Revenue orchestration: the next growth lever for fintech CROs

As fintech matures, sustainable growth increasingly depends on eliminating revenue leakage across payments, customer engagement, and commercial operations. In this article, James Bradley, Chief Revenue Officer at Contiant, explores how the CRO role is evolving beyond sales leadership and why revenue orchestration is becoming a critical competitive advantage in the age of pay by bank and open banking.

As Pay by Bank and Open Banking adoption accelerate globally, fintech companies are increasingly focusing on revenue orchestration to reduce revenue leakage, improve customer outcomes, and unlock long-term growth.

For much of the past decade, growth in fintech has been defined by customer acquisition. Companies invested heavily in product innovation, market expansion, customer acquisition, and fundraising, often prioritising rapid scale over operational efficiency.

Today, the industry is entering a different phase.

As fintech matures and investors place greater emphasis on profitability, many organisations are discovering that their biggest challenge is not acquiring customers. It is maximising the value of the customers they already have. This shift is forcing revenue leaders to rethink how growth is created and where revenue is lost.

James Bradley has recently joined Contiant as Chief Revenue Officer.  With over 15 years experience in Finance and Technology roles, James will lead our global revenue strategy, driving the expansion and growth of our merchant and partner portfolios, while overseeing Contiant’s international sales organisation.

‘This is an extremely exciting time to join Contiant. The organisation has achieved significant success and growth over the past few years, and our focus now is to build on that momentum by strengthening Contiant’s global framework with the enhancement of our Go To Market offering and positioning Contiant as a leading, international, Pay by Bank provider.’

Working closely with merchants, payment partners, financial institutions, and technology providers at Contiant across multiple markets has highlighted a common challenge throughout the industry: companies continue to invest heavily in customer acquisition while often overlooking the operational friction, payment inefficiencies, and disconnected customer experiences that ultimately limit long-term revenue growth.

This experience reinforces a growing belief that growth is no longer driven solely by acquisition. It increasingly depends on how effectively businesses connect payments, customer engagement, data, partnerships, and commercial operations into a unified revenue ecosystem.

Fintech's hidden revenue leakage problem

Revenue leakage exists across nearly every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Customers abandon onboarding journeys. Transactions fail. Payment methods create friction. Valuable customer data remains isolated between systems. Historically, marketing, product, customer success, and payments teams have often operated with different objectives and performance metrics.

Individually, these inefficiencies may appear insignificant. Collectively, they can represent millions in lost revenue.

Many fintech organisations have sophisticated acquisition reporting and can measure marketing performance with remarkable accuracy. Yet, post live, they often have limited visibility into what happens after the first transaction. As a result, businesses frequently focus on generating new demand while overlooking the operational friction that prevents existing customers from delivering their full lifetime value.

The organisations creating the strongest results are increasingly those that identify and eliminate friction throughout the entire customer journey rather than concentrating solely on acquisition.

Strategic partnerships as a revenue multiplier

Revenue growth is not only driven by direct sales. Increasingly, it depends on building strategic partner ecosystems that expand distribution, increase total processed volume, and embed solutions deeper into a merchant's daily operations.

At Contiant, partnerships play a critical role in accelerating the adoption of Open Banking and Pay by Bank solutions. Strategic relationships create a consistent flow of new merchant opportunities, reduce acquisition costs, shorten sales cycles, and create stronger long-term commercial relationships.

Choosing the right integrations and partnerships is equally important. Successful organisations align partnerships with business objectives, product roadmaps, and market expansion strategies while ensuring integrations are delivered within agreed scope, timelines, and budgets.

Strategic partnerships should extend beyond introductions and integrations. The most successful ecosystems are built around joint go-to-market initiatives, revenue-sharing models, cross-selling opportunities, and shared commercial objectives that create mutual value for merchants, partners, and technology providers.

The journey does not end once an integration goes live. In many cases, it is only the beginning.

Performance reporting, optimisation, and continuous monitoring are essential to improving payment performance, increasing conversion rates, and delivering stronger customer outcomes. Over time, this strengthens merchant loyalty, deepens partner relationships, increases customer lifetime value, and creates a more predictable recurring revenue model.

The evolving role of the Chief Revenue Officer

This changing landscape is transforming the role of the Chief Revenue Officer.

Historically, CROs were primarily responsible for sales performance and commercial growth. Today, revenue outcomes are influenced by a much broader set of factors, including customer experience, product design, payments infrastructure, retention strategies, data quality, and operational efficiency.

Revenue leadership is becoming less about managing sales teams and more about aligning the systems that influence customer value creation.

The modern CRO must increasingly act as a revenue architect, connecting functions that have traditionally operated independently.

When customer acquisition, payments, onboarding, customer engagement, and retention are managed as separate initiatives, inefficiencies naturally emerge. When they operate as part of a unified revenue system, businesses gain greater visibility, stronger performance, and improved customer outcomes.

The role has evolved beyond traditional sales leadership into cross-functional revenue enablement. Revenue is no longer solely the responsibility of sales teams. In a highly competitive market, the focus shifts from simply closing deals to creating customer value, profitable growth, and long-term commercial success.

For companies operating in fast-moving sectors such as Open Banking and payments, this also means balancing innovation, strategic partnerships, regulatory considerations, and market-specific opportunities, ensuring technology is leveraged effectively to maximise revenue potential.

Why payments have become a strategic growth driver

One of the most significant shifts occurring within fintech is the growing strategic importance of payments.

For many years, payments were viewed primarily as operational infrastructure. Their role was to process transactions efficiently and reliably.

Today, payments have become a direct contributor to business growth.

The rise of Pay by Bank, real-time payments, and Open Banking is creating new opportunities for businesses to improve conversion rates, reduce payment costs, accelerate settlement times, while further enhancing the customer experience.

At Contiant, this trend is increasingly visible across both merchants and payment partners. Demand for Pay by Bank solutions is being driven not only by cost efficiencies but also by the ability to improve customer experience, reduce friction, increase conversion rates, and unlock new revenue opportunities.

Contiant is at the forefront of the Pay by Bank movement, providing a market-leading Open Banking ecosystem and instant payment solutions for businesses across Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Our platform enables merchants and payment providers to accept secure account-to-account payments, access financial data, and streamline payment operations via a single API, thus helping reduce costs, improve conversions, settlement times, and reconciliation processes.

Businesses often operate across multiple markets, payment rails, providers, banking networks, and regulatory frameworks. Delivering a seamless customer experience within this environment requires significantly greater coordination than in previous years.

As payment ecosystems become more complex, the move to real-time global settlement is transforming operations by accelerating cash flow, removing multi-day settlement times, and simplifying reconciliation.

As payments become a more influential part of the customer journey, they are increasingly becoming a responsibility of revenue leadership rather than solely an operational function.

The rise of revenue orchestration

To address growing complexity, leading fintech organisations are adopting orchestration strategies that connect customer acquisition, payments, engagement, retention, and commercial operations into a unified framework.

Revenue orchestration enables businesses to optimise how customers move through every stage of the revenue lifecycle.

Rather than evaluating departments independently, organisations begin assessing how decisions made in one area affect performance across the broader customer journey.

Within payments, orchestration can improve transaction routing, increase resilience, improve performance, and support rapid adaptation to changing customer preferences and regulatory requirements.

This philosophy sits at the core of Contiant's approach, where payment orchestration, Open Banking connectivity, intelligent routing, and commercial alignment are designed to help businesses create seamless customer journeys while maximising revenue outcomes.

Beyond payments, orchestration creates stronger alignment between commercial teams, product teams, customer success functions, and operational departments.

The result is greater visibility into where value is being created, where friction exists, and where growth opportunities remain untapped.

As competition intensifies and margins come under increasing pressure, these advantages become increasingly significant.

Measuring what matters

For revenue leaders, this shift also requires new performance metrics.

While customer acquisition remains important, organisations are placing greater emphasis on indicators that reflect long-term value creation, including:

• Customer lifetime value;
• Payment success rates;
• Conversion rates across onboarding and transaction journeys;
• Customer retention and churn;
• Revenue per customer;
• Reactivation performance;
• Operational efficiency across the revenue lifecycle.

These metrics provide a more complete picture of revenue health and often reveal opportunities that traditional acquisition-focused reporting can overlook.

The future of revenue leadership

The highest performing fintech companies of the next decade may not necessarily be those that acquire the most customers. They are likely to be the organisations that remove the most friction from the customer journey and generate the greatest value from every customer relationship.

As Pay by Bank adoption accelerates and Open Banking ecosystems continue to mature, businesses will need to connect payments, customer engagement, data, and commercial operations more effectively than ever before.

The future of fintech growth will not be defined solely by how many customers a business acquires. It will increasingly be determined by how effectively it aligns payments, customer experience, data, partnerships, and commercial strategy into a single revenue system.

For CROs and revenue leaders, the challenge is no longer simply driving growth.

It is designing the systems that make growth scalable, efficient, and repeatable.

About James Bradley

James Bradley is Chief Revenue Officer at Contiant, where he leads the company's global revenue strategy, commercial growth, and strategic partnerships. With extensive experience across payments, fintech, and commercial leadership, he focuses on helping businesses unlock growth through open banking, pay by bank innovation, and payment orchestration.

 

 

About the company

Contiant is a global Open Banking and Pay by Bank technology provider that helps merchants, financial institutions, and payment partners simplify payments through orchestration, connectivity, and intelligent routing. By connecting payments, data, and commercial performance, Contiant enables businesses to deliver seamless customer experiences and optimise revenue outcomes at scale.