FlexPay Names Two Industry Vets To Leadership Team

The payments FinTech FlexPay has added two industry veterans to its team, the company announced Tuesday.

Steve Arentzoff will join the leadership team at the Canadian firm as senior vice president of marketing, responsible for “building and refining FlexPay’s go-to-market strategy and driving demand and company growth,” the company said in a news release.

Arentzoff brings with him more than 20 years technology marketing leadership experience, having led two tech companies — Medallia and Cision — through their IPOs. He also played a crucial role in Dealertrack’s acquisition by Cox Automotive, the release says.

Meanwhile, Ray Watson has been named FlexPay’s senior vice president of channel partnerships and eCommerce, responsible for “continuing to foster relationships within key verticals and develop and build new partnerships.”

A global payments expert with 15 years’ experience in the payments processing industry, Watson has held strategic business development and partner management roles with J.P. Morgan Chase and Ingenico ePayments, as well as leadership roles with Sempris, The Reunion Group, and AEGON Direct Marketing,

“The addition of these individuals to our leadership team will play an integral role in accelerating our company growth,” said FlexPay Founder & CEO Darryl Hicks. “Both of these executives bring tremendous knowledge and proven track records, and they will help us build on our momentum and strengthen our leadership position in the payments ecosystem.”

FlexPay bills itself as a “machine learning-powered FinTech that identifies and solves payment problems preventing legitimate eCommerce and subscription transactions from completing.”

In an interview with PYMNTS last month, Hicks discussed the issue of lost sales due to false declines, a problem he said could rise 30 percent this year to more than $600 billion.

“Many merchants are seeing on average around 20 percent … of all of their transactions falsely identified as fraud and declined, [sometimes even higher], so these are non-trivial percentages,” Hicks said.

And this issue can be as confusing as it is big. For example, Hicks pointed to a subscription box customer who pays their monthly bill without issue for 12 months in a row before their card is declined on month 13, even if nothing about the card is different. It could be that the card balance was too high and the charge was declined due to insufficient funds, but in most cases, it’s simply a bad decline.