Roles
The seats I fill, and what you get in each.
Nine seats. I have held each of them as an employee, then filled them again for clients as an interim, fractional or crisis engagement. Below, for each one: when you need it filled, what I do first, and what done looks like.
VP / Director / Head of Payments
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When you need this seat filled
- The incumbent has left and the search will take months.
- Acceptance rate or cost per transaction has moved and nobody owns the answer.
- You are entering markets that need new acquirers, methods and settlement currencies.
- Supplier contracts are up for renewal and you want someone who has negotiated 180+ of them.
What I do in the first 90 days
- Rebuild the acceptance and cost picture from raw data, by acquirer, provider, method and market.
- Audit every processing agreement against the invoices and against industry pricing benchmarks.
- Set routing, retry and redundancy rules with the product team.
- Fix the team and the operation: roles, KPIs, shift cover, supplier ownership, settlement and reconciliation.
What done looks like
- Typically 10 to 15% lower processing cost within the first month and 10 to 15% higher acceptance across markets.
- A supplier map with primary, secondary and fallback routes per market.
- Monitoring that tells you when something degrades, not when a customer complains.
- A permanent hire briefed, or a team that no longer needs one.
Head of Risk & Fraud
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When you need this seat filled
- A scheme, acquirer or sponsor bank has put you on notice for chargebacks or fraud.
- Fraud losses or promotional abuse are growing faster than volume.
- Payouts are slow because manual review is the only control you trust.
- You are onboarding merchants and need underwriting and monitoring that hold up.
What I do in the first 90 days
- Map every control across registration, pay-in and payout, and remove the ones that only add friction.
- Tune rules, 3DS strategy and device fingerprinting against real loss data.
- Put chargeback and fraud ratios on a dashboard against the thresholds that apply to you, by scheme and by MID.
- Train the team on a high-risk and real-time tooling, and set the review SLAs.
- Run the risk operation as a measured function: queues, SLAs, quality checks and staffing across markets and time zones.
What done looks like
- Chargeback ratio held under 0.5% across a 20-brand group is my reference point.
- Payout processing time down by 80% without raising loss.
- Promotional and bonus abuse cost cut by around 30% through data intelligence.
- A documented control framework that a regulator, auditor or scheme reviewer can follow.
Head of Payment Product / Chief Product Officer
When you need this seat filled
- Payments is a side task for engineering and nobody owns the roadmap.
- You are consolidating platforms after an acquisition, or replacing a PSP.
- Integrations take a quarter each and every market is a special case.
- Leadership gets reports but not decisions.
What I do in the first 90 days
- Take product ownership of the payment and risk platform: vision, roadmap, priorities, usability, redundancy, intelligence.
- Design the payments-as-a-service model so every brand and market runs on one stack.
- Run integrations and migrations as projects with owners, dates and rollback plans.
- Coach the product team in Agile delivery that engineering actually respects.
- Build the product with the operations teams, so every tool shortens a queue someone actually works.
What done looks like
- One platform instead of one per brand. For one listed group that cut infrastructure overhead by 60%.
- Three acquired brands migrated in nine months.
- A KYC and document management system, a reporting engine and a routing engine that the business uses daily.
- A roadmap the board understands and the team believes.
Head of Compliance / Chief Compliance Officer
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When you need this seat filled
- You hold, or are applying for, licences in several jurisdictions and the obligations overlap and conflict.
- PCI DSS, AML, PSD2 and data protection each have an owner, but nobody owns the whole.
- A regulator, auditor or sponsor bank has asked for evidence you cannot produce quickly.
- Compliance is seen as the department that says no.
What I do in the first 90 days
- Build one obligations register across every licence, scheme rule and regulation you are subject to.
- Own PCI DSS as a continuous process, not an annual scramble.
- Align AML, KYC, transaction monitoring and reporting with how your customers actually behave.
- Own the relationships with regulators, schemes, auditors and acquirers, so every question is answered once, in writing, with evidence attached.
What done looks like
- Compliance across licences in Europe, the UK, Latin America, Africa, Asia Pacific and Oceania run from one framework.
- Board reporting that states the exposure, the control and the residual risk in one page.
- Training programmes that keep the operation compliant after I leave.
- Faster onboarding of merchants, partners and markets because the answers already exist.
Development Centre Manager
When you need this seat filled
- You have, or plan, a nearshore or offshore engineering centre for payments and risk, and delivery is slipping.
- Communication between product in one country and engineering in another has broken down.
- You need payments domain knowledge at the head of the team, not only management.
What I do in the first 90 days
- Diagnose the team: skills, structure, tooling, cadence, morale.
- Set a product and engineering rhythm with clear priorities and a shared definition of done.
- Recruit, restructure and coach. Payments engineers are a niche; I know where to find them.
- Put platform reliability, security and PCI DSS scope on the engineering agenda.
What done looks like
- I led a 50-strong development centre for a listed group's risk and payment platform for five years.
- Predictable releases, fewer incidents, and a team that understands the business it builds for.
- A local lead developed and ready to take over.
Chief Operating Officer
When you need this seat filled
- Payments operations, risk operations, KYC, customer payouts and supplier management sit in different silos.
- Operations teams have grown across countries and time zones without common process, KPIs or tooling.
- Growth has outrun process, and the founders are still the escalation path.
- You need operational due diligence before a raise, a sale or a licence application.
What I do in the first 90 days
- Map the operation end to end and remove duplicated work and hand-offs.
- Design bespoke tools where off-the-shelf software is the bottleneck.
- Put settlement, reserve and reconciliation tracking under one owner.
- Set KPIs the executive team reviews weekly, and make them visible to everyone.
What done looks like
- An operation that runs on process and data, not on heroics.
- Supplier exposure known and managed, 150+ relationships at a time if needed.
- Reference point: responsibility for 160 payments and risk agents across nine countries, run as one operation.
- A management team that can run it without me.
Non-Executive Director / Board Advisor
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When you need this seat filled
- Payments and risk are material to the business and nobody on the board has run them.
- Investors, regulators or a sponsor bank expect independent challenge on controls.
- Management is strong but needs a sounding board who has seen the next stage.
What I bring to the table
- Independent challenge on payment economics, supplier exposure, control design and regulatory posture.
- Plain-language reporting: exposure, control, residual risk.
- A network across acquirers, PSPs, schemes and regulators in most markets.
- Board experience as NED of an EU-licensed crypto exchange.
How it works
- Board or committee membership, or an advisory retainer with monthly working sessions and asynchronous access in between.
- Typically one to two days a month.
- Clear conflict and confidentiality terms from day one.
Crisis Manager / Turnaround Executive
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When you need this seat filled
- A scheme, acquirer, regulator or sponsor bank has set a deadline.
- A migration, outage or PSP failure is losing revenue by the hour.
- The payments or risk leadership has gone, and the team with them.
- Fraud or chargebacks have spiked faster than anyone can explain.
What I do in the first week
- Establish what the counterparty actually asked for and what the real numbers are.
- Put the fastest controls in within days.
- Deliver the remediation plan in the counterparty's format, with owners and dates.
- Report weekly to the counterparty and the board until they stand down.
What done looks like
- The threat withdrawn and documented by the party that raised it.
- A permanent owner in the seat and a written handover.
- A defined end to the engagement.
Project and strategy mandates
Payments strategy
A review of the business and its platforms, then the strategy to create growth: the right mix of methods, suppliers and redundancy per market, the best cost and contract per supplier, settlement accuracy and 24/7 monitoring.
RFPs, negotiations and market entry
Identify partners, run the process, negotiate the economics, manage the integration. I have taken 180+ acquirer and PSP relationships from first call to live traffic.
Due diligence and migration
Payments and risk due diligence on acquisition targets, then post-acquisition platform migration. Three brands in nine months is my benchmark.
Not sure which seat you need?
That is a normal place to start. A 30-minute call usually settles it.