Eline Blomme is our Chief Strategy and Product Officer, she joined the company in October 2024, bringing a wealth of experience from her previous roles in the payments industry
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your experience in the Fintech industry?
For most of my career, I have worked in Payments, but I actually started out in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) space – the first company I worked at was AB InBev. Besides learning how to brew beer, I vividly remember the concept of ownership being rigorously applied throughout the organisation, which resulted in better outcomes. This is a concept I have retained and have applied consistently in my career.
After a short detour away from FMCG, I began working in Payments. I realised almost immediately that payments was my sector as everybody touches payments and it’s a relevant topic for everybody. No matter how long you have worked in payments, you are guaranteed to learn something new every single day – this has always kept me going and I’ve become an absolute payments fanatic.
What makes my career fairly unique is that I started out in sales and only made the shift to product later. I think this has provided me with useful insights, as ensuring the product team is focused on delivering value for the clients is key. There is nothing worse than delivering a product without adoption!
For most of my payments career I have focused on online payments. I quickly realised that this was where most of the innovation was and it was a more dynamic space as there is no incumbent POS that constantly needs to be updated and maintained. Online, you can make changes happen faster and more easily.
Personally, I have focused most of my free time on learning. I am a big believer that school doesn’t stop when you graduate. It is important to learn for life. The education system provides great frameworks that guide you, rather than having to dissect an overload of information that exists and understand what is important.
I hold three master’s degrees, the latest being an MBA from Warwick Business School, and I hold a range of certifications including Managerial Finance from LSE. I have also spent significant time learning Italian in evening school both in Belgium and in London at Imperial College.
I spend any holidays I have travelling the world. Recently, I took a ‘mum’s gap year’ and travelled the world for 6 months with my toddler. It was an absolute once-in-a-lifetime experience where we made amazing memories and many friends all over the world.
You recently joined Acquired.com as Chief Strategy & Product Officer. How has the experience been so far, and what are you most looking forward to in your new role?
The whole of Acquired.com lives and breathes financial services. The depth of understanding of this space and how it is embedded into the product is exceptional.
What I have enjoyed most so far is the fact that I quickly felt like I could make an impact as the organisation allows for that. There is no micro-management or very sturdy routines that have been built into the organisation and people are very willing to change their ways or collaborate to improve ways of working. Nothing is off the table and everything can be discussed. This allows us to move faster than others. Whenever there is doubt about a decision, having a single owner and CEO allows us to make quick decisions to align the organisation. Being very impatient, I can appreciate that.
I am looking forward to seeing what 2025 brings as we move into the next level of our payment optimisation, customization and orchestration. Our data is clustered around a single segment, allowing our optimisation to be unique and allowing us to further strengthen our USP in the financial services industry.
In 2024 Acquired.com saw strong revenue growth and secured agreements with major new customers. How do you plan to build on this success in 2025?
We have decided to renew our focus on new subverticals in the financial services sector for which we are doing a functionality analysis as well as in the retail space, but for recurring eCommerce. I am keen to get deeper into that so we can also go after these markets.
We will also be developing our VRP offering this year, this functionality should make Acquired.com the sole payment provider in the UK offering recurring payments across the whole payment stack including cards, direct debit and open banking solutions with a single integration and reconciliation platform.
But what I am most excited about is our payment orchestration, customization and optimization strategy. More to come about that in our payment pods and other communication channels.
How do you personally stay ahead of the curve in such a rapidly evolving industry, and what advice would you give to other fintech leaders?
I like to be efficient and I learn best on the go or in summaries. I am definitely a podcast person; Payments on Fire and 11:FS are personal favourites. I also really enjoy Blinkist which gives me book summaries and allows me to ‘read’ more with the limited time having a toddler on the weekend gives you!
I subscribe to some key newsletters from some consultancy firms that provide payment-relevant data, as well as Flagship partners and Marcel van Oost.
Alongside this, I very actively engage with sales in meetings with both merchants and prospects across all our verticals. I find it very important to keep on doing that especially as with my global eCommerce payments background it allows me to get faster up to speed on the specifics of this industry. Next to that I biweekly engage in meetings with potential new vendors to understand where the solutions are moving towards and see if we can gather new inspiration for collaborations.
