PaymentIQ has completed a management buyout backed by fintech investor InCore Invest, returning control of its payment orchestration platform to its own leadership team.
CEO Neil D’Souza has been direct about the challenges the platform faced before regaining its independence, acknowledging years of stagnation under previous ownership.
“We’ve gone through the last three to four years with very little development or product innovation,” D’Souza said, pointing to a period of underinvestment that allowed competitors to gain meaningful ground.
With that bottleneck now removed, PaymentIQ is accelerating its product roadmap and rebuilding the capabilities it lost during those slow years.
VP of Product Kaivalya Paluskar, known internally as KP, made clear the platform’s intentions around artificial intelligence are already moving beyond talk.
“Everyone is talking a lot about AI. But we’re not talking. We’re executing,” KP said, noting that integrations and features once taking months now ship in weeks.
For iGaming operators, the practical consequences of a fragmented payment stack are significant and often invisible to senior leadership until they look closely at the data.
An operator running at a 70% approval rate instead of 85% is losing 15 transactions in every 100, along with all the revenue those transactions carried, a gap D’Souza describes as one that “looks normal” until someone actually runs the numbers.
KP has observed payments teams across the industry shift their positioning over the past two to three years, moving away from being treated purely as a cost centre toward being connected directly to revenue growth.
“Now they’re getting attached to growing the business, rather than looking at it as a cost centre,” KP said, pointing to better data visibility as the turning point driving that change.
One of the clearest advantages of PaymentIQ’s routing engine is the ability to direct traffic across multiple acquirers based on actual performance, a fix D’Souza says moved approval rate numbers immediately for one merchant once implemented.
KP highlighted how operators can also A/B test checkout experiences by market, comparing a localised cashier in one region against another and presenting a CFO with the exact revenue impact of the decision.
“That would be almost impossible if you didn’t have that data to measure,” KP said, underlining how data access transforms payments from a support function into a strategic lever.
Speed to market is another area where PaymentIQ’s independence creates a concrete competitive advantage for iGaming operators looking to launch in new regions.
“Building direct provider connections can take anywhere between six to twelve months,” D’Souza said, a timeline long enough in competitive markets for a rival operator to establish a meaningful head start.
By contrast, PaymentIQ customers have launched in a new market in as little as a single day, because the groundwork with providers is already in place before the operator even signs a contract.
“When an operator wants to go to a new market, we’re already there. All they need to do is set up contracts with the providers and get their merchant IDs. It’s a flick of a switch,” D’Souza said.
The platform’s first major post-independence product launch is scheduled for the end of summer 2026, marking the opening of what D’Souza describes as three to six months of sustained new product innovation.
“Operators now get more attention and a faster velocity of delivery,” D’Souza said, adding that AI is being incorporated across several parts of the business and customer journey to improve efficiency for both the platform and its clients.
KP pointed to a recent internal project as evidence of that pace, noting it would have taken four months before AI-assisted development and was completed in two to three weeks instead.
