A Journey Through the Payments Department at GetYourGuide

Dennis Phúc McNulty is the director of payments at GetYourGuide. He explains how payments can help businesses continue to grow, some of the upcoming projects at GetYourGuide, and what a career in payments can look like.

Hi! I’m Dennis. I’ve been in the payments industry for 18 years and I live, breathe, and eat payment topics. I see payments as not just a way for customers to pay at checkout, but as a function of a company that can be used to acquire and retain customers, as well as generate new sources of revenue.

When meeting new people and explaining that I work in payments, the immediate first question is, “What exactly do you do?”

Fair question. I’m happy to share a bit of my working life in the exciting world of payments!

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Payments 101

Let’s start with the basics. Why do companies need a Payments department? Well, if you need to collect money from customers, you need to have infrastructure that allows you to do that.

Whether it’s at the supermarket when you pay with your credit card, or online when you checkout using PayPal, the infrastructure has to be built and maintained. And who deals with all of this? The Payments department!

One question to ask yourself, when you purchase something online is, are you always able to pay with your choice of payment? I once had a phase of obsessively collecting airline miles with my American Express card. When a website didn’t have American Express as an option, I would immediately look at booking through other websites without looking back. I wanted those airline miles.

I also remember one time I was waiting for my new debit card to be delivered, but I needed to purchase something online. I thought to myself, no problem — I’ll just use my PayPal account. When PayPal wasn’t an option, I found myself forced to wait for my debit card to arrive. Not cool.

These types of incidents happen all the time across the globe, and it’s up to the Payments department at companies to continually optimize how people pay, and ensure a smooth journey along the way.

My mission within the Payments department

If I’ve done my lordly duties with honor and valor, there are two outcomes:

1. Customers can’t even remember the payment portion of their online shopping because it was so simple, and they could pay however they wanted.
2. They were happily surprised — for example, that they were able to split the final payment into 4 installments and pay over time instead of all at once. Not necessarily paying with that cryptocurrency they’ve recently been profitably investing in, though.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

At GetYourGuide, the Payments department manages:

• Payments via the checkout page
• Payments that we make to our business partners for their tour and excursion services
• Our internal corporate card and miscellaneous company purchases
• The relationships with all payment companies and banks we’re using for payments

Basically if you hear the word payments, we’re a part of it.

Money is emotional

One thing I always tell people is that money is emotional. What I mean is that if anything goes wrong with how you spend or receive money, it’s an emotional matter. Imagine not getting paid one day from your employer because something went wrong with the payment. That’s stressful.

Or if you buy something online and you were accidentally double charged. You wouldn’t be a happy camper. The Payments Department not only will deal with these issues, we strive to continually improve how things work so that problems don’t arise in the first place.

Let’s imagine another scenario that isn’t related to problems during the payment process.

You’re browsing GetYourGuide for your upcoming trip to Chiang Mai. You have a budget of 150 and you can’t go over. You book the Thai cooking class, the street food tour, and the washing elephants in the River excursion. Total = 180… over your budget. But you can’t spend more than 150 or else you won’t have enough money for the other purchases on your trip.

If you’ve ever had this experience before, it can be stressful and emotionally draining. Luckily in the world of payments, we’re looking into these scenarios. For example, implementing split payments that can be paid over time, or reserve now and pay later schemes, so that in the end, you can do everything your heart desires during your precious holiday time.

An exciting but continuous road ahead

So what’s in store for the Payments department at GetYourGuide? Before working at GetYourGuide, I was working for Amazon and Mercari, the largest B2C Marketplace in Japan, where, no joke, there was some new method to pay every three months. Hard to keep up!

If you multiply that by new payment methods from every country in the world, you can imagine any Payments department has their plate full — more like a bottomless plate.

In the next few years at GetYourGuide, we’ll focus on our target countries, and make sure all customers can pay how they like, and without friction. One project I’m particularly excited to work on is adding the ever popular buy now pay later way of paying. This is perfect for those wanting to splurge a bit when traveling, and not having to worry about paying it all at once.

Let’s not forget that at GetYourGuide, we also have to pay out our business partners, who are supplying our customers with amazing experiences around the planet. As you can imagine, each of these business partners have their own preferences for getting paid.

There are even some countries where the preferred way of receiving money is cash — imagine how that works when you’re an e-commerce company like GetYourGuide. But fear not, the Payments department has it all under control.

Payments welcomes everyone

I know what you’re thinking…

“Payments sounds totally cool, but what does a career in it look like?”

Let me just say this.

Payments have been around for thousands of years, and I promise you, they’re not going away anytime soon. And there aren’t many of us payments people out there. Put those together, and you’ve got solid job security, and companies actively and sometimes aggressively seeking you out.

At GetYourGuide, a career in payments typically starts as a Payments coordinator. In this role, you deal with day-to-day payment issues as they arise, work together with Customer Care, and other teams, to investigate and resolve issues. It is a GREAT foot in the door and you will learn valuable payment skills.

Another typical starting point is also as a customer care agent. Here, you’ll quickly learn that many issues faced by customers revolve around payments. You’ll become an expert for all internal systems used to investigate issues, which acts as a great stepping stone to becoming a payments coordinator.

As you gain more payments experience, you'll start to notice areas of improvement, such as trends from unhappy customers that could be fixed if a change were made. When you get to this point, you’re progressing down the Payments career path.

As you move from payments coordinator, to lead, manager, and even Head of Payments, you understand how payments can be used to make great experiences for customers, but also tie payment initiatives to overall company goals. You’ll start to monitor all Payment KPIs, and understand how to make business decisions from the data you see.

You’ll also start to talk using Payments terms and forget that you need to say things in normal terms for people to understand. By the time you know it, you will be Head of Payments, running your own team, and teaching payment coordinators everything you learned when you first started.

Does this all sound a bit too idealistic? I can tell you from personal experience that I have hired two payment coordinators in the past and one payments manager, who are all now successful Head of Payments for large e-commerce companies.

I also started my career as a developer for a payments company, learning about payments through code. And now, I’m happily taking on challenging yet fun initiates at GetYourGuide.

But don’t take my word for it. Find out yourself and give a career in Payments a shot!

Interested in a career at GetYourGuide? Check out our Careers Page.

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