B2B Vault Podcast with Allen Kopelman - Interview with Viktoria Soltesz About The Future Of Finance

In a recent episode of B2B Vault Podcast hosted by Allen Kopelman, Viktoria Soltesz explianed the pattern what most merchants only learn after the damage is done. This repeats across the U.S. and Europe: merchants build a business, plug in a payment tool that promises speed, and then discover that payments are not a software feature.

Payment and banking today impact customer experience, risk management, technology, product development, data security, compliance, finance, and handling incorrectly, it can shut the whole company down overnight. It should be considered a standalone function, an essential element of the business strategy, not just a part of finance.

One Day "Yes" One Day "No"

Merchants often describe onboarding as a lottery. One day they get approved, the next day they are rejected or closed, and nobody explains why. That story sounds random, but it never is. Banks and acquirers have risk appetite, internal policies, and external obligations that change with market pressure, fraud trends, chargeback performance, and portfolio exposure. When your business touches their rails, you are entering their decision system, not just signing up to a tool.

This is also why the industry keeps failing merchants on education. I

Education Matters

Most teams treat payments and banking as a checkout plugin, then delegate decisions to someone who is not trained for it. The default choice becomes an accountant, a general operations lead, or whoever has time. That person can be very good at their own job, yet still lack the language and the baseline knowledge to evaluate gateways, ISOs, routing, settlement risk, reserve logic, or what a provider’s terms really allow. Without a standard way of learning, even basic words mean different things to different people, and the merchant pays the price for that gap.

Meaningful presence

People form companies in places like Delaware, Wyoming, or other popular structures, then try to process in a country where they do not live, without local substance, without the right signatories, and without the operational link that underwriters expect to see.

A structure can be technically legal, and still be commercially unbankable. Banks are not there to make tax optimisation easy but to protect their license and reduce exposure to financial crime and reputational risk. If the setup looks like it exists only to avoid tax or avoid scrutiny, it will not survive banking review, even if a tax advisor says the paperwork is fine.

“Legal” is a minimum standard. “Executable in banking” is the real standard that decides if you can operate.

The Chief Payment Officer

Merchants lose businesses because nobody owns payments end-to-end inside the organisation, and nobody is trained to treat payment and banking decisions as a strategic function. The ones who manage payment and banking tasks are not adequately trained to do so. Key areas, such as how payments and banking affect technology, UX, compliance, and other essential aspects in a business, are absent from accounting, economics courses, and MBAs. 

Payments touches cash flow, customer experience, product decisions, data security, risk appetite, provider contracts, settlement speed, and the ability to expand into new markets. When each department defends its own corner and no one holds the full picture, the business is forced into guesswork, and guesswork is expensive.

To wacth the full episode visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQQjrybAnqs