Everything is an IT matter. Including how your company gets paid.

Responsibility for invoicing and payments naturally sits primarily with Finance. But in companies built around digital and recurring business models, payments are not a one-off transaction. They are an ongoing flow that becomes a central part of the company’s digital infrastructure.

As such, how a company handles billing and payments directly impacts a wide range of IT-related areas, such as:

• Data security and regulatory compliance, including frameworks like DORA and NIS2

• APIs and integrations between business-critical systems

• Automation and the ability to leverage AI-driven efficiencies

• Self-service capabilities and other elements of a smooth digital customer experience
  

These factors are — or should be — decisive when determining whether a new solution should be implemented at all. The problem is that IT is often brought in late in the purchasing process, once other stakeholders have more or less made up their minds.

If you, as an IT leader, start asking the necessary questions at that stage, you risk ending up in the unenviable role of bottleneck. A prospective vendor may be disqualified entirely due to insufficient data security, forcing the evaluation process several steps backwards. Which rarely makes anyone happy.

Everyone feels the impact when IT input is missing

The reasons why IT isn’t proactively involved vary. Sometimes it’s a lack of understanding elsewhere in the organization; sometimes it’s simply a packed IT roadmap and lack of time. Regardless of the cause, not being given the opportunity to contribute early can lead to a number of frustrating consequences.

You may recognize some of these from other internal processes where IT was brought in too late:

• Implementations drag on and delay other initiatives

• Inefficient integrations force both your team and others into complex workarounds

• Poor data quality and manual input increase the risk of errors in flows and reporting

• Limited scalability and automation capabilities hold back business growth
  

A payment solution that isn’t designed to work seamlessly with the rest of your system landscape risks creating silos and increasing the workload. That affects your team — but also departments such as Finance and Customer Service.

What’s good for IT is good for the business (and vice versa)

Let’s talk about opportunities instead of problems.

A modern platform for invoicing and recurring payments, built by tech people for tech people, has the potential to become a powerful catalyst for innovation across the entire organization. Some of the benefits include:

• Less manual handling = more time spent creating real business value

• A modern, scalable IT architecture = easier growth across customers, products, and markets

• A smoother payment experience for customers = fewer support inquiries
  

And there’s more. The more your company automates and structures these payment processes, the greater your ability to optimize payment flows using data-driven insights.

7 questions to raise early when a new payment solution is being discussed

In summary, we at Billogram want to encourage you, as an IT leader, to take a proactive role in key decisions related to how your organization handles invoicing and payments.

To support you, we’ve put together a list of seven questions worth asking early on in the process:

1. How many vendors can this solution replace?

2. Is the API an engine for innovation, or a source of future technical debt?

3. How will this affect our compliance with relevant regulations?

4. Does the provider meet our non-negotiable information security requirements?

5. Can the solution scale with the business?

6. Cost vs. business value — what will the real ROI be?

7. How much ongoing maintenance will be required, and who will be responsible for it?

Curious what these considerations look like in practice?

When Rebel evaluated how to handle recurring payments, they faced many of the same questions around scalability, integrations, security, and long-term maintenance. One conclusion was clear: building and owning the payments infrastructure themselves wasn’t where they would create the most value.

Read the case to see how Rebel approached the decision, and how choosing the right payment platform helped them scale without turning payments into an IT burden.