Gloria Colgan, SVP and Global Head of Product, Commercial Solutions at Visa, on a future without passwords, AI agents that buy on your behalf, and bringing consumer-grade UX to business payments.
Gloria leads Commercial Solutions product at Visa. She was previously CMO at Velo Payments and President of PYMNTS.com, and is a founding LP of How Women Invest and executive board member at How Women Lead.
Carol is Yuno's Chief Business Officer and the host of Payments Unpacked. She brings two decades of experience from Google, where she worked on contactless payments, and from across the global fintech ecosystem.
Hello, everyone, I'm Carol Grunberg, your host and the Chief Business Officer at Yuno. Yuno is a global payment infrastructure platform. We use payment orchestration to make it easy for businesses to accept and manage payments all over the world. And I'm super excited today because my guest is an industry expert and a close friend, Gloria Colgan. She is currently the SVP and Global Head of Product for Commercial Solutions at Visa. Gloria was also the Chief Marketing Officer for Velo Payments. She was also the president for PYMNTS.com. She's also a founding LP in How Women Invest and she's an executive board member for How Women Lead. We first connected through what is now Paytech Women. We've been business partners and friends for well over a decade. She's been championing global payments and women-led initiatives for quite a while and really making a huge impact in our industry. So Gloria, thank you so much.
Thank you for having me, Carol. It's my pleasure.
All right. So should we jump right into it?
Yeah, yeah, let's go.
All right, so you've been at the forefront of a lot of things within payments. You've been with incumbents, you've been with FinTech, all over the world, quite frankly, done a lot of good domestic stuff, cross-border. So I'm going to start kind of in the earlier days. When you were at Chase, and now actually at Visa, which is really the world's first and largest FinTech, right? Before FinTech was FinTech, but there was FinTech. And it's the largest FinTech globally. So it's quite phenomenal. You've seen massive growth of this industry domestically and internationally. Can you tell me a little bit more about the payment innovations you've seen and the things that really have excited you through the years?
Yeah. You know, one of the things that excites me — and I could talk about this for like an hour, so I have to try to focus on the big ones — and it's still an innovation today, which is authentication. It's authentication of the individual. So you know who you're getting a payment from is who you believe it to be, or the request that you're getting is who you believe it to be. Which is getting harder all the time with fraud, etc. And we've come a long way in that authentication process, but there's still further to go. And it's trying to eliminate that ultimate friction. I want to be able to get rid of passwords ubiquitously across the entire ecosystem. And we're on our way for that, to be able to do that with biometrics and facial recognition and fingerprints and just things that eliminate all that friction. But it's still a process and it's still something that's been an evolutionary process for sure.
You took me back. I love that you said authentication because it is so important and it's been persistent and the need to figure out how to make this easier for everyone. Around 2012, I remember Larry Page at the time was CEO of Google and he gave us the seed and he said, get rid of passwords. Like get rid of passwords. And I think we've all been trying to figure out how to do that. And especially in financial services, as you said, it's so critical.
Yes. It's so critical. And there are things we're doing that introduce additional steps, which is why there's new innovations with passkeys as an example. You see passkeys coming up now. We've got our own passkey to really have that be like a one and done. So you don't have to leave another location. But yeah, it's a constant challenge. And it's something that I think you can't stop trying to invest in and trying to get further. The other big one that really happened, I think it started happening in the early 2000s, maybe late 2000s, was embedded payments. The classic case of Uber, right? Taking away the friction of having to take out your money and pay for a cab. When you're done with the ride, you're done with the ride. And the payment is automatically happening in the background. And that's just continuing to come on even stronger. Now you're actually starting to see it also within commercial payments — embedding credentials within ERP solutions. So if I'm paying an invoice, I don't have to stop, figure out if it's all matched up, then go somewhere else to make the payment. I can automatically, seamlessly embed a credential in the background and pay with a Visa account while you're sitting in your ERP. Again, it's all about eliminating friction. But there's so many different elements that you live and work that it takes a while to work this way through the ecosystem. So I think that's another really fascinating one. It's been started for quite a while, but again, it's going to continue to accelerate.
Right. And this is one where we're excited. So at Yuno, as you know, we're partners and we're trying to solve this together. And so this has been really exciting in our journey. And I think, you know, it's interesting you brought up the ERP side, so on enterprise accounts, which is — well, we work a lot with enterprise clients, but across SMB as well. Whatever the form factor — in-app payment, point of sale, any form factor — it's continuously evolving across small businesses and large enterprises, authentication and the ability to eliminate the friction is really important. And so I love what you guys are doing. I love that we're partnering on this together. So this is great.
And maybe I'll bring this up in the last one. I'm sure we'll probably end up talking about this a lot today in a variety of forms. But it's AI for sure. And the shocking thing is that this has been around for a long time. I think it's kind of starting to become a household word now. The Alexas and Siris and all those that operate off of AI — and even fraud tools. We've been investing in AI for over 60 years. So it's just taking on new capabilities and acceleration with Gen.ai is all together different, which is why I think it's super exciting. I can't imagine a world where if we hadn't had AI to attack fraud over the past few decades where we would be. So I think those are really game-changing kind of applications.
In that vein, can you talk a little bit more about what Commercial Solutions is at Visa?
People kind of think about Visa as — I'm going out and buying a pair of shoes and I'm using my Visa card to pay. That's when I'm like a consumer, right? A consumer is doing the shopping. Commercial Solutions is when an entity, any kind of company — whether you're a creator and an influencer, you're running your own company, a sole proprietor, mid-market company, or the really large multinationals — when they're using a Visa product to either make or receive their payments. So our Commercial Solutions is the business that manages all those products that companies use to make their Visa payments with. It's pretty big because that's vast. It's an enormous global network going from small to very large, and they very different needs. So the things that we build and deliver for them are very different. And then of course, we work with partners like Yuno and financial institutions to distribute those products everywhere in the ecosystem. We are global. It's across all regions. So it's a pretty complex business. But it's really fun, really dynamic.
It always keeps everyone on their toes, that's for sure. I think that's why we've stayed in this industry for so long. It's always changing, it's great. So I think — one of the fascinating trends is the evolution of digital payments, which you touched on a bit already. It's moving toward more convenient, transparent, efficient — real-time payments, integration of AI for fraud deterrent purposes, etc. Do you see changes within regions or do you see kind more of a global innovations that need to transpire?
That's a great question. I'd say they're global trends, but they're in different degrees and in different stages. The big one again, back on the commercial side, is the consumerization of commercial payments — the things that we've grown to be very accustomed to: highly digital, beautiful, elegant interfaces, do everything on my phone, make it easy on my phone. That's taken a long time to be able to use those kinds of tools in your work experience. It's clunky and a pain in the neck. That's finally changing. So all of the learnings that we've built on the consumer side are really starting to be used and adapted in commercial, including really large and it's moving pretty fast. The other one — coming back to AI — one of the things that's just a little mind-blowing now is as we talk about agentic commerce and agentic AI. No longer having to run models necessarily to come up with ideas, but there's actual agents that can perform those tasks that a human used to. I used to have to do search myself. And then once I figured out where I something that I liked, then I'd look into it further. Then I'd say, OK, I want to buy it. And then I'd have to put in all my payment. I mean, now you can have — this is coming. It's not mass adoption yet — but the ability to have parameters on what you're looking for. Then let the agent just go look for it and come back and say, hey, you want this? And I say, yes. And then they execute everything behind the scenes. They buy it and it shows up at your door. It's pretty astonishing when you think about it.
Yeah, the learning curve and the execution speed is just phenomenal.
It's unbelievable. And I think that's the other thing — just understanding how rapidly this stuff is moving. I used to think that the smartphone adoption was a fast adoption rate, and what's happening within AI today blows that away.
But it's the confluence of everything happening at once, which makes it the perfect environment for all of this coexistence at scale. So really interesting.
Yes. That's right. Now, going back to whether it's global or regional, I think in a lot of the emerging markets and countries, they can kind of start de novo. And that's sometimes where we see the real innovation happening. Like in Asia Pacific, you're very familiar with that region. They didn't have a lot of old legacy that they had to work with. They could just start with a mobile-first, digital-first application. Unlike the US and the UK, which have a lot of older infrastructure that's very big, very efficient, very digitized — but newness might take a while because you have to ingrain it across so many different entities. Sometimes you see adoption happening faster or that spark of innovation happening faster in emerging countries and then being adopted by the more mature.
True. And I think you're right. The lack of legacy systems makes it easier to leapfrog, which is the term we always hear. But I think also the mass population sizes — everyone is able to test things so rapidly because so many people are on your systems. And I think that goes to what you were saying about enterprise now in commercial solutions, trying to bring the best of the consumer world into the enterprise or commercial world. It gets tested out with the mass populations with lower volume, higher frequency of transactions. And now it could get applied over to enterprise.
That's exactly right. Great point. It is fascinating. And it constantly keeps you on your toes to think about not having the walls — like, well, that's my personal life and what I experience, and this is my work life. No, merge those together. What do you like? What works? What doesn't work? And apply it across the board.
It's fascinating. Right. Okay, I'm going to pivot a little bit. A lot of people that are listening to this podcast are payment leaders or CFOs, product leaders, and they're trying to understand in many ways how to focus their payment strategy. Based on how quickly consumer behavior evolves — in one market you could be doing something and another one, it's a completely different form of payment. What is your advice to those leaders trying to do a global payment strategy with kind of localization embedded?
It's hard. I mean, I think you really do have to keep up with technology — at least understanding it. You might not be applying it, but understand what's happening. Really do try to keep tuned in to trends and applications around the world — Brazil, India, China. Not just UK, US. Because a lot of the things that are happening there are things that we will ultimately adopt in the US. So it's kind of like constant listening and learning is number one. But then I'd say try to move as much as you can to configurability. Have your core in your basis from a tech perspective, the base stack — but then make things as configurable as you can at the edges so that you're not having to completely rewrite and do something completely custom in a particular market, particularly if you're a global company. Sometimes that's easier said than done. With today's modern tech and with also an API focus and eliminating a UI, you can get a lot of mileage out of a global solution. I mean, we do — we try to make everything globally available. Then it has to be tweaked locally. If you do that thoughtfully, you can probably accomplish a huge majority of what you're trying to build. Again, with an eye of where things are going and having a good vision and strategy state for where you're trying to go. Within that, I'd also say you absolutely have to have a digital strategy. You can't do this without a digital strategy. Really an interesting statistic to me — I'm continually surprised by this — the percent of the population that is digital native, so they grew up with digital devices and technology, is now 43% globally. 43% of either consumers or employees or your clients are digitally native. So they just won't accept old, clunky stuff anymore. You have to think about how to either become digitally native, transform, or start out that way in the first place.
Yeah. And you know, when you think about some regions of Africa where the average population is 18, or Philippines, I think it's 26, Indonesia 28 — they're almost a generation younger than the US and Europe. And these are the ones making purchasing decisions and they're digitally native. So that's a completely different way to attract these consumers and to go after them as organizations. Two strategies have to coexist.
Yeah. They have to. You absolutely have to bring them along. Easier said than done. It makes the job exciting. You have to really like change and excitement as you're thinking about this. But it's also funny. No matter who you are, you also have to consider and understand your social media impact. There's so much happening around social media between influencers and their ability to ramp quickly that you need to think about everything from whether or not you're a marketer and how you speak — either use influencers or use social media to get your message out and apply it in the environment and people's everyday lives to make it practical and understandable. The old TV ads are going away. Now today it's very micro and you can have this impact on social media like you never could before. Really think about whether you're going to get affected by social media or you can affect the message that you want to display, whether it's product or it's just cultural and brand messaging — to say who and what you are. Because that also matters to the generation of digital natives.
That's right. And I think what's interesting too is in the same vein as the app downloads and watching what apps get downloaded in which region — as a glimpse of changing consumer behavior — which is really interesting.
Yes. Fascinating.
So I'm going to go a little bit to the personal side. Can you share maybe a pivotal moment that really made you realize how much you love this industry, that maybe shaped you in a way or made you realize, you know, payments is why. I mean, you spent such an interesting amount of time across different facets of it. From your network days, your financial decisions, to FinTech, to overall payments — what was it that held you on so tightly?
That's a really good question. I think about this a lot. Ironically, I actually started in tech. A long time ago, but I started in tech. At the time, tech was much more of like the order takers. I knew that particularly financial services, it was the enablement. I mean, that's all we are is tech. We're bits and bytes. We don't build a product that comes off of the manufacturing line. We are only bits and bytes. But still, at that point, it was much more of order-taking. And I wanted to help influence the impact on the ecosystem. Once I hit commercial payments — commercial gets really technical in a hurry. Because you have to understand the data and the transactions and all the pieces that are flowing and where those pieces flow throughout the ecosystem. I think that's what kind of grabbed me into being on the payments side as opposed to just the lending side. Not the consumer lending balance sheet, APR and reward-driven side. That's fascinating, but how money really moved. I actually have an economics background too from way back in undergrad. So money movement always fascinated me. Commercial and the payments side of moving that money is what really tripped it. This is way back when I was at Sears and starting to work on commercial. It was kind of like the ugly stepchild of the sexy consumer payments, the consumer lending side. But now all the change is just happening so fast on the payment side. So it's gotten even more exciting.
And I think you answered kind of something I was thinking about earlier, which is — what do you wish more people knew about payments? But I think the fact that it's such a behavior change, or it's an insight into behavior, you just kind of answered that.
Yes. You get to see everything of what's happening — the trends, the fraud, good and bad — and help influence that to make people's lives better and simpler and easier. Take away some of that pain. It is exciting.
So I know you're working on solving a lot of things, but if there's one more thing you could focus on solving in your spare time, of course, what do you think that would be?
What would I solve in my spare time? It does come back to the investment side and women and trying to make things much more ubiquitous. I think it comes to information and equal playing field and equal access to capital. If I could just really solve that — payments is one, but it's getting that money to the companies that can really change and make a difference on an even playing field. Sometimes access gets limited in different ways. So that's the big nut I would crack — to just make it universally acceptable to get access to capital.
And so that's some of what you're working on as part of How Women Invest. Is that right?
That's right. Yeah, we created our own fund to say, we'll create a fund to invest in women. Because 2% of venture cap goes to women entrepreneurs. 2%. So we're going to change the needle. In order to do that, you got to play. We're actually in our third fund, which is a great statistic because so many funds, they can't go on to another round. They're kind of one and done and maybe eke out two. We're now actually in our third fundraise and a big one. The more money you have, the more you can invest and really start to make a difference. It's one thing to write a check for a million or two. It's another to be able to write a check for 25, $50 million. That's where the big guns play. So yeah, it's really exciting. Then simultaneously, How Women Lead is getting more women on boards. Again, this comes back to having multiple voices at the table. It gets very passionate for me back to what I do day by day, which is product and payments. Because if you're going to build solutions, you're building solutions for everybody. And you need to have diversity of thought to know how to do that well. So having multiple voices at the table — and particularly women — at the table on board seats and senior positions to help bring that voice.
That's great. And I know you're also strategic — you give an enormous amount of support, mentorship, network connections to a lot of the companies that you work with. That's much needed as well.
Yeah. Well, it also keeps you abreast of what's happening on the ground and asking questions and working with all kinds of partners and listening around the globe. You can't stay in one spot in your own little world. Sometimes that's easier. But you have to get out and hear what are people doing? What are the pains that they're trying to solve? What are how are they running their business? What's working, what's not working?
And having known you for such a long time, personally and professionally, I think that's one of the things — you're curious. You're just a really curious individual. And that's probably also why payments and financial services has kept you wanting for so long. Because it's never the same.
Yeah. That's a great point. That's also why you and I have such incredible conversations because we're always talking. But it's always — I've said that I think that if I could have gotten paid to stay in college forever, I probably would have chosen that path because I love learning. Curious, but then having to apply it, of course. But yeah, it's helpful to always be curious and I am by nature. Sometimes I can make my team a little crazy. But you do — you have to keep stretching yourself.
Right. And I think that goes to one of the last questions I had on the personal side — what is one piece of advice you would give to someone that wants to go into this field?
I think always keep your options and opportunities open and being curious. Because you don't know what is there to just take you to another level. I've had so many different — even though I've been in payments and financial services, I've taken on so many different roles and different opportunities and felt like I allowed myself to be present and take advantage of new big things that were happening and changing. So what I do today doesn't look like what I did when I started, but I feel like there was always still a path to get here. But you've got to be open to it. You have to listen and be curious and be open and be willing to listen to opportunities and new things as they come up.
That's great. OK. Let me attempt to recap. This has been fantastic. Visa Commercial Solutions is really focused on eliminating friction. You've done an enormous amount on this. You continue to put out new solutions around the world and making it easier for consumers and businesses to do business. And you're really focused on the consumerization of commercial payments — specifically replacing passwords, leveraging passkeys, making it very easy and ultimately the most secure possible. AI will enable new levels of growth — AI agents are evolving super, super quickly, so keeping abreast and understanding and leveraging them is very important. Emerging markets are leading the way in digital innovation because the legacy infrastructure wasn't always there. The mass number of the population, young consumers, able to have a huge test bed. You also talked a lot about leveraging social media, influencers to connect with global audiences and build a brand and build affinity in ways that we never did before in marketing — segmenting and really localizing in different ways, leveraging influencers is very important. And diversity of thought is necessary to support innovation. So well put — I think those were your exact words. And I think that's spot on. If you need to represent the people that you're trying to write solutions for, asking the right questions to always influence your payment or any other strategy you're focused on is really critical.
Well done. Great rap.
Yeah, thank you. This was fantastic, Gloria. I know your time is very limited and precious. I appreciate this. This is great.
I loved it. I always love our conversations of any nature. So this is my pleasure.
It's great to see you, Gloria. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. We'll see you next time.
You too.
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