The general manager of payments at Asos has said that in the near future AI will play an “even more important” role in the personalisation of the checkout.

On Wednesday during a panel at Money 2020 in Amsterdam, Bono van Nijnatten said that AI will allow merchants to understand who a specific customer is and what there needs are.

“We’re not there yet but we are getting there,” continued van Nijnatten, who is also a member of the board at Asos.

He went on to say that payments has become a more significant player in the infrastructure of organisations.

During the panel discussion, which explored the role of embedded finance and payments in hyper-personalisation, Sameer Kurani EMEA head payments solutions specialist at JP Morgan, agreed that payments is becoming more of a first thought when it comes to “end-to-end design”.

Kurani said that payments is now “beyond money movement”, with more focus on the peripheral services that can add value.

Who should be responsible for payments?

Asos' Bono van Nijnatten said that payments should be the responsibility of the chief product officer (CPO) rather than the chief financial officer (CFO) because if the latter doesn’t know much about payments they always run the risk of treating it as a commodity.

If payments is treated as a commodity, he continued, companies won’t effectively utilise the valuable data associated with transactions and will risk missing out on turning this information into insight and increasing conversion.

Likewise the payments general manager said that if the chief technology officer is put in charge, they too may not fully understand payments.

“Payments can be a scary thing; what if something goes wrong?” he said. “With the CPO you’ve got a better chance of payments never being an afterthought.”

Money 2020 Europe is taking place at the RAI Amsterdam from 4 June - 6 June.

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