“We’ve Always Done It This Way” Is Not a Payments Strategy

I had a conversation recently at NEACH’s Future of Payments Symposium that stuck with me.

We were talking about how easy it is to keep doing something simply because it’s the way it has always been done.

Not because anyone decided it was still the best approach. Not because the alternatives had been explored. It was just familiar. It worked well enough. And somewhere along the way, “this is how we do it” became “this is how we should do it.”

That feeling is probably familiar to a lot of people working in payments.

You follow a process. You complete the same manual steps. You use the same spreadsheet. You get the same approvals. Maybe there’s a workaround everyone knows about. Maybe there are a few extra steps nobody is quite sure why they’re doing anymore.

And every once in a while, you wonder:

Is there actually a better way to do this?

When “it works” is good enough

There’s a reason these processes stick around.

Changing something takes time. It takes resources. And when you're dealing with payments, risk and compliance, change isn't something you make just for the sake of making it.

So if a process works, it can be easy to leave it alone.

But “working” can mean a lot of things.

Maybe the process gets the job done, but it takes three people and a spreadsheet.

Maybe a control made perfect sense five years ago, but no one has stepped back to ask whether it still addresses the same risk.

Maybe an agreement has been updated several times, but the underlying language was written for a product that looks very different today.

Maybe employees have created workarounds because the official process doesn't match what they actually need to do.

None of those things necessarily mean something is wrong.

They do mean it may be worth asking why you're doing it that way.

The hard part is knowing what you don’t know

That's where I think the conversation gets interesting.

When you work inside a process every day, it becomes normal.

You know which spreadsheet to open. You know who needs to approve something. You know which system doesn't talk to the other system. You know the extra step you have to take because “that's just how it works.”

You become very good at navigating the process.

But that can also make it harder to see the process itself.

Someone looking at it from the outside might ask a simple question:

Why do you do that?

Sometimes there is a very good answer.

Sometimes the answer is, “Honestly, I'm not sure.”

And that's usually a question worth exploring.

Payments have changed. Has the process?

This becomes especially important because the environment surrounding a process doesn't stay the same.

Transaction volumes grow. New payment channels are added. Fraud risks change. Customer expectations change. Teams and responsibilities shift. Technology improves. Institutions introduce new products and services.

A process designed for one version of the organization can quietly remain in place while everything around it changes.

The same is true of controls, procedures, agreements and governance structures.

The goal isn't to change everything.

It's to make sure the way you've always done it is still the way you would choose to do it today.

A simple question can start the conversation

You don't necessarily need a major modernization initiative to find opportunities for improvement.

Start with one process.

Look at how it works today and ask:

If we were building this from scratch today, would we build it this way?

If the answer is yes, great. There may be a very good reason for the process you have.

If the answer is no, the next question is more interesting:

What would we do differently?

That could lead to a small procedural change, clearer documentation, fewer manual steps, a different control, better use of technology, or a larger conversation about how the organization approaches payments.

And sometimes, it simply confirms that what you're already doing is the right approach.

Either outcome is valuable.

Because “we've always done it this way” explains where a process came from.

It shouldn't be the only reason it stays that way.