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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Women Leaders in Payments: Ahalya Vijay, VP Product Operations at Worldpay | Episode 412
What happens when your work drains rather than energizes you? For Ahalya Vijay, VP of Product Operations at Worldpay, this realization sparked a pivotal career transformation from consulting to product leadership in payments.
In this illuminating conversation for Women Leaders in Payments month, Ahalya shares her global journey from Singapore to the crossroads of product and technology transformation. With remarkable candor, she reveals how an exercise mapping her energy levels across various projects led to a career-defining revelation: her superpower lies in cross-functional leadership, bringing diverse perspectives together to create tangible solutions.
At WorldPay, Ahalya leads Product Operations across three critical domains: strategy planning, analytics reporting, and operating model transformation. She describes product management as "a constant game of trade-offs," requiring data-driven decision-making to prioritize initiatives with limited resources. Her collaborative leadership style enables her to be a bridge between business functions while empowering team members to reach their potential.
The conversation ventures into artificial intelligence's transformative impact on payments, with Ahalya detailing how Worldpay is embedding AI into products while developing responses to its implications for tokenization, fraud prevention, and KYC. She also highlights open banking's potential growth in the US market, with Worldpay planning significant product launches in coming quarters.
Perhaps most valuable is Ahalya's distinction between mentorship and sponsorship. While mentors advise, sponsors "solve for your potential before you're aware of it," creating opportunities by advocating for you in rooms where you aren't present. Her advice for women in payments? "Own your impact and your story. Become comfortable talking about yourself because you're your best advocate."
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and this episode is part of our Women Leaders in Payments month, something we do every year in the month of July, and it's one of my favorite times of the year. This year's theme is redefining leadership, influence, impact and innovation. So those are some of the things you're going to be hearing about during the month of July. So first, a special thank you to our sponsors. Our title sponsor is WorldPay, our participating sponsors are VisiPay and Payrock, and our episode sponsors are the Clearinghouse and Genico and PaySafe. So special thanks to those companies. Today, I'm honored to have as our special guest Ahalya Vijay, vp of Product Operations at WorldPay. So thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, greg, absolutely. So let's dive in with kind of a fun icebreaker. If you could have dinner with any woman in history, past or present, who would that be and why, and what kind of restaurant would you go to?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I laughed when I read this question because I had an answer almost immediately. Actually, when I first saw the question I was like, oh, what am I going to answer to this? But then I actually had it in my back pocket. So it's going to be Michelle Obama.
Speaker 3:I really admire her. I think she has amazing gravitas, poise. She's so articulate. Anything she says both seems very authentic, very thoughtful. She doesn't shy away from difficult questions in the public limelight and I think she you know just the way that she approached the first lady job was very I found it awesome how she was. You know she was there for the family, she kind of took a backseat in her career to support the president, but at the same time she also had her you know initiatives that she was driving and they were good ones too. And yeah, and so I mean I'm a bit of a fangirl of Michelle Obama yeah, that would be great to have dinner with her. I don't know in terms of restaurant, probably like down to earth, casual kind of restaurant. Yeah, I'm quite flexible when it comes to you know, just good vibe music in the background, some good wine, happy to go anywhere.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, great. Well, let's talk a little bit about your background and your career. So maybe tell us about where you grew up, where you studied, maybe what led you into the payments industry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure so you know. Growing up I moved around a lot. I was born in India. Yeah, sure so you know. Growing up I moved around a lot. I was born in India, spent most of my growing up, you know, being brought up in Singapore, where we moved to when I was about three, so I'm actually Singaporean. And then I moved to Canada for my undergrad. So I went to McGill University there, met my future husband at McGill and then he's Canadian, so then we ended up staying in Canada, starting our careers there. I've lived and worked in Canada, us and the UK, so I'm currently based in London now and I actually spent some time in the US as well, living in Chicago. I did my master's, my MBA and a master's in design at Kellogg at Northwestern University. That was a great time and I also worked in the US as well. So, yeah, moved around a lot.
Speaker 3:The first chapter of my career was in management, consulting. So I worked at McKinsey in the digital practice and I spent over a decade helping financial institutions kind of respond to competitive threats and, you know, digital attacker competitive threats and also changing customer preferences by building digital products and journeys for their customers, and this ranged all the way from, you know, acquisition all the way through to servicing operations, like different types of products that they wanted to surface on mobile and digital channels, and that was my first kind of exposure to the world of product and I absolutely loved it. I played a lot of interim product manager roles as these FIs were building this capability to. You know, it was a new capability for them to have cross-functional product managers, and so we often played interim product manager roles teaching the org how to do this and I absolutely loved it. And so I decided at some point last year that I didn't want to stay in consulting, I wanted to work in product. That's really where I got a lot of energy. And at that point WorldPay had just spun off from FIS and they were embarking on a major growth and product transformation, and so somebody introduced me to the new CPO at WorldPay and then the rest is history and I thought this would be a great opportunity to come here and help to drive the product transformation at WorldPay.
Speaker 3:Well, let's dive a little deeper into what you do, so maybe explain kind of your role there at WorldPay. It's a global remit and essentially this is a relatively new discipline in product management and tech. So there are many flavors of it depending on you know what the business needs are, what their strategy transformation and also making significant investment in modernizing our product and tech portfolio. And so it's a transformation role. It's a strategic kind of change and transformation kind of team that ProductOps is at WorldPay. And there are three kind of elements to this there's strategy and planning, there's analytics and reporting, and then there's changing our operating model, so how we develop and take products to market and commercialize them. So I'll just cover them off one by one to say a bit more about each of them. So strategy and planning, you know what that is is.
Speaker 3:You know product management is a constant game of trade-offs. You want to do like 10 things. You actually only have resource to do four things. So which four are you going to choose and how deep are you going to go? And do you think you could squeeze in five and six? And so to help make those decisions, you need data, you need to consider customer demand, you need to consider business viability, you need to work with engineers, the lines of business, the customer facing part of the organization. So it's a very cross-functional kind of decision-making process, and so my team essentially puts in place the process, routines, the cadence, the data to enable this kind of decision-making at the senior levels of product and across the business.
Speaker 3:On analytics and reporting, we're shaping kind of the narrative of what WorldPay product is doing, working closely with product marketing externally and then internally as well, across the product organization and WorldPay as a whole. And we're also using data to inform, go forward roadmaps as well. So we're investing a lot in building and improving self-serve kind of data dashboards for product managers to get a pulse of how products are doing, you know, ideate on how they should improve products going forward. And then, thirdly, changing our operating model. So here I think the big focus for us is how can we create a consistent, scalable, repeatable go-to-market motion so we're actually maximizing the value capture from our product investment. So that's a major focus for the next six months, but you can think of this as like an evolving backlog of strategic projects. At some point later in the year we're also going to start picking up my team will pick up the product integration work, also to prepare for the acquisition by global payments as well. So yeah, those three things In terms of what excites me.
Speaker 3:I think you know this has been a tremendous learning opportunity.
Speaker 3:I've been at WorldPay now and this is my first kind of job in payments as well, so I'm relatively new to the industry, and what excites me is just how much I can learn from this company. I mean, everywhere we are, product suite is massive. We serve like so many different segments and so many different flavors. We have like over 100 product partners, so we go to market in many different ways and so I can learn a lot. I also have you know anything. Any changes I institute affect a massive organization. So you know there's a potential to have impact at scale, and I've just been pleasantly surprised by how much people want to collaborate and how much people actually care about the company. So I think a big part of our value proposition in the industry I've heard over and over again is our people. I do see that because I work with so many different parts of the business, because it's such a cross-functional team, so I'm just learning a lot and just this amount of scaled impact that I could have in this role is awesome as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, great, great. Well, thanks for sharing that. So let's switch gears a little bit. Talk about leadership and lessons learned. So you know, as you know, leadership is evolving. It has tremendously over the years. So how would you define modern leadership and how do you embody that on a daily basis?
Speaker 3:This is a tough question to answer. I think for me. I've realized that the kinds of roles I really thrive in are when I'm bringing together and leading a cross-functional team. I really enjoy diversity. I love working with people with diverse backgrounds and kind of playing the translator role and leading them and influencing them and being able to speak like different languages, different business languages, to get things to happen. Because what I've seen, you know it's really exciting to see something come to life, see something tangible come to life in terms of product. So this is really where I feel like I'm at my best and really contributing the most to the organization. I think it's.
Speaker 3:I'm a very collaborative leader and cross-functional leader, so, and I try to compose very diverse teams. It doesn't have to be only ethnic you know, background diversity, but also diversity of function. So I think like it really really improves the answer to bring in people from different teams together to solve a problem and get different perspectives to solve the problem as well. So I really try to be a bridge, I try to identify ways to partner and collaborate with other parts of the business and then I like to also empower people. So I think this is the other thing, like a balance between how much specific instruction and guidance you give versus how much room you give to people. And as I work with more, you know in consulting you work with highly motivated, like young talent all the time. There's more diversity of talent at world pace, so I'm learning. You know how to do this in different contexts all the time, but I think that's really important as well to help people solve for their potential before they're even aware of it Makes sense.
Speaker 2:So, when you step back and look at your career, have you had any kind of I call them aha moments, but kind of moments that really defined or helped define your career?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I spoke a little bit about this earlier, but I think one big moment happened last year when I realized that what I was doing was actually draining my energy and not really leveraging kind of my superpowers or, you know, giving me energy. You know I was feeling really stressed out at work. A friend recommended this book called Designing your Own Life. A friend recommended this book called Designing your Own Life and so it had this exercise where you basically had to plot out, you know, over the like, different projects or different things that you did over the course of your career Could also be like personal projects and write down kind of how you felt, what gave you energy, what took away energy in each of those moments. And you know I did that exercise, thinking I wouldn't really get much out of it, but it was very obvious that you know what gave me energy was working with cross-functional teams, like influencing stakeholders to do things differently, drive change in an organization. I also got a lot of energy from looking at the big picture, solving like an intellectual problem, like a hard problem, but then also seeing it through to execution. I really liked to implement, see it through to execution, bring something tangible to fruition, a master's in design innovation and I really like the whole design thinking model of problem solving as well, reframing the problem, like you know, not just asking customers what they want and just building that, but going under the surface to understand their motivation, drivers and behaviors and abstracting that away to come up with a solution, because a lot of the times customers don't want know what they want. So I really enjoyed that as well. So I realized that, you know, progressing and consulting wasn't really going to give me that, because it was getting increasingly commercial, like less focused on delivery, and I realized also that there was a clear pattern where, you know, I had done work that checked all these boxes, which was when I was, you know, playing an interim product manager role in various projects.
Speaker 3:So I decided to start, kind of like leave consulting after over a decade and start a new chapter in product, which I mean it was a big decision. It took me like I don't know, two months, like you know, to make my peace with that decision. I was like whoa, this is really big and it was scary. But now, looking back, you know, I think consulting gave me a lot of the ingredients to be effective in product. So I think it was the right decision. I'm really enjoying this experience. It comes with other challenges, like it's not perfect all the time. Obviously there's always like trade-offs, but I think it was the right decision the time. Obviously there's always like trade offs, but I think it was the right decision. I wake up every day like excited about the problems that we're trying to solve at WorldPay. So, yeah, I think that really shaped my go forward career.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. So what do you think is something that women bring to the table that our industry needs more of?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've spoken a little bit about it, but I really think, like diverse perspectives improves the answer.
Speaker 3:It also improves the way that the team operates. You know there's been a ton of research on how women operate versus how men operate and all the strengths, and you know that women and men both bring to the table. So I kind of argue that what we need is gender balance, like we need both men and women to show up and care about diversity. That's really what you know, what we need, and I think it'll show, in the way that the team comes together, the quality of the answer, the solutions and also, I think now you know we're at a point where you know clients like to work with partners that have gender balance and that look like them, like teams are, also like talent is attracted to work with leaders. You know where they see that they could be that person, like you know, five, 10 years down the road, right. So I think gender balance is really critical and I think we need both men and women, you know, at the table. Honestly, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but that's really what I, that's what I think.
Speaker 2:Okay, Okay, great. So let's talk a little bit about innovation and influence. So, as you know or at least I'm sure you have heard since you've been in payments that it's a ever-changing, fast-changing innovative industry.
Speaker 3:So how do you stay innovative as a leader? Yeah, it's hard. I mean it's like really hard to be externally focused in this role, especially because a lot of the work that I'm doing is trying to improve, like the way WorldPay does X, so just product development or, you know, whatever the topic is that we're trying to fix. So I have to sort of carve out time to be externally oriented. So what I've started to do is I have like this backlog of like podcasts and newsletters that I kind of read, go through. You know, I refer to it every time I'm in transit. So I take a train in to work. It takes, like you know, 40 minutes or whatever. So I sit on it and I listen or I read. I subscribe to few like FinTech newsletters and papers. I think the two most frequented ones that I use are FT and the FinTech Brain Food newsletter. So I spend a lot of time reading that. I also follow a bunch of like writers and podcasters on product product development, product management. I just like find it really helpful to listen to other companies how they're solving stories and how they're solving like product challenges, and I take a lot of that learning to WorldPay as well Over the December holidays.
Speaker 3:You know, I started this job in October. Over the December holidays, I started this job in October. Over the December holidays, I read a bunch of books on product operations and payments, and so I do that as well. So I try and carve out time to do that as well. And then the product leadership team at WorldPay have a WhatsApp chat and a Teams chat and we're constantly sharing information and, of course, conferences and events as well. But yeah, I mean it's really challenging because there's just so much content being generated all the time. What do you read? How do you create? Carve out time for that? It is always a constant thing.
Speaker 2:Right right right. So what's one trend or change in the industry that you're really keeping an eye on?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's got to be AI. You're probably I don't know how often you've heard that Every time yeah, yeah, it's got to be AI. I mean, we're doing a bunch of things on AI at WorldPay, but this is also one that you know we're going to have to like wait and see also how like industry players act and how we want to partner with them or not. So I think we're doing a bunch of things. We've already been embedding ML and then AI now in our products. So we're continuing to do that and scale that up Right now in the throes of developing a response, or shaping our response, to agentic AI and its implications on things like tokenization and fraud prevention and KYC. There's also a question about how we choose to work with other industry stakeholders on this topic as well, because it's such an evolving space.
Speaker 3:Everyone is announcing new things every other day.
Speaker 3:I think we were at Money 2020 a few months ago, and while we were at Money 2020, there were announcements by the networks on like things they were doing on agentic AI as well, and then we're doing a whole bunch of like internal productivity experimentation as well.
Speaker 3:So we're using AI in product development, like to write user stories and things like that, and we're using AI in product development, like to write user stories and things like that, and we're also using it in tech as well, like Copilot. And then we also have a chat GPT kind of secure chat GPT kind of instance that I actually use almost every day and it really helps on some of the research tasks or like small tasks that I need to do throughout the day. So, yeah, I mean this is huge, like I think it has like transformational impact, especially on the payments industry, and we're just going to have to keep closely monitoring you know what our competitors are doing, spot opportunities proactively to improve our product offering and remain competitive. Right, and we have a global presence. So there's that added complication as well because, just like our surface area is so massive. So how do we keep a pulse on?
Speaker 2:I think it's one of the few things that have come along in generations where it can not only affect inside the company and how people work, but also externally, right, so it's not something that's a factor that just affects the industry, but it affects people and how their productivity works. And I don't know it's just. Ai is fascinating to me, so I'm not surprised that it's been one of the main answers. But yeah, I love to hear people talk about sort of what they're doing in the space.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean. The other thing that we're very bullish on and watching closely is open banking and how it evolves in the US. On and watching closely is open banking and how it evolves in the US. You know watch the space like we have some exciting product launches planned in the space over the next few quarters but we're very bullish. We think there's going to be significant growth and evolution in this space in the US over the next few years.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about mentorship and impact. So, have you had women influential in your career? Maybe you know who they were. How did they sort of influence your career?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I'd like to reframe it to be not about mentorship but more about sponsorship. I've actually found sponsorship kind of more transformational on my career because you know sponsors solve for your potential, like they see your potential, they solve for your potential. They create opportunities for you before you even are aware that there is an opportunity. Often they're like much more senior than you and they're in rooms that you aren't and they talk about you in the room when you're not there and create opportunities for you to kind of progress in your career. So all kind of my progressions to where I am now was through sponsors not all of them women, actually. Most of, actually most of them were men. There were some women but most of them were men. It was all through sponsorship giving me an opportunity because they saw the potential not necessarily because I'd done it before and they saw the raw intrinsic. So I think that's really influenced my career and kind of the shape of it.
Speaker 2:Well, what's one piece of advice that you could give someone? Maybe? That's maybe look like similar to what you did is changing careers and they look at payments and they say, you know, hey, I might want to, you know, build my career there. If you had to give them just one piece of advice, what would that be?
Speaker 3:I'd say become comfortable talking about what you've done and the impact that you've had on you. Know the work that you've done in your career. I think a lot of women talk about and I'm guilty of this as well like we default to you know, we and teams and the company. And I think, like, own your impact and own your story and become comfortable talking about yourself because you're your best advocate.
Speaker 2:No, that's a great answer. Yeah, I mean, own your own story is a is a great answer to that question. So I appreciate that. I don't know if you. I didn't mean to interrupt, so I don't know if you want to elaborate on that.
Speaker 3:No, I mean like just you know, I guess the other piece of advice that I got is like reduce the cognitive burden.
Speaker 3:You know, when I was like looking and networking for my next role, like reduce the cognitive burden on the person you're talking to to help you. Like they want to just assume they want to help you and reduce the cognitive burden on them. Like make it easy for them to help you. So tell them what your value prop is. Like. Tell them what you've done, tell them the impact. Like own your story and give them the words, whether it's written or in the conversation. And I think, from what I've observed, like a lot of women don't do that as strongly as they're kind of you know, their mindset is more and I think this has been shown in the research as well their mindset is more like let my work speak for itself. But yeah, I mean it's really critical Like people you know communication is really critical, I think, and cutting through the noise with and helping people help you I guess was really helpful during my search last year for a new role.
Speaker 2:Okay, Okay, let's end the conversation with a fun question. So when you look at your phone, what is the number one app that you use that is not business related, and what does that say about?
Speaker 3:you. Yeah, I think it's going to be a four-way tie between like, spotify and camera or photos app. I have a four-year-old I didn't mention earlier so he basically controls my spotify and photos agenda and we have steadily been increasing our subscription tier to like google photos because we don't have the heart to like, delete anything. So I don't know, I don't know what the bill will be like 10 years from now, but like, yeah, so that on my personal side. And then I also use WhatsApp and FT a lot. I'm in FT, the Financial Times app, and WhatsApp. I know WhatsApp isn't really used in the US, I guess as much, but everyone runs their life on WhatsApp in all the other countries that I have. You know relationships and family in.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, Okay, okay, great. Well, we've covered a lot of ground. Obviously you know a lot of great topics here. I really appreciate that. Just want to kind of open the floor, see if there's anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up.
Speaker 3:Not really Well. I'd be curious to understand what trends you're looking at as well in the payment space. What have you heard from others in terms of innovations and trends?
Speaker 2:You know, I think AI is huge, right. I think the challenge we talked about it, so I don't want to elaborate too much on it. But I think the challenge with AI is sort of yes, we know it's being used in fraud and the fraudsters are using it against us and all of that, right, that's kind of an easy one, but there's so many more use cases, so I think it's interesting to me how that evolves. I think you kind of mentioned open banking. I've always been fascinated with what other countries are doing versus what the US is doing. I've always thought kind of the A2A payments thing, where you're paying straight through your account at a retail establishment as opposed to bill pay or those kind of logical things. I think is an interesting thing that's going to open up in the US. I'm fascinated with things like PIX in Brazil and how they've really gotten technology to work in that country using your mobile phone and a QR code, so that's been fascinating.
Speaker 2:The other big one that I hear a lot about recently and I'm getting a lot of requests around stable coins and kind of what that means, and I'm not sure if you're familiar, but the US just enacted some laws or some legislation that is going to affect that called the Genius Act. I don't know the details, but anyway I know it's related to sort of the whole crypto world the stable coins, blockchain, all of those I think are still kind of like wait and see, let's figure it out. And I think with this maybe new administration here, they're going to be a little more aggressive on opening up and allowing, you know, real innovation to happen. So that's one that I'm hearing a lot about and people are talking a good bit about.
Speaker 3:Yeah Cool, it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:It is. It is, and I'm glad you asked because you know those are things that you know I'm hearing about every day, so I'd love to share that, but I think, unless you have anything else, we can wrap up the show. Yeah, that sounds good, okay. Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I know your time's super valuable, so thank you so much for being on the show today.
Speaker 3:Thanks, thanks, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Great, I really enjoyed it, and thank you to all you listeners out there. I really appreciate your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.