Worldline: a relaunch into one market, and the vertical I told them to drop

The relaunch was to sell it to European online businesses operating in Russia.

The commercial problem underneath it was technical. Russian consumers were split between global card schemes and the domestic one. Foreign sellers were routing transactions as cross-border rather than local, which lowered authorisation rates, a routing decision showing up as lost revenue. Add a volatile currency and a rule requiring personal data to be stored inside the country, and the product is not selling convenience. It is selling approved transactions and a compliant footprint.

Travel was the obvious vertical for a cross-border payments product, and it was the one I argued against: Covid uncertainty, stagnant domestic tourism, and domestic business travel the deck called dead. E-commerce had the opposite profile, a pandemic boost on top of a long-term growth forecast, and brand value that mattered most in the categories where European sellers were strongest.

The second half of the decision was how success would be counted. Ten new customers and twenty upsells. Not a lead volume, not a marketing-qualified number, customers, split across two motions that need different machinery. New business runs on outbound and inbound with a learning centre behind it. The twenty upsells run on reactivation calls, product-update newsletters and booked catch-ups, with sales closing.

Setting the objective in customers forces the funnel maths to be written down, and writing it down is what makes it checkable.