Andrea Feinberg is the Head of Payments at loveholidays, the UK’s fastest-growing travel agent. She discusses her reasons for transitioning to the merchant side of the industry, highlights the importance of context-switching in her role, and shares her ambition to build a dedicated payments team.
I grew up with payments—my mother worked for 20 years in Visa’s commercial team in Argentina. However, I didn’t always envision following the same path. As a child, I dreamed of a career in architecture or design.My journey into the payments industry began after completing my master’s degree when I secured a job with Axalto in France, which has since been rebranded as Gemalto and later acquired by Thales. I entered the industry at a dynamic time in 2006, working in a company focused on POS terminals when mobile point-of-sale devices were just emerging. It was an exciting time.
Given my family’s payment experience, I understood the industry's complexity. It’s not just the technical aspects but also the challenge of aligning all the stakeholders in the ecosystem. The tricky part for me was learning about the European landscape.Gemalto provided me with valuable experience in bringing new products and concepts to market. However, it was when I joined Visa that I began to understand the broader payments industry. Payments are constantly evolving, and each role offers new opportunities for learning and growth. After spending over a decade working for payment providers, I was ready for a new challenge and decided to move to the merchant side of the industry.
I’ve always been interested in how payments affect customers’ experiences and buying behavior. During my last few years at Visa, I worked in the Merchants and Acquirer Value Proposition team. After that, I joined a payment solutions and gateway provider, where I developed products for Europe and serviced merchants again.While offering merchants various cost, price, and competitive options, I often thought, “I’d love to make these decisions myself.” That desire to directly impact the decision-making process ultimately drove me to move to the other side of the fence.
It’s not a prerequisite, but it certainly helps. Over the years, I’ve developed an instinct for spotting trends quickly and, when incidents occur, the ability to swiftly identify the source by asking the right questions. This skill comes from being deeply immersed in the details and performing analytical tasks over time.Working in payments requires analyzing, understanding, and communicating a wide range of information to different stakeholders. It takes a particular mindset to do this effectively. You must also have the technical and financial acumen necessary to balance cost control, compliance, and infrastructure needs.
Payments is a horizontal function that impacts every aspect of the business, from the back end to the front end. My role sits within the finance team, but collaboration is a key aspect of my job, as payments touch many different parts of the business. I frequently engage with multiple teams: tech, product, and engineering teams who help implement my projects; customer service teams who handle customer inquiries and issues, marketing and brand teams who optimize our website; and legal teams to sign new agreements. You must collaborate constantly to ensure that payments are seamlessly integrated into all business areas.
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