I came into payments in 2015 from real estate. The transition made more sense than it sounds. Both worlds run on relationships, structured negotiation, and the ability to read what is actually driving a deal versus what people say is driving it.
What I did not expect was that I would be joining cross-border payments during its messiest, most interesting decade. It was a regulatory gray zone slowly evolving into the licensed, supervised, infrastructure-grade business it is today. I am grateful to have been part of that evolution, from compliance being something you worked around to compliance being something you compete on.
I spent my first seven years in sales, and that foundation shaped everything that came after. Selling cross-border payments to enterprise merchants like Roku, SIE, Viacom, Blizzard, Fiverr, Tinder, Flywire, and Pay My Tuition taught me what merchants actually need from a payment provider. Where the friction lives. Which features get talked about in pitches versus which ones close deals.
When I moved into partnerships, that merchant lens became my edge. I knew how to negotiate SLAs, pricing, and commercial conditions with acquirers and banks because I knew exactly what the merchant on the other end was going to ask for. It is hard to design the right deal if you have never had to sell the product.
Partnerships was also where I got my first real exposure to GTM strategy and the broader commercial picture. Pricing decisions, market entry, unit economics, and the structural choices that determine whether a payment business actually scales rather than just grows.
Today, I build and scale LATAM payment operations across cross-border, Merchant of Record, and local payment infrastructure. The work sits at the intersection of commercial outcomes, regulatory complexity, and the partner ecosystems that make either possible. I think about it less as a payments job and more as a fintech infrastructure job, because the lines between acquirers, banks, wallets, schemes, and orchestration layers are blurrier than they have ever been, and the people who do this well are the ones who can see the whole system rather than one slice of it.
I have owned partnerships, negotiation, and performance across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Argentina, working directly with the institutions that move money in the region. That includes acquirers, issuing banks, schemes, wallets, and payment technology providers such as Stone, Cielo, Fiserv, BBVA, Banorte, Banco de Occidente, Transbank, Klap, Kushki, Payway, Crediban, Redeban, and Worldpay, alongside global orchestration and acceptance partners like Adyen, Stripe, Worldline, and ACI.
The work I am proudest of is rarely the kind that fits in a number. It is consolidating fragmented legacy agreements into clean commercial frameworks that hold up over time. Building distribution models that turn competitors into channels. Designing approval rate programs that look at issuer behavior, routing, and retry logic together rather than as separate problems. Migrating large enterprise portfolios through acquisitions without disrupting the flows that keep merchants in business.
What ties this work together is a habit I have built over the years of looking at operational patterns early, before they become problems anyone is talking about. Most issues in payments do not arrive as crises. They arrive as small signals in approval data, partner behavior, or contract structure that most people walk past. The discipline is catching them at that stage and treating them like product problems rather than fire drills.
I operate with an owner mindset, whether the thing I am owning is a function, a region, a partnership, or a P&L. I would rather make the call, own the outcome, and learn faster than wait for certainty.
I genuinely enjoy partnerships work. The structuring, the negotiation, and the long game of building trust with regulated counterparties are all parts of the job I value.
My next chapter is about owning the P&L those partnerships feed. I want to be closer to the revenue line, working on pricing decisions, unit economics, market-level commercial strategy, and the discipline of running a business rather than a function.
That is why I am starting an Executive MBA in Finance at Insper in July 2026, to sharpen the financial fluency that turns commercial intuition into defensible decisions.
I work best in environments where business, technology, and regulation collide and someone has to make a call before all the information is in.
Latest Articles
