The Hidden Cost of Payment Failures

What most payment testing programs miss

Most payment failures are invisible to internal teams — but painfully visible in lost revenue and churn. And AI-driven experiences (recommendations, dynamic checkout flows, agents) introduce new, unpredictable failure modes in payments. Learn how to develop a solid payment testing strategy for what’s next in digital payments.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:

Where payment failures actually occur (issuer declines, 3DS friction, localization gaps)
New risks where AI intersects with payments (personalization, fraud detection, agentic checkout flows – inconsistent flows, hallucinated inputs, broken decision paths)
Why traditional QA misses real-world payment issues
The impact of expanding payment methods (wallets, BNPL, local rails)

Speakers

Guest Speaker: Lily Varón

• Principal Analyst • Forrester

Lily Varón is a principal analyst serving digital business strategy professionals. Her research focuses on the evolving role of payments and billing technologies in winning, serving, and retaining customers in the age of digital business. She helps consumer-facing businesses understand the merchant payments processing landscape, evolving consumer payments behaviors, and how their payments acceptance strategies must adapt to serve their customers. In her research on billing technology, she focuses on how the future of buying — in both B2C and B2B models — will pressure every business to modernize its billing relationships and the technology that underpins them.

Zeb Winzenried

• Senior Director, Testing Services • Applause

Zeb is a Senior Director in Applause’s Testing Services organization, focusing on Payments. Zeb manages the delivery of testing requests with a global team, focused primarily on some of the largest Payment Testing customers at Applause. Zeb began his career at Applause when he went from stay-at-home dad to full time software tester. He found projects dealing with the payment landscape to be a challenging and fascinating space. Zeb fused his background in business management with his love of technology, dedicating his time to these projects. His passion and drive in the field allowed him to rise through the ranks of Applause quickly, from tester to Test Team Lead, then Test Architect to a Director of Testing Services. Zeb is currently based in San Antonio, Texas, and has been helping to successfully grow Payment Testing at Applause since 2015.

LEADING COMPANIES PARTNER WITH APPLAUSE FOR DIGITAL SUCCESS

Applause is the global leader in managed software testing services. Through AI, automation and the world’s largest independent testing community, we help enterprises validate every aspect of their digital experiences at scale. Top brands trust Applause for end-to-end expertise and end-user insights on demand, to accelerate functional testing, AI evaluation, accessibility testing, payment testing and more.