Executive Spotlight: Archana Prasad
Meet Payrix’s Chief Product and Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Worldpay for Platforms
Payments — Love at First Sight
There’s no doubt about it. Archana Prasad is passionate about her work.
“I’m completely in love with payments and banking products because they make a deep positive impact on our lives. I don’t think we can imagine a day without using one of these products. I believe that financial products have been and will continue to be one of the biggest contributors to socioeconomic development. The world would not be where it is without these products.”
She’s certainly made a mark in the industry throughout her career. She is a growth-minded product management executive with a consistent record of building financial products-based businesses from scratch and expanding those through organic and inorganic growth.
Before joining Payrix in the fall of 2022, Archana was at Marqeta, building and launching embedded payments products, and services and scaling them globally. She was responsible for driving a major part of revenue and redefining the brand as a provider of modern issuing and banking platforms.
Prior to that, Archana worked for Visa in two capacities. First, she led U.S. and global credit, specifically affluent servicing initiatives. She ended up building several products and services, including launching Chase Sapphire Reserve. Archana’s leadership helped completely rejuvenate how credit cards were used by millennials.
Her second role was at Visa Direct. “I was fortunate to work with a very passionate leadership and team members who drove fast-paced innovative product launches, solving real customer problems and grew the business 50 times in four years.” She led new business segment growth and was responsible for working with all global acquirer processors, such as Worldpay, to enable the enablers and drive growth through API products and other value-added services.
Positions at several other large financial institutions round out her 18-year career. You might be surprised that she’s also an engineer and has an MBA from the University of California, Berkley, earned while becoming a mother. She is also a big advocate for women in tech and product. Like we said, passion!
Along Came Payrix
Many things drew Archana to Payrix. “I was interested in the fact that Payrix was doing something different for software companies. Payrix is truly focused on its customers and provides end-to-end embedded payment services.” Unlike so many other players, Payrix’s holistic and customer-centric approach in the market is exciting to her as is the product itself.
But the most exciting part about the prospect of working at Payrix was the merger with FIS and the challenge and opportunities it created.
“Payrix has the right platform to build the whole suite of products from embedded payments to embedded finance. FIS provides us the channel to grow and expand the business across verticals and geos. Our customers have a lot to look forward to.”
“Payrix has a huge potential that can be unleashed with the right business and product strategy. I knew it would be challenging. I don’t shy away from challenges. That’s the fun part of the job.”
Experience Matters
Archana has worked on successful products throughout her career, and she also admits she’s worked on products that weren’t. She learned there’s only one difference between people with experience and those who don’t have it. “Most talented people can figure out what to do. Experienced people know what not to do.”
She gives one example of how she made a positive impact while at Visa and how that experience will benefit Payrix as it becomes part of Worldpay for Platforms.
“When I joined Visa Direct, it was a small and mighty team on a path to success. However, we needed new verticals and use cases to unleash the product’s full potential. As part of the new business segments team, we identified many segments to attack however I took a focused approach to penetrate the high-value select segments with real customer needs, unlocking a serviceable addressable market (SAM) of multi-trillion dollars in payment volume.”
Archana believes that the opportunities are endless for Payrix to penetrate new verticals and markets. By working closely with customers, Archana is taking a focused approach to building the right product set to address customer needs in a certain vertical.
An Exciting Future
Her plans for 2023 are all about further differentiating the Payrix offering and focusing on how to enhance our products to better serve our customers. Delivering a feature-complete platform to customers is key, including enabling portfolio migrations from different platforms, building strong risk capabilities, and ensuring Payrix continues to bring high-quality products into the market.
“If I had one superpower, I would want to make the payments and banking experience completely seamless, frictionless and secure for everyone, everywhere — meet the Payrix users where they are, using embedded payments and finance.”
Outside of Payrix
Last year, Archana was named one of the 2022 Most Influential Women in Payments: NEXT by American Banker. Aside from building innovative payments and finance solutions that solve real-world customer problems, she enjoys cooking and spending time with her family. Archana lives in California with her husband and two children. She is an avid reader and just recently finished reading “How the World Really Works” by Vaclav Smil.