Miranda McLean, Chief Marketing Officer, Ecommpay

Today we're delighted to speak with Miranda McLean, Chief Marketing Officer at Ecommpay. With over 25 years' experience in financial services and FinTech marketing, Miranda is a passionate advocate for diversity, inclusion and accessibility in payments. In this interview, she shares her journey through the sector, Ecommpay's unique approach to payment technology, and why making services genuinely accessible is both a moral imperative and a business opportunity.

My questions are in bold - over to you Miranda:

Who are you and what's your background?

I am an award-winning marketing leader with more than 25 years' experience in strategic and operational marketing in Financial Services and FinTech. I am regularly invited to submit comment for publication. I have also joined numerous industry events as an expert speaker. I've built and elevated global brands, delivered impactful marketing programmes for major players and transformed businesses to be more inclusive and accessible to employees, partners and customers. Throughout my career I have always been passionate about increasing inclusion, accessibility and diversity within FinTech.

I began my career at Thomson Financial and have held positions at Reuters, Standard and Poor, Lexis Nexis and Equifax. In 2012 I joined alternative payment brand, Ukash, then in 2015 I was part of the founding team for Banking Circle, taking the firm to a multi-million-dollar business in less than three years. I joined Ecommpay as Chief Marketing Officer in 2024.

Beyond my professional achievements, I proudly serve on the Executive Board of the European Women Payments Network (EWPN) and the Advisory Board of the FinTech B2B Marketing Community, championing initiatives that foster a more inclusive industry. And I am an active participant on two working groups for the Payments Association (ESG and D&I). Through my industry and trade body affiliations I support women-led businesses, making introductions to the FinTech community and providing informal mentoring to a number of individuals.

One of ten industry experts named in the latest Payments Power 50 and recognised as one of the Standout 45 on the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist in 2024, as well as in 2023, I have advocated for women and other minority groups in the tech community for a number of years.

In 2025/26 I have devoted considerable personal time to participating in industry events that help women further their careers, including speaking on panels at MPE, The Women's Domain, HSBC Innovation Banking, The Financial Services Forum, Meet Magento and the EWPN Conference. I am passionate about furthering the conversation on inclusivity across the FinTech sector as well as sharing my experience in creating impactful FinTech marketing campaigns. I have also dedicated considerable personal time to mentoring a number of women in the FinTech space, responding to requests on LinkedIn as well as at networking events.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

Since joining Ecommpay as Chief Marketing Officer at the start of 2024, I have spearheaded initiatives to enhance equity, diversity and inclusion. One of my first big projects was to rebrand Ecommpay in September 2024, to be the inclusive payments provider. I also launched a new, more accessible website as well as a guide to help merchants increase accessibility. Accessibility and inclusivity is embedded throughout our organisation and is foundational to our core values.

In each of my professional roles, both paid employment and voluntary positions, I have used my marketing experience, expertise, connections and instincts to bring about positive change and measurable success. I believe it is important to measure and learn from every piece of marketing activity to gain insights that will help boost engagement, expand reach and attract new audiences.

I mentor emerging professionals, create valuable content such as white papers, case studies and thought leadership, and speak at conferences and take part in panel discussions to share insights and learnings.

When commissioning industry white papers and reports, my priority is to share valuable knowledge with the wider sector to educate and empower those working in payments. I focus on current issues and pain points, gaining insights from a range of experts and investigating how challenges can be resolved. I have also ensured that the research findings are available for free to any business that wishes to benefit from our insights, and commit marketing budget to promoting the reports to help them reach as many people as possible.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

Inclusive global payments platform, Ecommpay, is breaking through the noisy payments services market with its commitment to being a partner that has market-leading technology and that develops customised solutions for its customers. Critically, merchants experience an 8% increase in acceptance rates thanks to Ecommpay's seamless, global payments infrastructure.

Ecommpay is the only payments services provider currently bringing together a full range of payments options all integrated within its stack alongside operational functionality and state-of-the-art, proprietary fraud tools. As well as 100+ alternative payment methods, the platform offers global and local acquiring and comprehensive payment processing - all accessible through a single, seamless API. And it is continuously building essential capabilities including open banking, recurring billing, Click to Pay, Visa Instalments and Bacs Direct Debits directly into its platform, eliminating the need for third-party systems, streamlining operations, reducing costs, and minimising friction for merchants' clients.

Ecommpay puts the tech that drives payments at the centre of its operations, most notably making a significant investment in 2025 alone in the adoption of AI tools to power improved payment performance for its customers. In a market where a failed transaction is lost revenue, and potentially a lost customer, Ecommpay has made its mission to push checkout performance to its absolute limit. A company-wide investment in artificial intelligence is analysing payment declines to transform FinTech performance.

A proprietary AI-driven performance analytics engine goes far beyond conventional payment routing. Where previously a team of analysts would manually review a sample of perhaps 50 to 100 transactions, Ecommpay's AI models now process entire transaction data sets - tens of thousands of individual payments - in a single pass. Consolidating decline reasons into ranked groups, the system instantly identifies where the highest-impact problems lie, to direct efforts to have the greatest effect on approval rates.

The platform addresses the three most significant areas of decline in the global market: 3DS-related failures, fraud and suspicious transaction declines, and client-behaviour errors. For each category, Ecommpay has developed dedicated AI models that simulate bank risk-scoring, compare live merchant configurations against established technical standards, and identify clear, actionable guidance. A further AI layer translates dense analytical findings into plain-language strategic recommendations, enabling FinTech clients to take action immediately without requiring deep technical expertise.

The system also ingests the complete 700-page 3DS protocol documentation, to answer complex compliance questions in seconds. This institutional knowledge, once locked inside the heads of a handful of specialists, is now available on demand across the entire performance team.

The results speak for themselves. In Q1 2026, Ecommpay achieved a 2.6% uplift in portfolio-wide transaction success rates, exceeding its internal target of 2% for the quarter and keeping the business on track for a full 10% improvement across its FinTech client portfolio by year-end. For individual clients, the AI-led performance programme has delivered transaction success rate improvements of between 5% and 15%.

In July 2026, Ecommpay launched a new solution for micro-enterprises which responds to the limited choice of checkout-optimised payment solutions for small businesses. Built on the success of our enterprise level solution, Ecommpay for Small Businesses is designed specifically for UK-registered small businesses selling online who have been trading for a minimum of six months and have less than 2 million euros in annual revenue, including those running WooCommerce stores and custom-built websites. At the heart of the new platform is the capability to go live within hours of onboarding, using the Ecommpay Hosted Payment Page, at a highly competitive transaction rate and without any volume threshold.

For many small businesses, despite having a great product or idea, the payment process offered to customers can be a barrier to success. Enterprise-quality payment infrastructure is out of reach unless they are processing at scale, which may result in higher decline rates or elevated per-transaction costs. And the lack of developer resources in these businesses limits their options to optimise checkout performance.

With Ecommpay for Small Businesses we are actively tackling these issues. We have taken the same risk management, smart routing and fraud infrastructure we operate for enterprise clients to create a solution for micro enterprises at a competitive rate starting from 1.30% + 20p per UK transaction, with no monthly fee or minimum commitment.

With Ecommpay for Small Businesses, merchants can go live within a day of onboarding, and with a direct plugin for WooCommerce, Magento 2 and Xero no developer involvement is required. The fully brandable Hosted Payment Page, which has been accredited for accessibility by the Digital Accessibility Centre, is also built-in as a default, to be launched from the merchant Dashboard without any technical resource.

Tell us how you are funded?

Privately funded.

What's the origin story? To solve what problems?

Ecommpay was founded on a vision to revolutionise the digital payment landscape for e-commerce. Founder Aleex Sjarki came from a background in financial consultancy rather than payments technology. A chance encounter changed the course of his career: a client needed acquiring services, and Aleex - by his own admission knowing nothing about the industry - found someone who could provide them and simply connected the two parties. That first deal became an unplanned education in how the payments market actually worked, from onboarding processes to settlement mechanics. Having seen the full picture, Sjarki became convinced that digital payments were where he wanted to build a business, drawn in by the imperfections he'd spotted in the space and a growing sense that he could fix them.

From the outset the business focused on genuinely understanding what clients needed. And it quickly became clear that technology would have to become the core of the business, eventually building its own bespoke, in-house technology.

14 years later, Ecommpay is, first and foremost, a technology company that holds a payments licence, rather than a financial company that happens to use technology. It is an international payments company with offices around the world and a client base spanning many industries. This growth is attributed to three pillars: a deep understanding of client needs, a genuine commitment to solving problems through technology rather than simply processing payments, and the people who built that technology.

It is the only payments services provider currently bringing together a full range of payments options all integrated within its stack alongside operational functionality and state-of-the-art, proprietary fraud tools. As well as 100+ alternative payment methods, the platform offers global and local acquiring, comprehensive payment processing and orchestration - all accessible through a single, seamless API. And it is continuously building essential capabilities like open banking, recurring billing, Click to Pay, and Bacs Direct Debits directly into its platform, eliminating the need for third-party systems, streamlining operations, reducing costs, and minimising friction for merchants' clients.

Payouts via Hosted Payment Page is a clear example of the work Ecommpay is doing to reduce in-house development and compliance workload for e-commerce merchants. An industry first and game-changer for e-commerce businesses, it facilitates payments for 'member communities', delivering a swift time-to-market solution to overcome the traditional requirements of payout functionality.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

Ecommpay works in partnership with e-commerce merchants around the world, and across a wide range of industries, including Retail, Travel and hospitality, FinTech, Mobility & transport, Digital goods and services and Insurance. The Ecommpay global payment solution can be tailored to each merchant's unique needs, including payouts, one-off payments and subscriptions, and is backed by an award-winning fraud prevention platform.

For all merchants, Ecommpay allows access to a wide range of payment methods through a single integration, so customers can pay the way they like regardless of geography or currency. This helps limit shopping cart abandonment and increases purchaser confidence and loyalty. As an intuitive payment solution, Ecommpay's payment platform is designed to alleviate the biggest payment pain points.

Ecommpay supports merchants with account loading, prepaid card top-ups, pay-to-card, bank transfers, payment confirmation and third-party funding verification.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

I find it beyond frustrating that equity, diversity, sustainability and accessibility still seem to be little more than the latest buzzwords, rather than being morally essential and a real, measurable business benefit. I am working to change that, but it is a long road, and sadly there is no magic wand.

I want to highlight the value of ESG, and show other organisations that they can make changes to be more sustainable, accessible and inclusive. I don't want Ecommpay to remain the only inclusive payment platform - we must all carry this responsibility if we are to effect real change in our industry.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

I believe that accessibility and inclusivity are still the big issues that larger players need to address. They can't just be buzzwords that are bandied around at the boardroom table and in annual report. There has to be genuine difference being made in the real world and that means that a wholesale shift to digital only simply won't work.

A mid-2026 study of 2,000 UK adults commissioned by the Diversity and Inclusion working group of the UK Payments Association (UKPA) identified around 58% of respondents as vulnerable to some degree. The 2025 European Accessibility Act (2010 Equality Act in the UK) mandates that merchants are legally obligated to consider the needs of vulnerable groups, demonstrating that they are delivering good outcomes for vulnerable customers.

Merchants can't do that alone. The financial services that are embedded in their websites must be inclusive too. And the growing role of AI casts a particular shadow on this issue right now. Agentic commerce that does not account for vulnerability is not just risky - it may also be noncompliant.

The UKPA study revealed that 12% of respondents said they had been unable to complete a banking or payment task because an AI-powered or digital tool did not work, rising to 42% among the most vulnerable. And among vulnerable groups, just under half of respondents (49%) to the UKPA survey said their providers of regular digital financial services could do more to instil confidence in their services.

Vulnerable UK users said they wanted "to speak to a real person more easily when technology doesn't work for me." While this goes against the wholesale drive to removing humans from the financial process, it can't be ignored.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

Marcel van Oost, The Paypers and we have our own AI system that scours all reputable news sources and gives me a daily roundup of all FS and FinTech news.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

There are so many knowledgeable people and experts in FinTech it is so hard to select just 3 but these are 3 people I follow: Marcel van Oost, Panagiotis Kriaris and Sandra Mianda.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

Dojo.ai

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

AdClear - this is a great service that is designed for financial services marketing teams to automate the review and monitoring of financial promotions. It uses AI to analyse images, text, video or audio against internal company policies and regulatory frameworks like the FCA handbook.

Vouchsafe - another important tool for business growth. It provides an identity verification (KYC) toolkit and fraud intelligence network which helps with onboarding, particularly where there is limited intelligence on businesses and individuals.

Dojo.ai - a marketing operating platform that continuously monitors all the marketing channels of a brand, empowering decision making for future campaigns.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

Obviously AI is the big talking point right now - but what needs to happen next is for trust to become part of the story. Currently AI is being used across financial services to improve processes and speed - for the provider as well as the customer. What needs to come next is for that AI to have a real perceived benefit for the customer.

AI also needs to move the dial in the fraud space. Currently it's great for fraud detection; it needs to pivot to fraud prevention, shifting from flagging suspicious transactions after the fact to predicting and stopping them before they happen, using behavioral and contextual signals in real time. That same intelligence layer will also start personalizing the payment experience itself - smarter routing, smarter authentication, less friction for genuine customers.

I believe another trend we are going to see defining FinTech is the evolution of real-time. It's already the baseline expectation. Instant payments, instant settlement, instant reconciliation. And that means merchants and consumers alike will treat delay as a defect, not a norm.

With all of these advances in improving the customer experience will also come changes in regulation. It is currently playing catch up with reality. However, as open banking matures into open finance, stablecoins and digital assets get clearer frameworks, and compliance shifts from a back-office cost centre to a competitive differentiator, the companies that build trust and transparency in early will be ahead of the game.

Many thanks to Miranda for taking the time to share her insights with FinTech Profile. You can learn more about Ecommpay on their website.