Regulation As Advantage: How Devang Gaur Turns Compliance Into A Growth Strategy

Shopping online can be a thrilling experience, especially when you discover a new store with great products you’ve never seen before. You might find exactly what you’ve been searching for, and quickly enter your payment information to place an order.

But there’s a problem: your payment is rejected and you’re asked to contact your bank or credit card provider to confirm it’s really you behind the screen. And since it’s a Friday after business hours, you’re out of luck until next week. In the end, you move on because the purchase isn’t worth the drawn out hassle, depriving the retailer of your business and yourself of a product that you really wanted.

This situation is far more common than you might realize, as payment processors work behind the scenes to prevent fraud and comply with regulations on commerce between different countries.

Merchants and customers often see these systems as annoying roadblocks, but product strategist and AI specialist Devang Gaur has identified compliance as a growth opportunity for smart businesses to get an edge on the competition. After obtaining his master’s degree in software management, he has spent his career designing systems that reduce churn, strengthen billing systems, and improve customer satisfaction globally.

Here’s a closer look.

Saving Time And Raising Revenue With A Compliance-First Mindset

Devang started out doing advanced work on payment initiatives, working with household names to integrate complex payment infrastructure into AI-informed systems aimed at removing friction from the payment process.

Currently a senior product manager specializing in global payments systems, he leads the team responsible for the implementation of compliance standards that govern how money is authorized to move from a customer’s bank account and become a complete payment across diverse use cases, from self-serve individual accounts to high-ticket enterprise subscription renewals.

Standards like 3DS2 (3D Secure 2) are used to ensure payments are being made by authorized users. They’re particularly important in the EU and UK, where incorrect metadata passed between merchants and payment processors can result in transaction declines, delays, and regulatory penalties for significant or repeated errors.

So when Devang identified gaps in his company’s payments compliance architecture, he quickly mapped edge cases and redesigned coordination logic, reducing requests for user re-authentication to only cases where it was truly required. This led to a significant increase in authorization rates across key markets, saving customers time and boosting revenue.

One of Devang’s key contributions to the payments architecture was identifying how 3DS2 could help refine the quality of upstream customer data. “By authenticating users early, we discouraged fraudulent activity and abuse-prone behaviors,” he explains.

Asking for the right customer information up front also helps his company understand customer behavior on a more granular level, like whether they might be interested in complimentary services or less likely to churn if enticed with targeted offers similar customers have received.

Providing accurate metadata to payment processors, including factors like geographic location, transaction type, and confirmation of specific user agreements, is key to completing merchant initiated transactions (MITs) without requiring user authorization for every charge. By comparing the payment data his company sends to what payment processors receive, Devang’s refinements increased “exempt” MITs by fixing transaction categorization and authentication lineage to prove charges were authorized and repeatable.

Using insights from these systems also allowed Devang to guide teams in building compliance directly into the user experience. Sending pre-billing emails to alert customers to upcoming charges, for example, helped reduce chargebacks and refund requests, ultimately increasing overall customer lifetime value.

Collaborating With Processors To Stay Ahead Of Compliance Challenges

To the average user, most payments usually feel more or less identical. But on the backend, different requirements from payment processes based in countries with more stringent regulations can create real headaches for large businesses, which have millions of customers all over the world using different services and accounts.

To improve compliance at this level, Devang tailored solutions to individual processors, often identifying unique regulatory interpretations that required custom data formats in order to be accepted at scale.

By communicating and aligning metadata requirements early with internal engineering and legal teams, as well as with counterparties in particularly strict regions like Europe, Devang’s company was able to preemptively uncover issues like mislabeled card validations that could have caused unnecessary customer friction on the heels of new product launches.

“We tailored our implementation to ensure correct metadata was passed to processors,” Devang recalls, “and worked with them to proactively address areas where exemptions would not be honored.”

By working closely with payment processors, his company was able to better account for edge cases like customer support requests for add-on features and post-sale price renegotiations by identifying how existing metadata and credentials could be used to further reduce reauthorization requests while staying compliant with relevant regulations.

Turning Compliance Requirements Into Competitive Advantage

As electronic payments have become the standard in the US and around the world, compliance will continue to evolve to prevent fraud and protect data.

By baking compliance logic into product design from the start, Devang is building systems that don’t just adhere to regulations, they use them as a springboard for improving customer satisfaction and helping companies take the friction out of paying for subscriptions for essential business software.

Devang remains a leading voice on compliance-based improvements to payment systems, acting as a mentor to aspiring product strategists and regularly speaking at important events. Over the summer, he participated as a panelist at industry-leader events, outlining how tokenization and deeper AI integrations can further reduce authentication needs while keeping fraud and identity theft at bay.

By aligning compliance requirements with customer needs and business strategy, Devang Gaur is helping build payment infrastructure that stimulates growth and is ready for a future where compliance is built into products people use everyday, even if it’s almost invisible to the end user.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.