Welcome on #PaymentViews, your series of interviews of people who deal with payments!
In this interview we meet Paul, Financial Planning & Analysis Manager at Aircall. We talk about him, Aircall’s growth ambition and the challenges he faced with payments.

Hi Paul! We’re so glad to have you here! Could you tell us about Aircall, its growth ambitions & upcoming challenges?

Aircall is an advanced cloud-based phone system, a complete business phone and call center software combined in one single tool. It has dozens of integrations with CRMs, support and SaaS tools, and can be set up in a few minutes. Aircall is currently doubling each year, which is a challenge as the company gets bigger and bigger (currently around 200 employees). The biggest challenges for the next months will be to maintain that growth pace without impacting the quality of the product. A big emphasis is put on the customer experience, which has implications at all levels of the company. New features are also in the pipe to guarantee that Aircall stays on top of the market.

What’s your scope as a FP&A Manager?

My main responsibility is to help the management team take decisions by building financial and business models, forecasts and analysis. I also monitor the health of the business, and see where improvements could be made. For example, improving the level of our gross margin at Aircall is key in proving the long-term viability of our business to the investors.

Regarding payments, what are the issues you have been dealing with in the past and what will be the focus in the next months?

Credit card is the most versatile payment method, it has many benefits like getting the money quickly, but it’s also really expensive, especially in the US. The first goal has been to reduce processing fees as the percentage of the sales. In the coming months, we’ll have the additional goals to reduce the support needed for failed payments, and reduce the administrative workload of manual payments.

How does your payment setup looks like?

Most of our transactions occur by credit card, as our ARPA is rather low. A growing number of transactions go through direct debit or bank transfer. For credit cards, we’re now using three different payment gateways through ProcessOut, which gives us the flexibility of retrying transactions across them while optimizing our payment fees.

You’re using both Monitoring and Smart Routing products of ProcessOut. How do you use them on a daily basis?

I look at Telescope every day to check my authorization rate per gateway. As we’re still trying to optimize our routing, I often change our routing rules and monitor their performance through the analytic tools.

At ProcessOut we’ve developed Telescope, a free tool helping companies accepting online payments to audit the performance of their payments, to identify the weaknesses of their payment setup and to see how much money could be saved with which optimizations.