best for them. As such, the value and results Pagos delivers to our customer is higher than even we originally thought.
A good investor is critical to the building of great companies. They provide advice on scaling, vendors, help with growing fantastic teams and products, and offer network connections to potential partners and customers—all of which contribute immensely to the long term success of a company. Unfortunately, many investors can’t or aren’t willing to put in the work and support required to be an important partner. Not the Infinity team! They are part of our family and have been invaluable to help us grow and scale the company over the last couple of years. From giving strategic advice on anything from small to big topics, to providing that key introduction needed to get to the next level, Infinity has been a huge asset to the Pagos team. We highly recommend everyone get Infinity on their cap table ASAP if they can.
We are already working with some of the biggest trail blazers in the payments space and actively collaborating with leading global brands to help them not only drive better outcomes from their payments operations, but turn payments into a strategic asset where they can have full control. This collaboration has resulted in (or will soon) our rolling out a number of new services that will help them take advantage of their payments data in completely new ways to further drive scale and performance improvements.
That being said, not every business has a specialized payments team that’s ready immediately to take advantage of our suite of products to improve their payment operations. For those companies, we’re working to make it easier than ever to access Pagos and quickly derive value by doing the fundamentals better and then scale from there. Whether they start by just baselining their own operations and understanding where optimization opportunities exist, or they’re ready to advance from ok, to good, to great performance outcomes, Pagos has their back.
