Payments look instant and invisible until something goes wrong. That’s when you find out whether you’re working with a faceless system or a team you can actually trust. We sit down with Alex McCandless, EVP of Marketing and Training at Payroc, to get specific about what “people powered” really means in fintech and why transparency and access to real decision makers still matter in a world of automated transactions.
Alex shares her career journey from the agency world into payment processing, plus what she learned scaling from a scrappy startup environment into a platform shaped by 27 acquisitions. We talk about the challenge of bringing many brands under one Payroc umbrella without forcing a one-size-fits-all playbook, and how culture integration requires real discovery, humility, and a willingness to borrow the best tools and processes from every team.
We also dig into the future of payments and the role of AI in fintech. Alex makes the case for AI-assisted operations, not AI-powered relationships, and connects that to embedded finance, SaaS, and the push toward more holistic experiences across card-present and card-not-present payments. On trust and security, she explains why “secure” should be baseline, why trust is earned one transaction at a time, and how the 1% edge cases can define your reputation. We close with what she’s watching next, including agentic commerce, machine-to-machine payments, and how marketing teams are adapting for LLM search and more qualified inbound leads.
