On the Leaders in Payments podcast, Rapyd’s Kristin Reischel discusses trust, local payment behavior and the continuing importance of human accountability as payments become more embedded and automated.
Kristin Reischel, Senior Director, Solutions and Partner Marketing at Rapyd, recently joined the Leaders in Payments podcast with host Greg Myers for its Women Leaders in Payments Month series. The episode is organized around the theme “the future is human” and examines what that means in an industry increasingly shaped by embedded payments, artificial intelligence and automation.
The conversation covers Reischel’s path from fine art and software engineering into payment product marketing. Its broader message, however, is about what technology cannot remove from money movement: judgment, accountability and trust.
Connecting payment technology to real business needs
Reischel’s career did not follow a direct route into payments. After studying fine art, she moved into computer science and began her professional career in software engineering at IBM. She later realized that the part of the work she found most rewarding was speaking with clients, understanding their problems and connecting those problems to what technology could do.
That discovery eventually led her into product marketing and then payments. At Rapyd, she describes her work as a bridge between people who build technology and the clients and partners that use it.
The questions behind that work are practical. A business may need a specific local payment method in a particular country. It may need to move money more quickly. It may be trying to address a problem that looks simple from the outside but depends on several technical and market-specific considerations.
Product marketing helps connect those requirements to the product, engineering and partner teams responsible for delivering them.
Trust has to be built into payment operations
For Reischel, the human side of payments becomes most visible when a system does not work as expected.
Software can fail. Payment systems can go down. Fraud activity can require someone to determine whether an event is an isolated case or part of a broader pattern. Even when everything is functioning correctly, people still decide where a company should invest, which capabilities it should build and which markets it should enter.
This makes trust more than an abstract brand value. In embedded payments, trust is tied to whether functionality has been thoroughly tested, whether the location and status of funds are understood and whether settlement happens when it is expected.
Reischel notes that businesses of every size depend on access to their funds. When money does not arrive when promised, the effect is not limited to a technical metric. It can affect a company’s ability to operate and weaken its confidence in the organizations handling its payments.
Global payments are shaped by local relationships with money
Reischel also describes payments as deeply cultural.
Her own move from the US to the UK changed her understanding of banking access and credit. Financial products and behaviors that had felt routine in the US did not transfer automatically to a new country.
She uses that experience alongside examples involving cash preferences, mobile payments and digital wallets to illustrate how payment behavior differs between markets. Consumers may have different levels of access to traditional bank accounts, different attitudes toward credit and different expectations about how money should be stored or transferred.
For businesses expanding internationally, those differences are not peripheral. They help determine which payment methods customers will use and which experiences they will trust.
A global payment strategy therefore cannot assume that the habits of one market will apply everywhere else. It has to account for local behavior while still giving the business a consistent way to manage payments across its operations.
Automation still needs a path to human intervention
As payment experiences become more automated, Reischel believes people will continue to expect access to another person when a serious problem occurs.
A customer dealing with fraud or a declined card while travelling may not be satisfied with a chatbot as the only available form of assistance. The same issue applies to agentic commerce. When an automated transaction fails, businesses and customers still need to understand who is responsible and who has the authority to correct the error.
Her point is not that automation or AI has no role in payments. It is that automation does not eliminate accountability. Trust can weaken when technology creates distance between a problem and the person capable of resolving it.
Stablecoins and agentic commerce are developments to watch
Reischel is also closely watching stablecoins, cryptocurrency adoption and the convergence of AI with payments.
She sees potential for stablecoins to give more people access to forms of value that are less exposed to local currency instability. She also points to the growing connection between digital assets and familiar payment experiences, including the use of established card networks.
Agentic commerce is another area of interest. Reischel describes it as an early but increasingly practical use case for the combination of AI, payments and cryptocurrency. Many automated transactions may involve relatively small amounts, making transaction cost and speed important considerations. Digital assets that reduce those costs could make a wider range of automated transactions more viable.
She presents these as developments to monitor rather than settled outcomes. Questions involving reliability, responsibility and human intervention will remain important as the technology develops.
Leadership through experimentation and accountability
The episode also explores the career and leadership lessons Reischel has gathered across art, software, marketing and payments.
One lesson is that understanding what a person does not enjoy can be as useful as knowing exactly what they want to pursue. Her own career developed through a series of experiments and pivots rather than a fixed plan.
She also discusses the importance of process and accountability. Leaders need to recognize that people come from different cultures and have different frames of reference, while still creating enough visibility to identify problems and help team members improve.
Mentorship changes over time as well. Early in a career, close guidance can be invaluable. More experienced employees may benefit more from leaders who give them room to experiment, make mistakes and develop their own judgment.
For women considering payments, Reischel’s advice is to look beyond any single job description. The industry includes opportunities in engineering, fraud, data, AI, marketing, sales and many other disciplines.
The human requirements of global payments
The episode brings together two realities of modern payments. Technology is making payments more embedded, automated and globally connected. At the same time, payment behavior remains local, businesses still depend on reliable access to funds and people are still responsible for resolving the most consequential problems.
Reischel describes Rapyd as building a global network and providing fintech infrastructure that businesses can embed into their existing systems. Her comments highlight the practical requirements behind that work: understanding local payment needs, moving money dependably and maintaining trust when technology requires human judgment.
Listen to the full Leaders in Payments episode to hear the complete conversation, and read the full transcript below.
Full edited podcast transcript
The transcript below is based on the supplied automated transcript. It has been lightly edited for readability, repeated words and verbal fillers, while retaining every substantive exchange.
Introduction
Series introduction | 00:00
Welcome to Women Leaders in Payments Month, where we highlight and celebrate the women shaping the future of payments and fintech through their leadership, insight and impact.
A special thank you to Payroc for sponsoring this year’s series and for powering the continued advancement of women across our industry.
Now, on to the show.
Greg Myers | 00:14
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Women Leaders in Payments Month episode.
Today, I’m honored to have as our special guest Kristin Reischel, Senior Director, Solutions and Partner Marketing at Rapyd.
Kristin, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the show.
Kristin Reischel | 00:31
Thank you, Greg, for having me. It’s very nice to be here.
Music and bringing people together
Greg Myers | 00:35
Let’s start with a little icebreaker. If you could instantly become an expert in one non-work-related skill or hobby, what would it be and why?
Greg Myers | 00:44
This is actually a tough question for me. I have a lot of hobbies and a lot of interests, so I had to think about this one.
Maybe because I just went to the Hyde Park concert series over the weekend, I would say music.
I am not a natural musician. I don’t have a good musical ear, so I appreciate good music and good musicians. More than anything else, I really love how music brings people together.
No matter what language or culture, there’s something universal about music. I’d love to understand music, be able to play music and maybe even be able to sing, but I’m far from any of those things today.
Greg Myers | 01:36
I love that answer. I’ve asked many people that question. We have 11 episodes this month, and I always get a different answer.
I think it’s really interesting to hear people’s perspectives. I love your answer because I’m the same way. I can’t sing or play an instrument, but I love music and do think it brings people together. It’s a real gift.
From fine art to software and payments
Greg Myers | 01:58
Let’s talk about your background and career journey.
Give us a quick snapshot of your background, where you grew up, what you studied and what led you into the world of payments and fintech.
Kristin Reischel | 02:07
Greg and I were chatting right before we started recording. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, which is a place he lived very close to a few years ago.
Growing up in Boulder meant I was a very outdoorsy person. I grew up skiing, and I loved biking, hiking, backpacking and all of those things.
How did I end up in payments? It was very convoluted, honestly. It was not a direct path.
I started by studying art in college, so I have a degree in fine art. I was an artist very briefly and found it very hard to make a living as an artist.
Through one of my hobbies, I met a friend who introduced me to computers. I became very interested in computers and decided to get a computer science degree, which was very different from art.
I had always loved math growing up. I was interested in engineering, how things worked and getting into the details of things.
Through my computer science degree, I met some interesting people. Again, through common hobbies outside of work, I ended up working for IBM, which is a very good place to start a career.
I worked in the services area of IBM. From day one, every hour I worked was billable. That created a very direct relationship for me, as a worker, between my time and money, and between my work and the value of that work.
Every hour I worked, I billed a client for that hour. I took my job very seriously. I wanted to be accountable, and I wanted to create good work.
Over time, though, I found the work I was doing, which was mostly software engineering, less interesting because there wasn’t quite enough collaboration for me.
I wanted to have conversations with clients. I really enjoyed that direct interaction.
Over the years, I found that I had the most excitement at work when I was speaking with clients, understanding their problems and thinking about the problems I could solve for them as an engineer through software.
That is how I ended up pursuing marketing. I worked on a filming project with a client, and through that project, I discovered marketing as a whole new space, and ultimately product marketing.
Through product marketing, I met someone through a common interest outside of work and was hired as a payment product marketer.
I dove deeply into the world of payments and never looked back. That was more than 15 years ago.
Three major career pivots
Greg Myers | 05:26
Was there a person, an opportunity or perhaps an unexpected moment that helped shape the direction of your career?
Kristin Reischel | 05:35
When I look back at my career, I think there were three major pivots.
Early in school, I did not start my degree as a fine arts major. I actually started as an engineer because I loved math, or “maths,” as they would say here in the UK.
But I found that a lot of my free time was spent drawing. I had one art class, and a lot of my free time was spent thinking about my next drawing. I would fill up sketchbooks very quickly.
More and more of my free time was being spent in an area that I wasn’t studying for my degree. Through my relationship with my art teacher, who really encouraged me, I pivoted and pursued art.
The second major pivot came when I was a software engineer. I was watching myself and looking at where I found the most joy in my work.
It was through interacting with people, creating stories and understanding clients’ problems. That was how I found marketing.
In marketing, you get to craft a story. You get to understand clients’ problems and try to solve those problems through storytelling. You work with product people and engineers, and you put all the hard work they are doing into something tangible that people can relate to, use and want to have.
Marketing eventually turned into payments, which was the third major pivot in my career.
I was inspired by a leader I met. He was a mountain biker, and I was a mountain biker, so that was our common interest.
I found him inspiring and intelligent, and I really wanted to work for him. I ended up pivoting from one marketing career into a completely different industry that I did not even know existed at the time.
Product marketing at Rapyd
Greg Myers | 07:48
Tell us about your role today at Rapyd. What part of your work are you most excited about right now?
Kristin Reischel | 07:57
There is so much happening in the payments space.
I’ve done a lot of different things at Rapyd over the years, but my main focus and passion, and what I get to do daily, is still product marketing work.
I love working with product people and people who are passionate about technology. I love getting into the details of how things are created, why they are created and how they work.
I also enjoy working with clients and understanding what they are looking for and what they actually need.
Is it an obscure payment method from a particular country? Is it moving money faster? Whatever the problem is, I want to understand what they are trying to solve with our technology.
I enjoy bridging all of that together.
Some of the most interesting areas in payments today are the convergence of AI and cryptocurrencies, the speed of payments and the globalization of payments. Those are some of the most interesting things we are doing at Rapyd and that are happening across the industry as a whole.
Why the future of payments is human
Greg Myers | 09:14
Let’s pivot and talk about leadership and perspective.
This year’s theme is “the future is human.” When you hear that phrase, what does it mean to you as a leader in payments?
Kristin Reischel | 09:25
If you have ever worked in software, or even just used software, you know that we are interacting with it all the time. Many of us are on computers or other devices for most of the day.
But software breaks. Systems go down.
No matter how sophisticated software is, it is still written by humans. AI is starting to take on more of that, which is exciting, but even the best AI still has to be checked by a human.
When a payment system goes down, there is still a human who brings that payment system back up.
When there is a fraud event, there is still a human looking at it and determining whether it is a bigger issue. Is it a systemic issue? Is it an outlier that they do not anticipate happening again? Is it a common trend they are beginning to see?
There is some form of human intervention behind every payment, anywhere in the world.
That is not only true when things go wrong. When things go right, someone still has to decide where the company needs to invest, where it should build more features, where it should put more focus or whether it should expand into a new market.
There are always humans behind the payments infrastructure we all get excited about.
Trust and embedded payments
Greg Myers | 11:06
Payments are becoming more digital, more embedded and more intelligent. What do you think leaders need to keep front and center as the industry continues to evolve?
Kristin Reischel | 11:18
There are a couple of things I think about with embedded payments.
That is an area Rapyd specializes in. Our technology is designed as fintech infrastructure that businesses can embed into their existing systems, so it is definitely top of mind for us.
It always comes back to a couple of things. Trust is a big one. You have to trust each other.
Payments are money, and money is everything. It is why we get to do what we are doing today. It truly makes the world go around.
Trust is foundational to payments. In anything we are doing, we have to ensure that we can trust the systems.
At Rapyd, we are building a global network. With every additional partner we work with and every additional capability we add, we have to make sure we have tested it thoroughly and that we know exactly where the money is at any point in time.
We are dealing with people’s livelihoods.
We work with small businesses, large businesses and enterprise businesses. All of those businesses need funds in order to function.
They need their funds to go where they expect them to go and to arrive when we say they will arrive.
If money does not settle when we say it will settle, we start to lose that trust.
Anything we build or enhance has to be thoroughly tested.
Lessons about leadership and accountability
Greg Myers | 13:08
What is something you have learned about leadership that you wish you had understood earlier in your career?
Kristin Reischel | 13:16
There are so many things. I like to think I am learning something new every day.
One thing I wish I had understood earlier is that knowing what you do not like to do can be almost as important as knowing what you want to do.
Some people are very lucky. They know early in life exactly what they enjoy doing and what they want to pursue.
I was not that person. I have a lot of interests and love studying different things.
A lot of my career has been a reflection of things I realized I did not quite enjoy doing. I thought I would enjoy something, but I tried it and realized it was not where I wanted to spend my time.
That is one lesson I probably could have learned earlier.
Another is that humans are complicated. People are challenging. Everyone is different.
That is the real benefit of working with and managing people, but it is also hard. You work with people who come from different cultures and countries. They have different frames of reference, were raised differently and have different values.
It is not easy. It is good to be flexible and understanding, but one thing I have learned over and over again is that you also need processes that keep people accountable.
Of course, you want to trust the people you work with. But without processes or systems that create accountability and visibility, it can be difficult to see exactly what people are working on.
We all miss deadlines. But if it happens repeatedly and you have a system in place, it is easier to recognize the pattern early.
You can then find tools to help the person grow in that area, or perhaps they need to move on and try something different.
Those are a couple of lessons I could have used earlier in my career.
Payments as a culture
Greg Myers | 15:34
Let’s talk about the human side of payments again.
Behind every payment, there is a person, a business or a particular need. How do you think about the human side of payments in the work you do every day?
Kristin Reischel | 15:51
That is probably one of the most exciting things about payments for me and one of the reasons I continue to be excited about this industry.
Payments are money, and money is a culture. Payments are a culture.
I started my payments career in the US and focused heavily on card processing, so I knew card processing very well.
In the US, most Americans have a credit card. I had my first credit card at 18, when I was in college. We are very comfortable with having debt and credit.
As soon as you leave the US, that is not necessarily the case.
I moved to the UK three years ago. When I first moved here, I went to get a bank account, and it was not easy.
For the first time in my payments career, after I had already spent many years in payments, I understood why neobanks existed. I never really understood it until I moved to the UK. Then I realized why they had been created.
It is hard to get a bank account in a new country when you have just moved there.
A lot of people I knew who had moved to the UK were using Revolut or, really, name the neobank, because it was so challenging to get a traditional bank account.
I also learned very quickly that getting credit was different. Of course I wanted a UK credit card. That is what you do as an American. I was wondering where my first credit card would come from.
They would not even talk to me about credit for six months.
As an adult and a professional, it was surprising to me. I had three or four credit cards from the US, so it was not a problem for me, but I was shocked.
Culturally, the relationship with money in the UK is very different from the relationship Americans have with money.
Then you can look at other countries. Germany is a very cash-centric society. People generally do not like to have debt, so cash remains popular.
You can look at Africa, where mobile payments have been on the leading edge for decades. Many people may not have had access to banks, so they were using mobile payments to send money to one another and becoming very creative about how they transacted.
It is similar in Southeast Asia, where there are many super wallets.
We are starting to see more of that in the US and across Europe, but it has existed in Southeast Asia for a long time. Many people have some form of digital wallet, such as WeChat Pay in China or GrabPay in Singapore.
These digital wallets have become a major part of the payment ecosystem.
That is one of the most interesting things about payments. They are very human and very cultural.
No matter which border you cross, you are going to encounter a new way of relating to money.
Maintaining trust as payments become automated
Greg Myers | 19:16
You have mentioned trust several times, and it is such a critical part of the industry.
How can companies build and maintain trust as payments become even more automated and technology-driven?
Kristin Reischel | 19:31
I think people still want access to a human being.
If you have experienced fraud, or you could not use your credit card to pay for a hotel in a foreign country, the last thing you want is to call your bank, credit card company or other provider and get only a chatbot or automated agent.
You will lose trust if that is all you are offering customers.
Having access to human beings will continue to be an extremely important part of all of this.
Even with agentic commerce, as exciting and fast-paced as it is, if something does not work, someone needs to understand who is liable. There also needs to be a human being who can correct errors in the system.
Humans are still relying on other humans and on human relationships.
If I say I am going to do something for you, or I tell you that your money is going to arrive on a certain day, you believe me. You do not necessarily believe the chatbot.
There is still a human element in business every day.
Stablecoins, crypto and agentic commerce
Greg Myers | 20:53
What is one trend or change in the industry that you believe will have the biggest impact on people or businesses over the next few years?
Kristin Reischel | 21:03
There is so much happening.
Right now, I am very interested in cryptocurrencies. I think they are almost a cultural reaction to money, banking systems and bureaucracy in many ways.
I think cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins specifically, will have a major impact and are already having an impact.
We have heard people talk about democratizing payments for a long time. It is something the industry has been saying for a long time, and it is part of our mission.
I think stablecoins are a step in that direction because they are becoming accessible to more people in more countries.
Consider a place such as Argentina, where the currency has fluctuated tremendously over many decades.
It is not fair for someone working in Argentina to watch their paycheck shrink significantly in a very short period.
Why should someone doing the same job in Argentina that another person is doing in the US or UK suddenly see their work valued differently?
Access to stablecoins, or a more universal currency such as a cryptocurrency, gives people an opportunity to address some of those differences in living standards and gain access to things that everyone who works hard should be able to access.
I think it is a very interesting space.
We are also beginning to see the card brands embrace stablecoins. There are stablecoin-backed Visa and Mastercard cards, so someone with a stablecoin account can use the same types of rails that other consumers use for debit or credit cards.
I think that is an extremely interesting area to watch.
There are many exciting things happening in payments today, but I also think AI, payments and cryptocurrencies are converging.
Agentic commerce is still in its early days, but we are beginning to see some real-world use cases take off.
A lot of agentic commerce may involve microtransactions. Microtransactions are still relatively expensive.
When you have a cryptocurrency that can decrease those costs and increase the speed, it begins to make agentic commerce more realistic.
I think that is extremely interesting for many different areas of the payments industry.
Mentorship at different career stages
Greg Myers | 24:05
Let’s talk about mentorship, impact and what comes next.
Who has influenced you along the way, whether directly or indirectly, and what did you learn from them?
Kristin Reischel | 24:15
There are so many people I have learned from over the years.
As I mentioned earlier, many people who influenced my career were not necessarily people I worked for or worked with. They were people with whom I shared interests.
A few people stand out.
Early in my career as a software professional, there were people who were willing to be patient with me. I was young when I started my career and had a lot to learn.
Having someone willing to take extra time to explain things and get into details I could not yet understand was very valuable.
When I started, we did not have AI or all the tools available today. It was much harder to learn software and programming than it is now.
Today, it is easy to find a YouTube channel and begin learning how to code very quickly.
Having those mentors early in my career made a major impact.
I also learned from people I did not necessarily love working for. I still learned a great deal from those working relationships, whether it was discipline, process or accountability.
I had a mentor who was extremely process-focused. I am not naturally a process person, so it was not necessarily my area of interest.
But I appreciated his discipline and the way everything was tracked and measured.
Looking back, I see the real value of that approach, and I am trying to integrate more of it into my own working life.
Then there are the managers who are absolutely wonderful and from whom you learn so much.
My manager right now is someone I am learning a great deal from. He is creative, sharp and always willing to try different things.
One of his gifts is trusting his staff to be good at what they do and giving them the room to do it well.
Some managers overmanage or micromanage. Working for someone who gives you room to explore and become good at your job is extremely important, especially later in your career.
Early in a career, it is important to have people willing to walk you through things step by step.
As you grow and mature, it becomes just as important to have people who let you experiment, make mistakes and fail.
Those significant failures are often when you learn the most. Usually, you do not make the same mistake again.
Advice for women entering payments
Greg Myers | 27:35
What advice would you give to the next generation of women entering the payments industry?
Kristin Reischel | 27:42
I fell into payments by accident. It was not something that had ever been on my radar.
Payments is a strange industry in that, until you enter it, you may never think about it very much.
Once you enter the industry, you realize there is an entire universe you did not know existed, and it is part of almost everything in your life.
My advice to anyone interested in payments is that there really is something for everyone in this industry.
People do not usually begin by saying, “I want to pursue payments,” unless they are already familiar with the industry.
People often enter payments by accident, through a project or a software initiative where payments become an enhancement or feature of something else they are doing.
But once you are in the industry, there is so much you can do. The possibilities cover many different personalities and skill sets.
If you are a technical person, you can build the systems.
If you are interested in AI, payments involve enormous volumes of data and transactions. You can work with that data, think about different fraud models and train data models. There is a great deal happening in that area.
If you are in marketing, you can understand customers, identify the problems payment systems are solving and craft the story.
There are also many opportunities in sales. Some of the best salespeople I have worked with are women.
Relationship skills are important, but so are a sophisticated understanding of payment systems and a strong sense of accountability.
There really is something for everyone in the payments industry.
If the first area you try is not working for you, try something else.
Move into a more technical role. If the technical side is not interesting, try marketing. If marketing is not interesting, try sales.
There are many different and interesting paths within payments.
Podcasts, museums and art curation
Greg Myers | 30:18
Let’s wrap up the show with one final, fun question.
What is one app, podcast, book, television show, hobby or favorite way to unwind that gives us a glimpse of who you are outside of work?
Kristin Reischel | 30:35
I am a little bit of a creature of habit.
I try to work out most mornings. My gym is about a 30-minute walk away. I live in London, so I walk everywhere and do not have a car here.
I have about a 30-minute walk in each direction, so I listen to a lot of podcasts.
My interests vary. Some weeks I listen to Bloomberg podcasts, and I also listen to The New York Times.
A podcast I started listening to recently is Lori Santos’ The Happiness Lab.
She is an interesting professor who taught a class at Yale that became extremely popular. She studied psychology and wanted to give her students skills they could use to deal with stress and anxiety.
She ultimately connects those ideas to the path toward happiness and what happiness means. I am finding the podcast very interesting.
For unwinding, one of the most relaxing and interesting things I like to do, especially here in London, is visit galleries and museums.
I am a member of the Tate, the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery, and I love looking at artwork.
It is very relaxing, and it connects me to my college years, when I studied fine art.
I have developed a whole new appreciation for curating art.
Previously, art was more about the individual artist I studied and loved. Now, the curation is almost more important to me than the individual artist.
People who can translate an artist’s history and story into something relatable to a wide audience are fascinating.
There is a real difference between someone who is an excellent curator and someone who is not a skilled curator.
I have developed a new appreciation for that since living in London.
Those are a couple of the things that come to mind.
Closing
Greg Myers | 33:03
Thank you for sharing those.
I think that is a great way to wrap up the show. I know your time is valuable, so I really appreciate you being here today.
Thank you again for being on the show.
Kristin Reischel | 33:13
Thank you, Greg. It was so nice to meet you, and thank you for having me on the show.
Greg Myers | 33:17
Absolutely.
And to all the listeners out there, thank you for your time as well.