onPhase Taps Veteran Exec to Lead Customer Success in FinTech Race

TAMPA, Fla. – March 12, 2026 – In a strategic move underscoring the growing importance of customer experience in the competitive financial technology sector, onPhase today announced the appointment of Heather Peterson as its new Chief Customer Officer. The AI-powered AP automation and payments provider has tasked the 20-year industry veteran with accelerating customer impact and operational scale as it pushes deeper into vertical markets.

Peterson, whose extensive background includes leadership roles at spend management giants SAP Concur, Emburse, and Planful, will now spearhead onPhase's customer success, onboarding, and time-to-value delivery functions. The appointment comes at a critical time for the company and the industry, where delivering measurable results quickly is becoming the ultimate differentiator.

The Customer Success Imperative in a Crowded Market

The Accounts Payable (AP) automation market is a fiercely contested space, projected to grow from USD 1.77 billion in 2025 to over USD 3.04 billion by 2034. While onPhase has carved out a strong position with its unified platform over 25 years, it competes with a host of players, including established leaders like Basware, Coupa, and Esker. In this environment, technological features alone are no longer enough to guarantee market leadership. The new battleground is customer value realization.

Peterson’s appointment signals onPhase's strategic bet on making the customer journey a core pillar of its growth strategy. Her primary mandate is to ensure every client moves swiftly from implementation to seeing a tangible impact on their operations. This focus directly addresses a major pain point for businesses investing in new technology: the gap between purchasing a solution and reaping its benefits.

"Finance teams today are running leaner than ever, and they expect a customer journey that respects their time and guarantees results," said Peterson in the official announcement. "onPhase has built a platform that delivers exactly that, and I look forward to working with our customers to ensure every organization is realizing the full value of that investment and operating with greater confidence."

Answering the Call of Lean Finance Teams

Peterson’s statement highlights a pervasive trend validated by extensive industry research: finance departments are under intense pressure to do more with less. A persistent talent shortage, widening skills gaps in areas like AI, and ongoing economic uncertainty have forced CFOs to prioritize efficiency and cost control. These “lean finance teams” are struggling with manual, error-prone processes and fragmented data from disconnected point solutions, which stifles their ability to function as strategic partners to the business.

This is the precise challenge that AI-powered automation promises to solve. By automating high-volume, low-value tasks like invoice capture, matching, and approvals, platforms like onPhase free up finance professionals to focus on higher-impact work such as cash flow analysis, forecasting, and risk management. With claims of up to 99.9% data extraction accuracy and significant reductions in processing time, the technological value proposition is clear.

However, the technology is only half the equation. onPhase CEO Robert Michlewicz emphasized that the goal is to translate these features into real-world outcomes. "Heather's appointment reflects our commitment to ensuring every customer moves effectively from implementation to real business impact," he stated. "Elevating finance teams to measurable outcomes and positioning them to be a strategic resource as their business grows are what we are focused on delivering. With Heather leading our customer success organization, we are ensuring every onPhase customer can deploy with greater efficiency and confidence, and realize value faster so their teams can focus on the work that matters most."

A Strengthened C-Suite for Strategic Expansion

Peterson’s hiring is not an isolated event but the latest in a series of strategic leadership appointments designed to architect the company's next phase of growth. Over the past year, onPhase has assembled a new C-suite with deep experience in scaling enterprise software companies. This includes CEO Robert Michlewicz, appointed in June 2025; CFO Katie Eskandarian, who joined in October 2025 from Visual Lease; and Chief Product Officer Sudarshan Ranganath, who came aboard in February 2026 to spearhead AI-centric platform innovation.

This fortified leadership team is steering an aggressive vertical expansion strategy. The company is targeting industries with particularly acute AP challenges, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and automotive. In healthcare, strict HIPAA compliance and complex billing add layers of difficulty. In manufacturing, intricate supply chains demand robust PO matching. For automotive dealerships, high volumes of paper invoices create bottlenecks. By tailoring its unified platform and customer onboarding to these specific industry needs, onPhase aims to capture significant market share.

Peterson's role is integral to this expansion. Her expertise in scaling global customer success organizations is critical for ensuring that as onPhase enters new verticals, its promise of rapid value and dedicated support is delivered consistently, building the trust required to succeed in specialized markets.

Unifying Technology with a Human Touch

At the core of onPhase's strategy is its commitment to a unified platform that manages the entire AP and payment lifecycle, from invoice capture to final supplier payment. This approach directly combats the data silos and operational friction caused by using multiple, disparate point solutions—a common headache for modern finance departments. By integrating capture, approvals, payments, and document management, the platform provides a single source of truth, enhancing visibility and control.

This integrated vision was significantly bolstered by the company's March 2023 acquisition of iPayables, an enterprise-focused AP automation provider, which deepened its capabilities for large, complex organizations. Now, under Peterson's leadership, onPhase is doubling down on ensuring this powerful, unified technology is matched with an equally seamless and effective human experience. Her focus on engineering implementation programs that accelerate measurable outcomes is designed to prove that advanced automation and exceptional customer partnership can, and must, go hand in hand.