Career History

Prior to the pandemic, Global Payments announced a $21.5 billion merger with TSYS.  While at the macro level this was a merger of equals, ProPay was a part of TSYS' Merchant division which was significantly smaller than the comparable business unit on the Global Payments side.  As a result, the merger felt more like an acquisition for ProPay employees as we were absorbed into the existing Global Payments operating structure.  This work had only just started to be outlined when the pandemic hit and when the pandemic first hit, the business pivoted resources to focus on responding to the pandemic.  But once the dust settled from the initial lockdown, my manager and one of the other members of the management team decided to take opportunities outside of ProPay and Global Payments.  

This created two opportunities--Underwriting Manager and Payment Facilitation Oversight Specialist.  Given some of the strategic projects I had been involved in, I was most interested in continuing to build on that work in the Payment Facilitation Oversight Specialist role.  This role was fairly new to the organization and it came with a mandate to own and develop the responsibilities to address several needs the organization had at the time.  I appreciated the challenge and the mandate to build something more or less from scratch.

I should take a moment to describe what the role of Payment Facilitation Oversight Specialist even means--because even for those in the payments industry--it's not self-explanatory.

In ProPay's operating model we rely on integrated software partners who host a signup and processing experience in their software which is seamlessly integrated into our payments gateway.  They host what is essentially the front end of the experience, while we host the back end connections to the card brands and legal, regulatory, and other compliance responsibilities and operations.  

In this model, a user of their software solution would have the opportunity from their account management dashboard to sign up for a payments account.  This payments account represents a value add to the software experience as it centralizes one of the key aspects of their business operations.  The software user would then go through the application process which would be sent to us and our system would decision on the account and return a response either approving the software user for payments acceptance with us or declining the request.  Assuming the account is approved, the merchant would then use the front end tools provided by the software provider to process payments which are in turn sent to us to be authorized and settled with the card networks.

This relationship can be incredibly profitable to both the software business and the payments company.  It's standard for the software vendor and the payment company to share in the interchange revenue that is generated by processing fees associated with these payments. It is one of a handful of successful exit strategies that startup tech firms have in order to sell their business to private equity.  It is also one way that a software vendor can offer significant "free" offerings as they don't need to charge upfront for access to the software if they are able to monetize the payments processed by the user on the backend. And on the payments company side it provides an unattended way to board new merchant accounts without the overhead or expense of having to attract these same merchants independent of their preferred software vendor.

It was quickly evident that while this relationship can be mutually beneficial, there are instances where it is not in our best interests from a payment risk perspective to allow any software company to integrate to our gateway.  The Payment Facilitation Oversight Specialist role was created to be responsible for analyzing those new partner level opportunities and the risk they pose.