Nobody actually wants to think about payments.
In 2014, a two-person team at Tencent built a side feature with a six-week deadline. Digital red envelopes — hongbao — let WeChat users send small amounts of money to friends during Chinese New Year, the way families had exchanged physical cash packets for centuries. By the end of the holiday, 16 million had been sent. Two years later, 8 billion were exchanged in a single night. Jack Ma called it a Pearl Harbor moment for Alibaba's payments business.
Tencent had not built a payment product. They had digitised a ritual. The payment was the mechanism. The job was belonging.
This is, more or less, how every significant shift in consumer financial behaviour has happened. Not through features. Through an understanding — sometimes accidental, usually hard-won — of what people are actually trying to do. M-Pesa wasn't a remittance service; it was a way for Kenyan families to be useful to each other across distance. Contactless payments were technically available for fifteen years before COVID made touching a keypad feel dangerous. The technology was ready. The job wasn't visible until it was.
Marketing is, at its core, the discipline of understanding this — what people are actually hiring your product to do, and why, and what has to be true in the world before they're ready to hire it. I have spent the better part of twenty years sitting inside that problem, in global banking, in CPG, across markets that look nothing like each other but whose customers behave with remarkable consistency. What I keep seeing is the same gap. Between what the product built, what marketing said about it, and what the customer actually wanted when they said yes.
In payments, that gap is particularly expensive.
What merchants are actually hiring for
Jobs-to-be-done theory — Clayton Christensen's framework, though he would probably say he was just naming something people already knew — asks a deceptively simple question: what is the customer actually hiring this product to do?
The obvious answer, for payments, is to process payments. Payments will get processed either way. The less obvious answer — the one that tends not to make it into product marketing briefs — is that merchants are hiring for cognitive offload. They want a category of worry removed from their operating life. The job is peace of mind. The features are just the mechanism.
The job wasn't visible yet.
The data on this pattern is consistent across B2B categories. Purchase intent correlates with features and price — merchants evaluate on those dimensions because those are the ones that show up in sales materials. Activation correlates far more strongly with onboarding ease. Retention correlates with something that doesn't appear in any product marketing brief: whether the merchant had to think about payments in the last ninety days.
That last metric doesn't have a clean name. Nobody tracks it formally. But every merchant can answer it in under three seconds, which is a reasonable sign it matters.
What the positioning failure looks like
Payment companies market features because product teams understand features, and product marketing inherits their vocabulary. Sales teams are trained on it. And somewhere in this entirely logical chain of events, the merchant stops listening.
I have sat in enough product strategy sessions to recognise the shape of this problem before it announces itself. The deck is good. The proof points are real. The pricing is competitive. And then the win/loss data comes back, and the reasons merchants chose someone else have almost nothing to do with any of it.
This is not stupidity. It is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation — a genuinely complex product being explained to buyers who have no interest in its complexity. They have a business to run. Payments are infrastructure. Nobody falls in love with their infrastructure. They just want it to be invisible.
What to do about it
Three things.
First, separate features from propositions. "We settle in forty-seven currencies" is proof. "Your customers in Mexico City check out the same way your customers in Montreal do" is a proposition. Same fact. Different job.
Second, find better proxies for product-market fit. Activation rate and ninety-day retention tell you more than anything in the sales funnel. If merchants are signing and not activating, the positioning is working and the product experience isn't. If they're activating and churning at ninety days, something happened in the first quarter that nobody is discussing yet.
Third — and this is the one that gets cut from presentations — consider what you are actually selling. The most effective payment solution is the one the merchant forgets about. That sounds like failure. It is the opposite. Building something that disappears into the background of someone's working life is genuinely difficult. Marketing an absence is harder still.
But "we will become invisible to you, in the best possible way" is — once you get comfortable saying it out loud — more compelling than any feature comparison table.
K Baksh