Our popular Voices of Nium feature is back! This initiative captures the voices, experiences, and perspectives of our team members across regions who work together to make global real-time payments seamless. In this blog, we celebrate the expertise and commitment of our Operations leaders and invite you to get to know more about the team who often operate silently but are the backbone that keeps Nium moving at lightning speed.
The team are led by Spencer Hanlon, Chief Operating Officer, who is based in London. Spencer is responsible for overseeing Nium’s day-to-day operations, ensuring efficiency, and driving business growth. His role includes optimizing processes and aligning cross-functional departments. He also plays a key role in strategic planning, scaling operations, and improving customer experience, all while supporting profitability and revenue goals.
The Operations Team, more broadly, ensures smooth and efficient execution of Nium’s services, keeping everything running seamlessly, behind the scenes. They deliver exceptional service daily, collaborating across departments. Their responsibilities include client servicing, transaction processing, reconciliation and invoicing, and more.
Akhilesh Shetty, Vice President, Operations
1. What do you most enjoy about your role at Nium?
There are many aspects that make me proud to work at Nium but if I had to whittle it down to two core aspects I’d firstly say, the people. We have a talented and hard-working team who push daily to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Nium’ers are supportive and hungry to achieve more, and more, continually. Secondly, we have solutions-based mindsets. We have a passion for solving problems and embark on change management regularly to ensure that our processes are well-designed and easy to integrate globally.
2. How do we measure operational success?
Operational success is about minimizing any hurdles that create friction in our processes. When these challenges arise, success is measured by how quickly we respond to resolve them, keeping our clients smiling and internal dynamics running smoothly.
3. How do you foster a culture of accountability and ownership within your teams?
Simply put, through leading by example. I dive into the details and actively engage with my teams to solve issues, drive improvement and strengthen controls. I believe that this approach encourages everyone to adopt the same level of detail and involvement, making it a default setting of our team culture.
4. If you could switch roles with anyone at Nium for a day, who would it be and why?
This is a fun question! I would want to switch roles with a leader in the engineering team to explore how they find ways to automate the most manual and boring tasks. At Nium, we believe in investing in operations that are scalable, so seeing how they unlock this value would be super interesting.
5. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received and still follow?
Progress over perfection. This helps me to stay focused on making steady progress, instead of getting caught up in the details and pushing for “perfection”.
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Devadasu Yasasvi Raman, Ops Change Management Manager
1. What is the role of the Ops Change Management team at Nium?
Our role is to serve as internal consultants for the global operations and servicing teams, leading transformative projects, and building solutions that enhance efficiency, reduce risk, and deliver superior client experience. To name only a few purposes, we act as a single point of contact between operations and all other Nium functions, such as product and tech, and we enhance operations for our client servicing team so that they can deliver superior service.
2. Looking back on the past year, what are you most proud of your team achieving?
Honestly, there are too many things to count but in general, I’m most proud of our contributions towards improving efficiencies within Nium. When things work well internally, we are better able to service our clients, so getting things right, like Zendesk implementation, ticketing, talking and migration is essential.
3. What do you most enjoy about working at Nium?
I thrive on ownership and accountability. I feel that there’s more value and purpose in work when we are given freedom and encouragement to pursue ideas that make an impact. This couldn’t be more accurate in terms of the way that we work at Nium.
4. If you had to describe your management style in one word, what would it be?
I would say that I’m a catalyst. Innovation and sustainability are key for my team’s success. I ensure that we are a constant catalyst for driving sustainable and innovative solutions by providing the knowledge and tools the broader organization needs to achieve their functional goals as well.
5. If Nium was an animal, which animal would it be and why?
Oh, a cheetah! Like the fastest land animal, Nium is focused on speed, agility, and efficiency, providing swift, real-time global payment solutions. We maneuver seamlessly across borders, much like a cheetah’s effortless movement across vast terrains.
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Ezza Benjie, Director, Card Operations
1. What is the role of the Card Operations team?
The card operations team provide key and critical support to issuing (Nium’s Travel and other card programs). We are responsible for looking after the end-to-end card lifecycle. We collaborate closely with the cards product team to support go live and licences, we are the single point of contact for card fulfilment and handle production queries. Further, we manage daily reconciliation, client escalations and execute closures.
2. What do you most enjoy about your role at Nium?
I would say it’s a combination of constantly being challenged and constantly learning through collaboration. To be able to build best-in-class and sustainable solutions that improve the overall operational efficiency of Nium really motivates me. As a global team, we are lucky to be able to learn from our knowledge colleagues worldwide, and we’re all very eager to teach and be taught, in return.
3. What would you say makes a successful Nium’er in the Ops Team?
I think that being resourceful is a key skill when it comes to looking for solutions. It’s also critical to have resilience and a thick skin in an fintech environment because change is a part of the reality we face daily. Resourcefulness in looking for solutions and resilience in adapting to changes. Having a strong sense of ownership is also highly beneficial.
4. If you could instantly master any skill, what would it be and why?
I would say the art of gentle and effective persuasion. We collaborate across many of Nium’s functions and finding the middle ground that works best for everyone can be tricky.
5. What’s one thing on your bucket list that you haven’t done yet?
I would like to learn to play the drums – one day as part of a band, in front of an audience.
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Karthikeyan Thondiraj, Senior Director, Payment Operations
1. You lead two teams here at Nium: Funding Operations and Payment & Refund Operations. What is the role each?
In Funding Operations, we ensure that all incoming credit from different methods and through different bank accounts get applied in a timely manner. In Payment Operations, we execute all payments that have been received. Continuous monitoring of various payment queues determines whether transactions need reprocessing or returning. When refunds or returns are necessary, we strive to deliver swiftly.
2. What do you enjoy most about the world of payments/fintech?
For a person who started his career with a typical SWIFT form of cross-border payments and watching how fintech today integrates cutting-edge technology to create seamless, efficient, and inclusive financial solutions is thrilling. I enjoy the innovation - every day feels like a fresh chapter in a Sci-Fi novel.
3. What would you say is your biggest career achievement to date?
I began my career in 2002, and I have experienced the transformation from SWIFT to gaining deep knowledge of different countries' clearing systems, payment methods, and cross-border routing channels during these years. I am also proud of my certification as an international payment clearing expert and abilities in standards like MT103, ISO20022 and pain series.
4. If you could have lunch with any celebrity (alive or dead), who would it be?
Swami Vivekananda - a Hindu monk and a key disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. He is renowned for introducing Indian yoga and Vedanta philosophy to the Western world.
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Myank Tandon, Client Servicing, Senior Manager.
1. What is the role of “client servicing” at Nium?
The Client Servicing team is the primary touchpoint for client needs, ensuring strong relationship management through effective query resolution, onboarding support, and ongoing communication. We focus on client satisfaction by meeting requirements promptly and proactively, while also collaborating on strategies to enhance client engagement. By tracking key performance metrics and gathering client feedback, we help inform product development and drive service improvements.
2. Looking back over the past year, what has your team achieved that makes you feel most proud?
Over the past year, I’m most proud of the strides we've made in building a dedicated client servicing model, where each client now has a dedicated client servicing manager for a strong sense of ownership. We successfully launched 24/7 client servicing, ensuring seamless global support, and reduced client response times from 24 hours to under 6 hours. This commitment has led to an enhanced client experience, clearly reflected in our improved CSAT scores.
3. When you are recruiting new team members, what are the main traits that you look for to have a successful member of the operations team?
When recruiting new team members, I look for strong expertise in payment processing, effective communication and interpersonal skills, and the ability to build trust and rapport with clients. Key traits include empathy, active listening, and the capacity to multitask and prioritize in a fast-paced environment. Collaboration skills are also essential, as they’ll work closely with Ops, Compliance, Product, and Tech teams to address client queries and conduct MBRs/QBRs.
4. What’s your guilty pleasure TV show or movie?
I enjoy watching thriller and suspense shows and movies; they always keep me on the edge of my seat! The latest one I saw was on Netflix – One of Us is Lying.
5. If you could have any superpower, what would it be and how would you use it?
If I could have any superpower, it would be instant insight - the ability to deeply understand client needs and concerns instantly. This would empower our team to proactively resolve issues, adapt swiftly, and drive faster internal and tech improvements to deliver an exceptional client experience.
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Ronson Dsouza, Financial Reconciliation, Senior Manager.
1. What is the role of the Financial Reconciliation team at Nium?
Financial Reconciliation is a core team that performs reconciliation for all funds incoming and outgoing in our Global Client Money Bank Accounts. This team ensures that Nium’s Cash position in the client money accounts is correct and there is no underpayment received, or overpayment made out.
2. What gets you out of bed in the morning? What excites you about your job?
My dynamic team that believes in building a robust process of reconciliation. We’re a team that believes there must be no room left for error, and ensure every dollar is accounted for.
3. What do you think Nium offers its team members that other companies don’t?
The constant adrenaline rush of facing something new every day. Versatile character building to deliver the best results even during chaotic situations.
4. What’s one thing people would be surprised to learn about you?
That I've gone sleepless for 1 entire day to complete a project at the start of my career.
5. If you weren’t in Financial Reconciliation, what career would you have instead?
Deep within, I have a bug in me that tells me that I would enjoy a Product and Market Research role.
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