Tony Craddock, The Payments Association: Payments evolution- more ways to pay, more value, less cost

Please could you begin by introducing yourself, and a summary of your career path leading you to The Payments Association?

My name is Tony Craddock and I’m the Director General and the Founder of The Payments Association. Typically, you can look back on your career and think, how on earth did this happen? Which is exactly what I have done but whilst there’s no formula, there were components such as my father being a committed innovator in his career as a banker. He was the first person in 1976 to come to my school and pitch the potential power of computing, even though at that stage nobody knew what it was. So, I’ve always had innovation and technology in my family’s blood.

I went to university to study Management Science. After my education, I went into packaging and then transitioned to sales as a sales rep. That was a key point for learning how to do business because I was persuading people for a living. I then got into publishing, for a publishing agency that specialised in producing customer magazines – and it was here that I decided to open my own business. We sold the business years later and I went on to try consulting and then set up my own trade association because I love getting people around a table to talk and collaborate. It was here, 20 years ago, that I realised I like bringing voices together and offering collaborative spaces, and that realisation was the birth of The Payments Association. And I love it because I would say that I’m a ‘community geek’ and I also get to be that version of myself in the payments space.

What is a day in the life of the Director General of the leading community for payments? How do you manage so many spinning plates?

The Association has various areas, with different industries within payments and different resources that respond to it. I was given advice years ago to focus on the things that you are uniquely able to do and get other people to be inspired to do the things that you are poor at. Of course, when we were a startup, I had to be able to do everything – from bookkeeping to buying and selling. But as we’ve grown, I’ve been able to place my focus more on the community element and helping my teams to be inspired with their work and relationships with each other. And I’ve got an amazing team who help me by doing a superb job for us, and our advisory board and board of directors are invaluable too. 

Looking at what I do – I get up and spend time checking what’s changed and happened overnight, and generally then fall into a number of meetings and conferences. But I also spend time trying to create some space to think about what is going to happen next, both in the payments industry and at The Payments Association. The tectonic plates of payments are shifting, the power is shifting to and from banks, and we’re seeing a shift from in-person to remote banking with digital and programmable money. So I work to look at the involvement of different parties, and create space in our community to recognise this transformational phase.

In a position like mine, there are numerous meetings, presentations and conferences – all giving a lot of food for thought. So I find that one of the most important parts of my routine is also stepping away for a while, and I go out on my bike. It’s my hobby and it’s important to have that moment to breathe and create space for yourself so that you can think and reflect.  

Could you describe how you’ve seen the world of payments grow and change? What are some of the most significant developments which you think have brought us to this point?

I think we’ve moved from being the plumbers of financial services to the design engineers, and what that means is that we now have more companies, variety and complexity. There are more ways to pay, more value that people get from paying in certain ways, but also less cost for transacting. And while we are seeing cheaper solutions, it’s getting less predictable as to how people are going to pay – because there are so many new technologies, and shifts in the macro environment around the use of the dollar and liquidity. 

Looking at the most significant developments is tough because things move so fast. One is the replacement of cash and shift towards digital alternatives. This has created a shift from slow clearing and settlement, to near instant clearing of transactions and a mobile future. The increase in speed for clearing and settling brings huge questions around the arrival of distributed ledger technology in the blockchain. And we’re starting to see, and will continue to see, the adoption of digital currencies, which will be issued by central banks, commercial banks and maybe by non-bank service providers in the future. In essence this shift of mentality to the fact that money can be programmable, tracked and traced is a massive development that has brought us to our current state and will continue to boom in the world of money and payments.

The main thing that worries us is the increasing threat of financial crime. Payments related crime has migrated from simply stealing physical cash from people’s wallets and fraud using a card with chip and pin, to what is known as, ‘authorised push payment’ fraud. The industry is working hard with regulators to prevent this from getting worse and in time, solve the problem altogether. 

We’ve also seen extensive developments regarding regulations around other aspects of payments, and regulations in general will become more prominent and assertive over time, which will help us to raise our standards. And regulations correlate highly to my last development which I believe has brought us to where we are today, which is data. Data on individuals, digital identity, how we use data, and the power of exchanging information on transactions to reduce fraud and increase security are strides in making the payments space better equipped to serve the world around us. Payments is such an exciting space to be in!

As the Co-editor of The PayTech book – what inspired you to enter the route of published literature, and how did you find the process of creating literature for our industry?

There are over 6000 companies in the industry, and it’s a $2.2 trillion industry globally employing millions of people. So you could ask why do people not write about it in book form? Because it’s changing so fast that by the time the process of writing a book and publishing it are completed, it’s already out of date. I had a chat with Susanne Chishti, as she had written a book on fintech and we collaborated with Markos Zachariadis and Robert Courtneidge to edit the book. It’s inspiring because we commissioned other people in the market to volunteer their ideas and we then selected those ideas and edited them into the book. It was hard work because we weren’t the writers but we were trying to edit them effectively and coherently into a book. It was such a challenge but it was a great feeling to have a book on my bookcase with my name on it – and knowing that we got to give platform to people’s ideas by submitting them into a book.

How do you stay motivated and cope with symptoms of burnout or lack of motivation?

Somebody once said to me that if you think that your career will end when you are 65, then as you get closer to that age you slow down. So I say that to say I’ve got another 30 years left in me, like Rupert Murdoch who at 92 became Chair of News International, which means I’m only halfway through my career. I feel a duty to use my platform to contribute to society in some way. The second thing is that I have an amazing support network around me, an amazing company of people who do great work, my advisory board, my family and friends – these are all motivators for me.

Of course, it helps when you love what you do, but I also find that it’s really important to not get dragged down by minute burdens of everyday life. We can’t control everything. And I think the final thing that really helps me stay motivated is exercise because there is a direct connection between your mental and physical well-being. The hit of endorphins from exercising really keeps me motivated and happy.

What are the top 3 trends in payments that you are most excited to see in the next 5 years?

First is digital currencies because we see the continuous evolution and improvement of the payments industry through alternative currencies which is very exciting. From this we also have distributed ledger technology, tokenisation, etc. We see some apprehension around digital currencies because we don’t fully understand their capabilities, but we can already see that they have attributes that allow us to do some things that conventional money can’t. And so, the impact of this on our world is going to be huge and watching everyday assets becoming tokenised will be an exciting adventure.

The second is artificial intelligence because we’ve seen it working phenomenally, and removing much of the heavy lifting work for us. It’ll give us back more time to focus on value added contributions. Inevitably it will challenge some roles in our industries, but I think that as a whole it will add a lot of benefit and give us a greater opportunity to focus on enhancements and new areas which we’ve not had the time or resources to explore.

The last isn’t a trend, but I’m very excited to see the diversification of our industries and how well we bring pools of talent into it. Typically the finance and payments space was very male oriented, but I would like to see more ethnic and gender diversity. It’s something that I stand for in our community because I believe it’ll be a richer community that is better at delivering value and solutions if we have more voices in the room.

How do you define success?

I define my success as being able to look back and see that other people are able to run the business I started. I believe human beings have the opportunity to create something and make something out of nothing. And that’s what a business is – it’s taking a concept and using your creativity and graft to make it into something. So the fact there are people who work or volunteer to support with ideas and work because of an idea I had years ago to launch The Payments Association is incredible. I love the idea that it’s helped to bring people together, and one day somebody else will run it. I’m looking forward to being able to look at the activities and seeing the impact while having a sense that this is something that I helped to create.