Expertise
Seven domains. One operator who has run all of them.
Payments problems rarely stay in one department. Acceptance is a product question, a commercial question and a risk question at the same time. This is the ground I cover, and the vocabulary I use when I cover it.
Acceptance, routing and performance
- Acceptance-rate analysis by acquirer, issuer BIN, method, market and currency
- Routing engines, cascading, retries, soft-decline handling, network tokens
- 3DS and SCA strategy, exemptions, frictionless rates
- Local payment methods, open banking, wallets, cards, instant payments
- Multi-acquirer redundancy with primary, secondary and fallback routes per market
Acquiring and supplier commercials
- Interchange++ pricing, scheme fee audits, invoice reconciliation against contract
- Acquirer, PSP, gateway, orchestration and banking negotiation
- Settlement terms, FX, rolling reserves and collateral
- Supplier identification, due diligence, contracting, integration and launch
- Sponsor-bank and acquirer positioning for complex and high-risk models
Fraud, chargebacks and transaction risk
- Rule design, scoring, machine-learning vendors and manual review economics
- Device fingerprinting, velocity controls, promotional and bonus abuse
- Chargeback and dispute management, representment, alert networks
- Scheme monitoring programmes: Visa acquirer and merchant thresholds, Mastercard excessive chargeback and fraud programmes
- Merchant underwriting and monitoring for acquirers and PSPs
- Payout controls, high-risk customer databases, emerging fraud-group detection
Compliance, licensing and regulation
- PCI DSS ownership as a continuous programme
- AML and KYC programme design, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting
- PSD2, payment institution and e-money obligations, safeguarding, data protection
- Multi-licence operation across Europe, the UK, Latin America, Africa, Asia Pacific and Oceania
- Regulator, scheme, auditor and acquirer liaison
Payment product and platforms
- Product ownership of payment and risk platforms: vision, roadmap, priorities, usability, redundancy
- Payments-as-a-service architecture across brands, platforms and markets
- Integrations, PSP replacement, post-acquisition migration
- KYC and document management systems, reporting engines, risk engines
- Agile delivery coaching for product and engineering teams
Payments data and AI
- Real-time monitors and alerts across every transaction
- AI-assisted analysis of failure reasons, cost drivers and acceptance trends
- Automated daily, weekly and board reporting
- Invoice and fee reconciliation at line level
- Tooling built on the client's own data and left with the client
Teams, operations and leadership
- Payments and risk operations: queues, SLAs, quality, staffing and tooling. Responsibility for 160 agents across nine countries at one point
- Interim C-level and head-of roles
- Building and restructuring payments, risk, compliance, product and engineering teams
- Distributed and offshore development centres
- Recruitment and training of payments and risk professionals
- Coaching and mentoring leadership teams
Corporate and board
- New-market entry: acquiring, methods, licences, risk appetite
- M&A payments and risk due diligence, buy side and sell side
- Board advisory and non-executive director roles
- Executive education on payments and risk
Markets
Worked in, not read about.
Acquiring, methods, licensing and risk differ by market. These are the ones I have launched, run or advised in.
- Europe
- All EEA countries, and the UK before and after Brexit
- Africa
- South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria
- South America
- Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador
- North America
- Canada, USA, Mexico
- Asia Pacific
- China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand
- Middle East & Central Asia
- India, UAE, Turkey, Georgia, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
- Languages
- English and Afrikaans (native), Dutch (professional)
Have a specific problem in one of these areas?
Describe it in a sentence. I will tell you what I would look at first.