I work on the part of online businesses most people never see: how the money actually arrives.
I'm Head of Payments at a Lisbon venture builder that runs a group of subscription businesses. I look after every payment channel we have, around £36M a year, and the platform underneath it that I helped build.
Before that I spent years in games: running game operations in Istanbul, bringing local payment methods to publishers like Steam at BoaCompra, running payments for our own game key store, and working on monetisation at FRVR. Along the way I became a data person too, and I still write SQL most days.
This page is a few notes on things I've worked on, in my own words.
Some things I've worked on
Short stories: what the situation was, what I did, and what happened.
Building our own payment orchestration layer
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We run several subscription businesses, and each one needs cards, several PSPs and recurring billing. We first plugged in a third-party orchestration platform. It worked on paper, but once real traffic arrived its technical limits started to show.
What I did
- Made the case to build our own, and then led the build from design to go-live.
- Designed how payments flow through it: PSP routing, cascading, retries, blocking rules and reporting.
- Added tokenization through a third-party vault, so card data never touches our systems.
- Set up a rule engine the team can configure without code, using datasets like country, currency, BIN and site.
What happened
Each business now integrates once, and we can add or switch PSPs without touching the business side. A new business goes live on it within a sprint, and it's now the default payments stack for everything new in the group.
Failed renewals aren't always churn
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When a subscription renewal is declined, it usually gets counted as churn. But many of those customers didn't leave. Their payment just didn't go through that day.
What I did
- Built a retry setup with up to five attempts per failed renewal, shaped by decline codes.
- Added cascading, so a payment declined by one PSP can try another, based on the decline reason, volume and each PSP's approval rate.
- Started looking at authorization rates by PSP, BIN and country every week, and adjusting the rules from what the data showed.
What happened
On average we win back around 20% of failed renewals. It varies by business, and the approval rates keep creeping up week by week.
The cheap CPA that wasn't
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Our businesses buy customers through paid ads in many markets. A low cost per acquisition looked great on the dashboard, but some of those cheap customers never paid back what we spent on them.
What I did
- Built unit-economics models for each business: 6-, 12- and 24-month LTV and renewal cohorts.
- Included the things that usually get left out, like VAT, authorization rate and how many retries succeed, so the model shows money actually collected.
- Turned it into a maximum CPA per market and product, and set it as the target CPA in Google Ads, so campaigns stop spending past break-even.
What happened
These numbers now guide around $500K of marketing spend a month. The first business we tried it on later became the largest in the group.
Helping Turkish players pay for their games
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Global publishers wanted to sell to players in Turkey, but many of those players didn't have international cards. At BoaCompra (PagSeguro group) my job was to fix that, and then to run the market.
What I did
- Co-launched BoaCompra in Turkey with local cards, bank transfer and carrier billing through Turkcell, Vodafone and Türk Telekom.
- Set up local payouts through a local provider instead of going bank by bank.
- When Turkey changed its VAT rules for foreign sellers in 2018, I led the rollout to our merchants and briefed Steam myself.
What happened
Turkey grew to six-figure monthly volume in euros over five years, and the publishers selling there stayed compliant through the VAT change.
The path so far
Games first, then payments, then data, and now all three at once.
- 2023 – nowSanjow, LisbonProject Manager, Billing → Data Analyst → Head of Payments
- 2022FRVR, LisbonProduct Manager, Monetisation
- 2018 – 2022Ananda Digital Technologies, LisbonE-commerce Manager → Director, E-commerce. Our own PC game key store; chargebacks kept under 0.03%.
- 2013 – 2018UOL BoaCompra (PagSeguro group), LisbonProject Manager, Turkey
- 2009 – 2013NTTGame, K2 Network, IstanbulGame operations
Say hello
If you work on payments, subscriptions or monetisation in games and want to compare notes, I'm always up for that. You can reach me at kursatkalayci@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.