Why you should bring your finance team into product strategy

• Travis Hughson says having the right payments system can help manage UGC revenue channels in several ways.
• Mobile Finance Collective founder Martin Macmillan believes a "savvy finance director can evaluate platforms that solve for scale, compliance and simplicity".
• "Bringing your finance and operations teams into the core of product strategy isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a growth enabler."

Travis Hughson is sales manager, EMEA Digital at Tipalti.

As mobile games evolve, the business model is getting more interesting and more complicated.

Premium has largely given way to live service, and now whole new revenue streams are opening up: user-generated content (UGC), creator and influencer programmes and rapid international expansion.

For many studios, especially SMEs, the instinct is to treat this as a product and marketing challenge, but in reality, the strength of your finance and revenue operations is just as important as game design. 

UGC - From design feature to monetisation engine

The UGC boom is no longer confined to a handful of headline platforms. The same forces that fuelled games like Roblox and Fortnite are now reshaping mobile:

• Creator monetisation – Creators expect real revenue share, not just exposure.
• Cross-platform play – Mobile, PC and console creators increasingly build side-by-side on shared economies.
• AI-assisted tools – Generative art, code assists and level-building tools slash the friction of making content, so the barriers to entry are cut.
• Social virality – TikTok, Discord, YouTube and Twitch turn standout user content into “you're the best” acquisition channels for new users.

You’re no longer just shipping game updates; you’re running a marketplace of creators, modders, tournament organisers, streamers and community members.

Another fast-growing flavour of UGC is influencer marketing, where creators use their own channels to showcase original content built around your game. They expect to be rewarded easily, globally and reliably when they drive results.

This is all exciting and powerful for your title, but it needs to be managed well. It requires a finance function that can support a high volume of small, frequent payouts to people scattered across the world. At that point, you’re in the mass payments business whether you like it or not.

Good processes and platforms matter

A successful title with a growing community can quickly find itself needing to operate at scale and need to reduce friction across all its processes. If they don’t, the hard work building momentum starts to suffer.

With UGC, for example, a company can find itself needing to make tens of thousands of small payments to creators, players and community members. The time needed to do this can quickly cause crunch points where resources are stretched, errors are made and goodwill is lost with a community.

Having the right mass payments solution can help manage UGC revenue channels in several ways that allow developers to focus on their game. To do that, you need the ability to:

• Onboard thousands of payees safely, including collecting tax and identity information.
• Pay out in many different currencies and via multiple methods, to dozens or even hundreds of countries.
• Handle FX, tax withholdings and local regulatory requirements without drowning your team in spreadsheets and support tickets.
• Identify those trying to use fraudulent financial information to create accounts.

Moderation is one of the most challenging areas for any games company that relies on UGC as part of its community.

Finance solutions have no direct role in moderation, but when internal moderation teams decide a creator has fallen short of the standards they expect, acting at speed matters. The right mass payments system will allow a publisher to quickly de-monetise that creator until the matter is resolved.

That capability to pay at scale, quickly and compliantly, underpins mass payments. It is exactly where a strong finance team with the right mass payments system at their disposal can turn a risky UGC experiment or a creative community idea into a game-changing and sustainable, defensible revenue stream.

Why your finance team belongs at the design table

Historically, finance only got involved once a monetisation strategy had been decided: “Here’s the rev-share model we’ve promised creators – please make it work.” Today, that’s backwards.

Martin Macmillan, from the Mobile Finance Collective, puts it bluntly: “Finance professionals across the mobile games and apps industries tell us that product teams are increasingly looking to them for financial models that support monetisation at scale.

"UGC creators – whether in-game or as influencers – are a great source of revenue. They need to be paid in small, recurring amounts, across multiple currencies and jurisdictions.

"A savvy finance director can evaluate platforms that solve for scale, compliance and simplicity. This helps them avoid the admin pain of onboarding payees or handling FX manually, for example.” 

Bring finance and revenue operations teams into the room early and they’ll challenge and refine the design of your programme so that the key risks are managed and efficiency is built in from the start:

• Unit economics – Does the proposed model actually make sense once FX, taxes, platform fees and fraud losses are factored in?
• Cash-flow timing – Can you afford weekly payouts, or do you need thresholds and batching to protect runway?
• Jurisdiction risk – Which countries are safe to open up first, and where do you need extra checks or local partners?
• Operational overhead – How much manual work will each new creator impose on your team, and what needs to be automated before you scale?

The result is not a “no” from finance, but a better-designed product and community programme that can grow without collapsing under the weight of its own admin.

What good looks like in practice

When studios get this right, the impact shows up across the business:

• Creators and partners are onboarded through a self-service, branded flow that feels like part of your game, not a bolt-on form.
• They can choose how they’re paid, track payout status and understand tax withholdings without raising tickets.
• Your team has a single view of payouts, from pay-ins through to disbursements, so finance can reconcile revenue and costs without heroics at month-end.
• Compliance and fraud checks run quietly in the background, rather than blocking creators at random.

For SMEs in particular the savings in headcount and error-handling, plus the reputational boost of paying creators promptly and correctly, can be the difference between a fragile experiment and a durable growth engine.

Community: Your real growth engine

A creator or influencer community doesn’t thrive just because the tools exist. It thrives when people feel respected, informed and paid on time. Late or missing payouts erode trust faster than almost any other mistake; they also hit your discoverability when influencers quietly stop talking about you.

Fast, accurate, transparent payouts send the opposite message: this studio is serious; this ecosystem is worth investing in. Payment reliability becomes part of your brand – a reason creators choose your game over another title vying for their time.

Three practical steps to take now

You don’t have to overhaul everything overnight. For most teams, the smartest move is to take a few concrete steps:

1. Form a “monetisation pod” – Put product, finance and live ops in the same (virtual) room and treat UGC and creator programmes as joint ventures, not side projects.
2. Map every type of payee – Players, creators, tournament organisers, streamers, affiliates, studios. For each, list how often you pay, in what amounts and in which countries. This will expose where manual processes will break.
3. Design your payout rules up-front – What are your content and conduct policies, what happens when they’re broken and how do those rules tie directly into whether a payment is triggered?

From there, you can decide what to automate, which tools or partners to lean on and how to phase your rollout so that payments infrastructure scales ahead of community growth, not behind it.

Finance is the key

Bringing your finance and operations teams into the core of product strategy isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a growth enabler.

Your existing finance talent already lives and breathes compliance, payments and scalability. Combine that expertise with bold product thinking, and you can unlock new revenue streams such as UGC, influencer marketing and global partnerships without burning resources or profit.