Summary
- Robert Soetens joins SurePay as chief product officer after seven years in senior product roles at Backbase.
- Co-founder Marcel Rienties moves into a newly created chief innovation officer position.
- The leadership change accompanies SurePay’s expansion from payment verification towards shared risk signals intended to identify potentially malicious payees before funds move.
Dutch payment-verification company SurePay has appointed Robert Soetens as chief product officer as it expands its platform beyond confirming account details towards broader fraud-risk intelligence.
Soetens joins from digital-banking technology company Backbase, where he spent seven years in senior product leadership roles and most recently served as vice-president of product.
Alongside the appointment, SurePay co-founder Marcel Rienties is moving into the newly created role of chief innovation officer. The company said Rienties will focus on emerging fraud patterns while Soetens takes responsibility for growing its fraud-risk intelligence platform.
SurePay was founded in 2016 around account-verification services intended to reduce misdirected or fraudulent payments. It says its verification network now reaches more than 4,500 banks and 30,000 businesses and processes more than 20 million payment checks each day.
The product shift is towards using activity across that network to create shared risk signals before a payment is completed. SurePay says the approach is intended to identify potentially malicious payees rather than simply checking whether an account name and number correspond.
That distinction follows the changing nature of authorised push-payment fraud. In many cases the underlying payment infrastructure works exactly as designed: the victim is manipulated into authorising a transfer to an account controlled by a criminal. Confirmation-of-payee systems can reduce mistakes and some impersonation techniques, but matching a name does not by itself establish that the recipient is trustworthy.
SurePay cited UK Finance figures showing payment fraud losses across the UK banking sector reached £1.28 billion during 2025. It said authorised push-payment losses rose 19% to £576.4 million, with case volumes increasing to 248,070.
The company already operates verification schemes in the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland. That footprint gives its product strategy a cross-border dimension as European payments regulation, verification requirements, and fraud controls continue to develop.
The appointment is therefore more than a routine executive change, although the success of the new platform remains to be demonstrated. SurePay is attempting to move from a service that validates payment details towards one that makes risk judgements using behaviour observed across a broader network.
That shift also increases the governance demands on the service. Shared fraud intelligence depends on data quality, explainable risk signals, false-positive management, privacy controls, and clear accountability when automated assessments affect legitimate transactions.
Soetens takes responsibility for that product expansion while Rienties retains a separate innovation brief. The leadership structure suggests SurePay is separating the longer-term search for new fraud controls from the work of turning its existing verification network into a scalable commercial intelligence platform.
