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Chris will share his knowledge on payment cost optimization in our upcoming webinar on October 22.
Sign up now: Controlling Payment Costs with Christopher Uriarte
Chris is a Partner at Glenbrook Partners, returning to the firm two years prior following a five-year hiatus. It’s the pinnacle of a career that spans C-level roles at four major tech companies, where he took the lead on payment strategy, technology and information security. His humility, warmth and easygoing smile convey a leadership style based on trust and straightforward communication.
As he approaches his 25th year of working in payments, Chris divides his time between working with clients on strategy projects, vendor briefing, and developing his educational work. Each day welcomes nuanced debate.
“One of the biggest challenges is we have a ton of very smart clients, so if we go into an engagement with the mindset that we’re always the smartest people in the room, we’re going to be in for a rude awakening,” Chris shares. Humility keeps him hungry to keep learning as well as educating; it’s rigor and research that underpins his collaborative work.
“We must always ensure that we’re providing insight and adding value to every minute we spend with the clients. We tirelessly prepare for every interaction and have to stay as up-to-date as possible on what’s happening in the industry.”
Influential trends in payments: regulations, pay-by-bank and AI fraud
The main trend to focus on this year? In a word: regulations. Chris highlights how US payments have, historically, been very lightly regulated. This is now changing, with pending regulations around open banking, recurring payments, digital wallets, the Durbin amendment, the Credit Card Competition Act, and the fact that certain states have introduced different rules around card payment fees. At the same time, Europe is seeing significant evolution of PSD2, as well as the disruptive effects of the Digital Markets Act on ecommerce.
He’s noticed merchants are increasingly interested in non-card payments like pay-by-bank, as well as asking about rails such as RTP and Fednow. “They’re starting to ask how we can reliably implement pay-by-bank payments at checkout, which is something that really wasn’t a consideration for most merchants, even just a year ago.”
As exciting as innovations in machine learning have been this year, the rise of generative AI is assisting fraudsters, too. His team have noticed new fraud schemes, as well as new ways to detect fraud, now that bad actors are using advanced artificial intelligence to attack businesses.
“We’re seeing a huge, huge increase in scams helping to facilitate things like authorized push payment fraud,” he adds. He notes that fraud is always changing, so it’s essential to keep an eye on it.
Early engineering days
Chris’s innovation-focused intensity is something he’s maintained since the very start of his career. While studying his computer science degree, Chris became Director of Technical Services for IDT Corporation, an early mover in communications, payments and telephony. He’d barely graduated before he was developing global secure messaging infrastructure for Dow Jones Corp as part of an analytics firm he co-founded.
And that was in the 90s, when almost nobody thought of “payments technology” as a tangible career path. Back then, Chris was an information architect, developing the technology behind the first copyright registration tool in the US.
Developing global payment systems and fraud detection products
Technological leadership suited Chris, and he became the founding CTO of Retail Decisions (now ACI Worldwide's Merchant Payment and Fraud Prevention business) at the turn of the millennium. He spent 11 years at the helm of product innovation and international development, as it went public then sold to private equity, eventually operating on five continents. The global payments business was pivotal in fraud prevention during the early days of ecommerce, Chris recalls, picking up clients such as Walmart and Google.
Yet a career in payments was not, initially, the goal.
“I was just lucky given the timing,” Chris shares, “I got into this industry as it was really redefining itself. With the launch of ecommerce and ecommerce payments, I got to see this industry grow up very, very quickly. That’s what got me hooked.”
“Every business today is really a payments business in one way or another; whether you’re monetizing payments or just taking payments. You can do everything right, but if you don’t get paid at the end of the day, none of it really matters.”
A growing fascination with payments
After Retail Decisions, Chris moved to American Express and became Vice President of International Operations and Implementations. During his three year tenure, he focused on Europe, Latin America, and then China, where he supported the card network to obtain a clearing license. Following this, he joined global payment services firm Vesta as Chief Strategy and Payments Officer. Chris oversaw the core payments business which included mobile payments, risk management, and consumer lending products.
For Chris, the opportunity to work in payment technology presents endless avenues of exploration. “Payments touch everybody’s life. Everybody has a payment story, whether it’s us professionals or our grandparents.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work on products and services that you actually see people use. To go to a store and see the brand or the product you’ve created at checkout. That’s a really, really neat thing.
“Most importantly, it’s always evolving, always changing, which keeps it super interesting. That's really cool from a day-to-day perspective.”
The next move brought him to Glenbrook Partners for the first time, where he served as a strategic consultant in payments, fraud and risk management. Chris deepened his commitment to educating others by leading several Payment Boot Camps and other payments education programs there.
Trust and empowerment: leadership that achieves innovation
Reflecting on various roles as advisor, consultant and board member, Chris says: “I’ve had a somewhat broad exposure, and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had throughout my career.” Each of his roles in technology have been distinctive, yet they share overtones of strategic ambition, better payment technology, and team leadership.
After a year at Glenbrook Partners, Chris left to become CIO and global practice leader for Aon Cyber Solutions Group. Excited by the possibilities of innovation, Chris drove digital transformation and founded a business team that developed industry-leading cybersecurity technologies. This preceded a year as CIO and senior vice president of data sciences and technology at Acima, a Salt Lake City-headquartered fintech. In October 2022, Chris returned to Glenbrook Partners five years after he left to take on the role of Partner.
He believes in a very specific form of leadership. “A leader needs to develop a culture of trust and empowerment. You have to trust your team and their ability to execute. Without trust, people become very conservative and cautious, which stifles innovation.
“When a leader thinks they can do all the heavy lifting themselves, in my experience, their team generally doesn’t succeed. You really need to empower your people to succeed.
“The team needs to believe in you as a leader and be comfortable enough working with you in making a leap of faith and trying different things, and feeling like they’ll be supported. In a culture like this, initiatives will sometimes fail. Then you have to pick people up and go from there.”
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Last thing you bought online: This is a really weird one, but a new scuba tank. I live in Miami, so I go diving and snorkeling a lot.
Office or hybrid: I work completely remotely out of my home, but I travel a lot. So let’s call that a hybrid of being at home, at conferences, and on-site with clients.
Digital wallet or physical wallet: Digital all the way!
Early bird or night owl: I’m a little bit of both. I don’t need a ton of sleep, so I get going early and I’m usually up late.
In-store or online: Little bit of both, as well. Obviously, we can’t live without online shopping. But I still like going to physical stores. I like seeing things and touching things.
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How about those looking to get into payments today? The answer for Chris, of course, is education. “Nearly all payments experience is on-the-job training – there still is no degree in payments. So you have to be thirsty to learn. Learn from your colleagues and from your industry peers. Read, read, read. Digest things like a sponge.
“Beg for learning and development opportunities like boot camps and conferences. Pay attention to the world around you in your everyday life. How are people paying? How are merchants accepting payments? How do your younger friends and family members pay? How do the older people in your life pay? How are people paying when you visit different countries? Be observant. Be curious.”
