From firefighting to revenue engine: how igaming heads of payments are changing the game

Ask Kaivalya Paluskar (KP to the team), PaymentIQ’s vice-president of product, what an ideal week looks like for a payments team, and he’ll describe logging in to test a localised cashier ahead of a campaign, clearing know your customer (KYC) and withdrawal approvals, working through a refund or a chargeback, and pulling reports to reconcile against the books. Ask him how close that is to reality, and he’ll smile slightly and say: “It never does … It’s usually a firefighting mode for a payments team in day-to-day operations.” Marketing complaining a campaign isn’t converting, operations chasing a transaction nobody can find, a business that only looks at payments once something’s already broken.

None of that operational grind has gotten any calmer, according to KP, but a shift is in motion. Payments teams now have the data to back up decisions that used to be guesswork, enabling them to move “from a cost centre mindset to actually being involved in growing the business.” That data, he says, is what lets a head of payments “not only be seen as a cost centre, but also basically a revenue enabler for your business.”

There’s a structural cause behind some of that firefighting, too. A single provider can pull out of a market on a week or two weeks’ notice, forcing a scramble for a replacement. Growing into new markets means more providers, and more providers means a growing dependency on a technology team that, in KP’s experience, is almost always a shared resource with competing priorities of its own. Payments ends up being managed reactively because the team rarely controls its own timeline.

PaymentIQ’s answer is to take that dependency off the technology team’s plate entirely: one API integration gives an operator access to more than 400 payment options, with PaymentIQ building, maintaining and upgrading those connections instead of the operator’s own engineers.

Turning connections into control

Comparing how a routing rule performs against another used to mean piecing it together across five different provider portals. PaymentIQ’s Rules Hub gives a head of payments one place to see that comparison directly: rule against rule, instead of cross-referencing them yourself.

KP calls the routing engine underneath it “the engine of the car,” built up over years, together with operators, into what he says is one of the most flexible and capable routing engines available.

The clearest proof is commercial, not technical. KP describes routing changes that are simple to test and easy to measure: shift traffic to a different provider, and the resulting revenue impact is concrete enough to take straight into a CFO conversation. “That would be almost impossible if you didn’t have that data to measure,” he adds.

At the more complex end, you can offer a persona-based experience. Trusted traffic sees a wide range of payment methods, while first time depositors get more restricted payment methods or a customised experience based on their KYC status. “With our custom attributes, the sky is the limit there,” KP says.

Why the infrastructure has to hold

None of this works if the platform underneath it doesn’t. PaymentIQ runs on more than 200 configurable routing conditions, backed by around 50 dedicated engineers maintaining uptime past 99.99%. When a recent cricket tournament pushed one operator’s transaction volume far past normal, the platform processed more than 250 transactions per second without failing over – exactly the kind of load a revenue enabler needs to survive.

Operators notice the pace, too. KP outlines a recent project where a merchant, expecting a build that would normally take another company the best part of a year, had it delivered in under three months. “That’s the speed that we deliver,” he says.

Compliance runs on the same infrastructure. PaymentIQ holds PCI DSS compliance at the highest tier, Level 1, with card data secured in a vault rather than sitting with the operator. For a head of payments already stretched thin, that’s an audit they no longer have to run themselves.

And that’s the real distance between the two versions of the job KP described at the start: one spent firefighting complaints and chasing transactions across disconnected portals, the other spent showing a CFO the exact revenue impact of a decision before it’s made. PaymentIQ is built for the second version.

Curious what PaymentIQ’s platform could do for your payments team? Click here to discover more.

About PaymentIQ

PaymentIQ is a payment orchestration platform that enables businesses to manage and optimise complex payment ecosystems through a single integration. The platform connects merchants to more than 400 payment service providers and payment methods worldwide, enabling intelligent transaction routing, improved authorisation rates and greater operational control. With real-time analytics, automated failover and built-in redundancy, PaymentIQ helps businesses maximise payment performance, reduce costs and scale globally.

PaymentIQ became a standalone company in 2026 following its acquisition by growth equity firm Incore Invest. Today, PaymentIQ supports digital businesses worldwide with scalable payment infrastructure designed to simplify operations and accelerate growth.

Kaivalya Paluskar (KP) is the vice-president of product at PaymentIQ, reporting into the CEO, he is responsible for executing PaymentIQ’s product vision and driving measurable impact across the business. Paluskar brings nearly two decades of experience in payments and technology, latterly in product leadership roles focused on payment orchestration and travel and hospitality solutions. Under his leadership, PaymentIQ’s product team continues to sharpen its focus on conversion, optimisation and performance, the pillars that guide every product decision the company makes for its merchants.