Ahead of MAG Payments Summit, The Paypers spoke with Kirsten Lockyer, Associate Director, Strategic Payments at Spotify, about how a global subscription merchant approaches payments strategy, the trends shaping the space, and what she's looking forward to at the event.
How has Spotify’s payments strategy evolved in recent years to support a global subscription-based model?
Spotify has undergone significant growth in the past six years. When I joined, we operated in 78 markets and had under 100 million subscribers. Now we’ve expanded to 184 markets and have 293 million subscribers. Our mission is to deliver creativity to the world, and a seamless payment experience is integral to how we show up for fans. They want to enjoy the music and audiobooks – why they pay – and not be distracted by how they pay. Scaling to deliver this in every market we operate in has been very exciting.
This growth has come with our drive to implement local payment methods that align with users’ payment preferences, such as UPI in India, PIX in Brazil, Verve in Nigeria, and PayPay in Japan. This ensures we’re fit for purpose in local and emerging markets.
In all of these cases, expanding our localised payment offering has proven to pay off – providing choice to our users, an increased total addressable market, and often increased performance and positive commercial results.
As a global subscription merchant, we recognise the complexity of managing payments in a range of developed and emerging markets, so we don’t have a one size fits all approach. Each market behaves differently – payment method preferences, regulation, issuer behaviour, and customer expectations vary significantly. For a subscription business, this is amplified. You’re not just acquiring a customer, you’re maintaining a long-term billing relationship. This means optimising for authorisation success, retention, and recovery, not just conversion at checkout.
In practice, this requires a highly localised approach layered on top of a global infrastructure.
What role does data play in improving payment performance?
For us as a subscription merchant, data is central to everything. At scale, even small improvements in authorisation rates or retry success can have a meaningful impact. We look closely at data points including issuer response behaviour, payment method performance by market, retry timing and logic, and customer lifecycle signals.
The key is not just collecting data, but acting on it quickly through experimentation.
What trends do you see shaping the future of payments for merchants?
A few key trends stand out. First, the continued shift towards account-to-account and real-time payments, which have strong potential in certain markets – though challenges remain around user experience, recurring payment support, and coverage.
Second, fragmentation isn’t going away. If anything, it’s increasing. With more payment methods, more regulation, and more variability in issuer behaviour, merchants need to actively manage complexity rather than abstract it away.
Finally, cost and performance are being evaluated together. It’s no longer just about acceptance rates – merchants are increasingly balancing conversion, retention, and cost efficiency in a much more deliberate way.
In June 2026, you will be speaking at the MAG Payments Summit in London. What are you most looking forward to discussing there?
I’m most looking forward to discussing how merchants are approaching agentic commerce, particularly in a subscription context. I’m also keen to hear how others are approaching using AI to optimise key processes across payment operations. We’ve just finished off a Spotify Payments AI hackathon, so we’re keen to build on this momentum and gather more learnings and insights.
Events like MAG Payments Summit are valuable because the problems are shared, but the approaches can differ – and that’s where the most useful insights tend to come from.
What are the key benefits of industry events like the MAG Payments Summit for a merchant like Spotify?
Payments is a space where collaboration and knowledge sharing is incredibly valuable. Many of the challenges we face – regulation, issuer behaviour, new payment methods – are shared across merchants. Communities like the Merchant Advisory Group provide a platform to exchange insights, align on common challenges, and collectively influence the broader payments ecosystem. For anyone operating at scale, this kind of dialogue is essential.
About the author
Kirsten Lockyer is Associate Director of Strategic Payments at Spotify. Her experience spans payments, ecommerce, and fintech. Prior to Spotify she has worked across strategy & ops and product at Freetrade, Barclays, and Accenture. She also serves as European advisor for the MAG which is focused on driving positive change and innovation in the payments industry serving merchants' interests globally through collaboration, education, and advocacy.
About Spotify
Since its launch in 2008, Spotify has revolutionised music listening. Our move into podcasting brought innovation and a new generation of listeners to the medium. In 2022, we took the next leap, entering the fast-growing audiobook market—continuing to shape the future of audio.
Today, more listeners than ever can discover, manage, and enjoy over 100 million tracks, 7 million podcast titles, and 500,000 audiobooks in select markets on Spotify. We are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 761 million users, including 293 million subscribers across 184 markets.
