Kieron Summers-Smith.
On the rails that
move money.
I look after Tier 1, global enterprise customers in payments. Issuing, acquiring, processing, orchestration. Currently at Enfuce; previously APEXX Global and Worldpay / FIS. Most of what I do is turning complex programmes into long, productive commercial partnerships.
A commercial role, not just a service one.
Relationship Management
Trusted senior contact for Tier 1 enterprise. Exec sponsors, QBRs, governance, the human side of long-term partnerships.
Customer Success
Adoption, retention, health, renewals. Catching risk early and keeping programmes on a winning trajectory.
Account Growth
Cross-sell and upsell across the platform. Spotting where the customer is heading and lining the right products up to meet them there.
Strategic Planning
Multi-year account plans, joint roadmaps, executive alignment. Putting the right structure around big programmes so they grow on purpose.
Commercial Negotiation
Renewals, pricing, contract changes, scope. Holding the commercial line while keeping the relationship intact.
Escalation & Advocacy
The person who picks up the phone when something is on fire, and the internal voice making sure the customer gets what they need.
Cross-Functional Delivery
Working alongside Product, Engineering, Ops, Risk, Compliance and Scheme teams to translate customer needs into shipped outcomes.
Insight & Reporting
Turning transaction data, scheme rules and incident reports into decisions a customer can actually act on.
The full payments stack, both sides of the rails.
Most people in payments specialise on one side. Through Worldpay / FIS, APEXX Global and now Enfuce, I have worked across acquiring, the orchestration layer, and issuing & processing. It means I can speak the language of merchants and issuers in the same conversation, which matters a lot when programmes get complicated.
Acquiring
Gateways, scheme rules, settlement, auth optimisation, cross-border acceptance.
- Card-present & card-not-present
- Local & alternative payment methods
- Auth rates, decline recovery, retries
- Risk, fraud, 3DS, SCA
Orchestration
Intelligent routing, multi-PSP fallback, consolidated reporting, single-API stacks.
- Routing logic by cost & performance
- Wallets, BNPL, APMs, bank transfers
- Vendor consolidation
- Conversion uplift programmes
Issuing & Processing
Card programmes end-to-end. BIN sponsorship, scheme certification, processing, lifecycle.
- Debit, credit, prepaid, fleet, expense
- Digital-first card experiences
- Multi-country, multi-currency
- Programme management & migration
The shape of the work, in numbers.
A decade in payments, senior commercial roles throughout.
Customer Success Manager at Enfuce
One of the first people in a new Customer Success function under new leadership. Strategic enterprise relationships across banking, fleet & mobility, airline travel and hospitality in the embedded finance and issuer processing space. Worked with commercial leadership to build the CS frameworks from nothing, and with internal and third-party teams to rebuild the Salesforce environment so it actually supports how the org manages, grows and tracks strategic accounts.
Senior Relationship Manager at APEXX Global
Built out a new Relationship Management function from scratch on a multi-award-winning payment orchestration platform. Managed an enterprise portfolio across e-commerce, retail, travel and financial services with £8M+ ARR, owning the relationship up to and including C-Level. Drove a 15% revenue uplift through cross-sell and upsell, set up the KPI and QBR cadence from zero, and recovered 95% of outstanding debt across the book working with finance.
…at Worldpay / FIS · Jul 2019 → Sep 2022
Three years on Tier 1 enterprise acquiring at one of the largest payment processors in the world. Portfolio of household names and global brands across retail, travel, hospitality, airlines, financial services, gaming, trading and crypto, with £11M+ ARR. Consistently hit or beat Book of Business growth targets through upsell and share-of-wallet expansion. Worked closely with Legal, CDD and Risk teams on the high-risk verticals where it really matters.
Customer Success Specialist, Executive Complaints at Booking.com
Before payments, two years inside Booking.com's Executive Complaints team handling escalations from both guests and partners. Hotels, airlines and experience providers. Learning how to take heat from a Tier 1 stakeholder without losing the relationship turned out to be the most useful preparation for enterprise CS I could have asked for.
Industries I've worked across.
Every vertical has its own quirks in payments. Retail cares about conversion at the checkout, travel about authorisation across borders, gaming about regulation and chargebacks, crypto about banking access. The breadth helps, because the same problem rarely looks the same twice.
I make payments partnerships work, not just go live.
Payments is a small industry full of acronyms and even smaller margins for error. My job is to sit between the engineers shipping the rails and the people whose business depends on them, translating roadmap, scheme rules and incident reports into decisions a customer can act on.
The customers I work with are Tier 1, global, household names. They expect a senior commercial partner who knows the product cold, has actual opinions, and can hold the line in a negotiation without breaking the relationship. That's the role.
I'm based in Colchester, UK. Always up for a coffee with anyone in payments, whether you're on the issuer side, merchant side, in orchestration, scheme-side, or sat in a CS team trying to figure out why your renewals look the way they do.
Founded and sold my first business before I could legally drive.
At 15 I started a small media and events business out of school. What began as running events and putting websites together for them evolved into something else entirely: clients kept asking who was hosting the site, who registered the domain, could I do the same for their other projects. Within a year or so it had quietly turned into a web hosting and consultancy business, with the events work fading into the background. Eventually sold it on.
It wasn't a fortune, but it gave me a very early lesson in the only thing that really matters in commercial work: listening to what customers are actually asking for, building the thing, and convincing someone it's worth paying for. Two decades later, the role title says Customer Success Manager. The instinct is the same one.
Let's talk payments.
Whether it's about a customer programme, a job, a coffee in London, or just to nerd out about issuer processing. I reply to everything, eventually.