Kevin Murphy, Group CEO and Board Director of CellPoint, discusses the move from payment infrastructure to intelligence, explaining why merchants that extract strategic value from payments beyond connectivity will unlock growth, resilience, and competitive advantage in the future.
The payments industry has spent years building infrastructure. Why do you believe the next evolution is payment intelligence?
When I talk to airlines today, it's clear the problem has shifted. They have all of that infrastructure in place and still can't tell me their authorisation rate by card type in Southeast Asia or which processor is dragging down approval rates in Germany. While the ‘plumbing’ works, the missing part is the brain sitting on top of it, the ‘payments intelligence’ layer.
The real value lies in the gap between connectivity and intelligence – and it's the single biggest commercial opportunity most merchants still aren't taking seriously.
What are the biggest blind spots preventing merchants from maximising payment performance today?
Three reasons keep coming up:
The first is when a merchant sees an 87% approval rate and thinks they're in reasonable shape. However, that 13% failure rate, spread across millions of transactions, represents enormous recoverable revenue, but the aggregated number hides the details that matter.
The second is siloed data. Payment information sits across separate processors, acquirers, and fraud systems that nobody has unified into a single view. Decisions are made in isolation, without the full picture, and that's just not good enough at scale.
The third is reactive operations, as most merchants only discover a problem after it's already cost them money. Authorisation rates drop, someone flags this days later, and by the time a fix is in place, the damage is done. Payment intelligence flips that model entirely, enabling you to see the pattern forming before revenue is lost.
Why is optimisation becoming the most important starting point for merchants evaluating their payment strategy?
Merchants start with optimisation when evaluating payment strategy because the ROI is immediate, measurable, and doesn't require anything new. Research shows subscription providers alone lose around 9% of annual revenue to failed payments — most of it involuntary, not churn. For a merchant processing USD 1 billion a year, a single 1% improvement in authorisation rates is USD 10 million in recovered revenue, all without new customers, new marketing spend, or new product development –just smarter use of the infrastructure already in place.
So if you’re a travel merchant, before evaluating a new processor, renegotiating acquirer contracts, and building anything, make sure to optimise what you have. Optimisation tells you exactly where the gaps are, it surfaces returns immediately, and it gives you the data you need to make every subsequent decision more intelligently.
What does a payment intelligence platform actually look like in practice?
At its core, a payment intelligence platform is a unified view across every processor, acquirer, and payment method you operate — with a decisioning layer on top that turns data into action. In practice, this means three things:
- intelligent routing that directs each transaction to the optimal acquirer based on real-time issuer behaviour, card type, and geography, rather than yesterday's static rules;
- automated retry logic that recovers declined payments based on specific decline reason codes, rather than blunt force retries that frustrate customers and get flagged by issuers;
- and anomaly detection that catches problems before they cascade, so you're managing in real time, rather than reconstructing what went wrong after the fact.
The distinction I'd draw is between orchestration with reporting and orchestration with intent. The system is continuously learning, optimising, and directing every payment toward the best possible outcome, rather than just passing transactions through. A payment intelligence platform becomes the merchant's strategic control room, not just middleware, and delivers real value.
Looking ahead three to five years, how do you see the role of payments changing inside large merchant organisations?
Merchant payments will change fundamentally. Right now, payments sit with tech or finance, optimised for reliability and cost control, which is the right model for an infrastructure function. But the payments industry is becoming something else.
As global digital payment volumes continue to scale, the intelligence layer sitting above that volume is where competitive differentiation is built. AI-native operations will handle routing, fraud, and recovery autonomously, and I think we'll see payment performance dashboards sitting alongside commercial KPIs in CFO and CRO conversations, with authorisation rates treated as growth metrics instead of operational ones.
The merchants currently investing in that capability are building a structural advantage that will be very hard to replicate quickly. Payments are the connective layer of the entire commerce system, and the organisations that make the layer intelligent, apart from functional, will define the competitive landscape for the next decade.
About the author
Kevin Murphy is Group CEO and Board Director of CellPoint, bringing extensive leadership experience across fintech, payments, consumer finance, and financial services globally. An accomplished CEO and Board Director, Kevin has led growth, transformation, and restructuring initiatives for private equity-backed firms, PLCs, and privately owned businesses. He brings deep expertise in strategy, M&As, and board-level leadership, with a proven track record of creating value and driving performance across international markets. At CellPoint, Kevin is focused on transforming payments from a cost centre into a strategic growth engine for merchants worldwide.
About CellPoint
CellPoint is the leading payment orchestration and optimisation platform for airlines, travel, and hospitality. We unify card schemes, alternative payment methods, and global processors into a single intelligent layer — enabling businesses to optimise payment performance through smart routing, real-time decisioning, and end-to-end visibility. The result: higher approval rates, lower cost of acceptance, and payments that actively contribute to revenue growth and competitive advantage.
