Kieron Summers-Smith.

Customer Success Manager

I’m joining Stripe as a Customer Success Manager. My previous roles have covered acquiring, payment orchestration and issuer processing.

Customer Success Manager

Issuing & embedded finance.

• Joined as one of the first people in a new Customer Success function under new leadership, helping decide how the business would manage and grow its strategic accounts in issuer processing and embedded finance.
• Worked with commercial leadership to build the CS approach from nothing, from the day-to-day processes and account frameworks through to health scoring, the QBR cadence and how escalations get handled.
• Rebuilt the Salesforce setup with internal teams and outside partners so it actually supports how CS works day to day, rather than getting in the way.
• Managed 15 strategic enterprise accounts across banking, fleet & mobility, travel and hospitality, worth around £5m ARR, as the senior commercial and relationship contact.
• Led QBRs and executive meetings up to C-level, covering performance, progress and where the growth is, keeping customer and internal leadership pointed at the same outcomes.
• Identified and delivered upsell, cross-sell and adoption opportunities across the book, contributing around £400k in expansion revenue across the portfolio.
• Mentored colleagues, helped set how the function works as it grows, and acted as the escalation point when things get commercially or operationally messy.
• Brought the customer view back into the business, feeding it into product and longer-term planning.

Senior Relationship Manager

Payment orchestration.

• Set up and grew a new Relationship Management function, putting in place the processes and standards that made merchant servicing quicker and more consistent.
• Managed and developed a team of four relationship managers, setting the servicing bar, running one-to-ones and getting the team delivering to a consistent standard.
• Looked after 6 to 8 enterprise merchant accounts across e-commerce, retail, travel and financial services, ARR over £8m, as the relationship owner and escalation point up to C-level.
• Grew revenue 15% (around £1.2m) through cross-sell and upsell of APEXX's payment solutions, increasing share of wallet across the book.
• Recovered 95% of outstanding debt, roughly £320k, with finance, which cut delinquency and tidied up forecasting on the larger accounts.
• Set and reported KPIs through Monthly Service Reviews and QBRs, both to merchants and internally to board, finance, legal and growth.
• Led contract, pricing and SLA negotiations, and worked with product, marketing and sales to steer the roadmap using what merchants were actually asking for.

Relationship Manager

Global enterprise acquiring.

• Managed a tight portfolio of 6 to 8 major enterprise merchants, including household names, across retail, travel, airlines, financial services, gaming, trading and cryptocurrency, ARR over £11m.
• Worked directly with C-suite contacts on strategy and payment optimisation, building long-term partnerships and acting as the escalation point when service issues got complicated.
• Brought in around £850k of extra revenue through fraud prevention, alternative payment methods and international expansion, growing share of wallet and processed volume.
• Ran QBRs with real data behind them, covering trends, compliance and market shifts, pulled into decks and infographics built around each merchant.
• Worked with FP&A on revenue forecasting within the margin the business set, feeding into planning across the book.
• Consistently hit or beat Book of Business growth targets, earning quarterly bonuses across nine straight quarters.
• Helped newer relationship managers with account strategy and escalations, passing on what worked and lifting the standard across the team.
• Worked closely with Legal, CDD and Risk & Controls to keep high-risk merchants on the right side of regulation and due diligence.

Customer Success Specialist, Executive Complaints

Travel & hospitality.

• Handled executive-level escalations from both guests and business partners, including hotels and airlines, taking on the sensitive and awkward cases and seeing them through to a resolution.
• Looked after a set of hotel partners, working with their management to understand where things were going wrong and putting fixes in place that stopped the same complaints recurring.
• Used internal tools and feedback data to see which resolutions actually worked and spot patterns, then fed that back to Operations, Partner Services and Product.

Founder, media & events to web hosting

At 15, I started a small media and events business. The websites led to questions about hosting, domains and other projects. Before long, it had become a web hosting and consultancy business, which I eventually sold.