Young Payments Professional Scholar Spotlight – Sagar Khatwani, Aliaswire

It’s the most recent thing he paid for with cash, and Sagar Khatwani just barely had enough on hand to purchase it. For the bands playing the music venues Khatwani likes to frequent in his spare time, the electronic payments industry has been slower to penetrate the market. Most merch tables, it seems, are cash-only. The band t-shirt Khatwani wanted couldn’t be charged.

“You can’t always be prepared,” Khatwani, a 2018 Young Payments Professional Scholar, told Transaction Trends.

But as a Product Manager at Aliaswire Inc., a payments technology company, Khatwani was in some ways very prepared. In fact, Khatwani says, he felt it was his duty to add a “shameless plug” while at the merch table for PayVus®, the Aliaswire merchant services product that he manages at his day job. Khatwani says he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to explain how the concept of “Interchange Minus pricing” could help the merch table “reduce interchange and fees on credit card acceptance, while ensuring cashless customers like me don’t turn away.”

While Khatwani didn’t mention the outcome of the impromptu sales pitch in his interview with Transaction Trends, what is clear is Khatwani’s interest in and depth of understanding when it comes to developing and implementing novel ways to approach payments industry problems.

Khatwani came into the payments industry from the technology consulting world. After earning his B.E. in Information Technology from the University of Mumbai, and then graduating with an M.S. in Information Systems from Indiana University’s prestigious Kelley School of Business, he worked with clients in banking, payments, retail and healthcare with Deloitte and The Boston Consulting Group. A self-described generalist problem-solver, he was “naturally enticed” by the complexities and challenges of the payments industry while he was consulting for a B2B payments product.

“Given the type of problem this product was trying to solve, which was ultimately customer convenience, I was engrossed by payments with every passing day,” Khatwani says. Khatwani moved to Aliaswire, and now works with his team to simplify complex customer experience (CX) questions for the PayVus® product.

“I consider myself a huge cheerleader for the end-customer, which I believe is the primary reason why I love Product Management and CX design,” Khatwani says. “I always ask myself and try to understand the ‘so what’ of the problem and the resulting solution, and how this solution is going to create ease of use and ensure speed.”

Customers know what they want, where they want it, when they want it and that it needs to be fast, Khatwani says. And that leads him to be excited for what he sees as the customer-driven future of payments technology.

“In general, payments has seen a surge of innovation in recent years,” Khatwani says, “Blockchain has led the pack, but the commonality in this wave of innovation places customers in the driver’s seat. That’s where I believe the industry is headed.”

Voice payments, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, strategic partnerships between FinTechs and banks – he sees these as the trends and technologies that are moving the payments industry to more experienced-based products.

“With voice-triggered payments on the horizon, and IoT already making waves in the payments industry, CX is evolving even as I frame this response,” Khatwani says. “The time is nearer than ever, where ‘Alexa, pay my electricity bill’ could soon be a common statement at home. Pair that with the ability to originate and settle payments in real-time, and you have the perfect payments network that can satiate even the savviest of customers. The evolution is shaping towards getting close to the consumer.”

And the history, Khatwani says, is clear. “Physical branches to ATMs, to now. Payments are everywhere. They’re on your phone, your wrist watch, refrigerator and even on your smart assistant, to the point where transacting through a laptop now seems antiquated.”

His outlook on the future of payments? “It blows my mind to imagine the possibilities.”

YPP Spotlight Features is an editorial feature that highlights ETA’s Young Payments Professionals (YPP) Scholars to emphasize thought-leadership, storytelling and payments news. The 2018 ETA YPP Scholars represent the finest young minds across the payments technology ecosystem. You can read more about the program, which is sponsored by Discover Global Network, here.