First Data

I'm the chief commercial officer for Martrust, which is part of the Makura Group.

Just to give you a little bit of background of myself, I started my career in finance and I became regional CFO for First Data in 2006.

Now, the reason why I'm mentioning this is because I closely worked with sales on a project which was to digitize food stamps in Egypt.

And this is quite important because it has a welfare element to it.

I have been in the industry for a little more than 20 years.

I started as a merchant sales agent out in the industry and from there kind of expanded roles at what was formerly First Data.

I had roles at Bantib, at Visa, and then most recently I've been here at Payrock for almost three years.

I live right outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana with my husband, and I have three grown children who are on their own professional journey these days.

And o- one secret to success inside of any of that was I knew all of the platforms.

The, the biggest platforms, you know, Fiserv and TSYS, at the time it was First Data, Worldpay, all of these guys, and they all had national sales managers and division managers and all this making a quarter million dollars a year in salary, and I knew that the good year for them would be, like, five to six customers, like, a year that they could get to the finish line.

Right.

And then you'd say, "How many of those five to six start producing anything?" And they're like, "One to two." I'm like, "Great, so you're paying, like, $3 million in OPEX for fucking, like, six new customers a year.

And there were all these acquisitions and purchases that happened.

We were a joint venture for the longest time between JP Morgan and First Data.

And then there was a diversification that happened in 2008, where it became a JP Morgan Chase company.

So it was called Chase Payment Tag, carried on that name.

So it's, uh, I didn't set out to be, to be in payments from, from day one.

And I studied at my, uh, university in Leicester as a, as a foreign student, and, uh, when I needed to find a, to find a job after that, The, um, First Data, uh, the first payments company I worked for, needed an Italian speaker.

So I, I, I answered the job advert, and I joined as an Italian speaker.

So essentially, I, I'm Italian originally, by the way, if, if you haven't, if you haven't kind of, uh, found out from, from the accent.

... over the last few years in payments, you know, particularly in, you know, in your area in, in risk?

Yeah.

So, um, I've, um, when I started at First Data in 2008, we were very much like a PDQ machine-focused company with, with old tech infra- old tech infrastructure, and whatnot.

The tech has really, really changed dramatically, uh, throughout the years.