For private equity, growth equity, and strategic acquirers
I assess payments, PSP, payment-facilitator, and embedded-payments assets for investors — before the deal, and inside the portfolio company after it. Twenty-five years building the systems I now evaluate.
The problem you are actually underwriting
Volume and take rate are legible. What is not legible from the data room: whether settlement reconciles without manual adjustment, how many processor integrations are genuinely productized versus held together by one person's exception handling, whether the underwriting policy exists as a written rule or as an analyst's judgment, and how much of the codebase can safely be touched by anyone still employed there.
These are the things that do not appear in a quality-of-earnings report and do appear in year two — as an integration that costs three times the estimate, or a platform migration that quietly consumes the value-creation plan.
I have built those systems. I know where they are hidden and what it costs to unwind them.
What I assess
Whether a single transaction can be reconstructed end to end — authorization through settlement to the merchant deposit — without asking three systems the same question.
Example outputs
Which gateway, processor, and acquiring integrations are productized, which are bespoke, and which depend on a single person who could resign.
Example outputs
Whether risk policy is written and executable, or resident in individual judgment — and what genuine automation would actually require.
Example outputs
The honest cost of change: what the codebase, the data pipelines, and the people in place can actually absorb.
Example outputs
How I work with investors
1 week
A fast read on architecture, integration and key-person risk, and the red flags worth repricing or walking on.
2–3 weeks
Platform, integrations, settlement, underwriting, data, scalability, security posture, and roadmap credibility. Written findings and an investment-committee readout included.
3–4 weeks
Findings converted into a sequenced remediation and investment plan the management team can actually run.
Ongoing
Two to three days a week inside a portfolio company as a fractional technology and product executive — for the asset that needs an operator, not another report.
The findings come with a view on what to do about them, and I am willing to stay and execute. That is the difference between a report that gets filed and a plan that gets run.
Evidence
Replaced a hand-built settlement and reporting layer with pipelines that reconcile deterministically and can be re-run and audited on demand. The rewrite retired the large majority of a legacy processing codebase and let further processor integrations land without another bespoke exception path.
A merchant onboarding queue sending the overwhelming majority of applications to manual review, cut back by making an implicit risk policy explicit, testable and executable — with AI decisioning sequenced after the rule surface was stable rather than in place of it. The result was a risk function that could be inspected rather than described.
Platform work spanning gateways, processors, acquiring banks, terminals, settlement, and reporting across a multi-acquirer, multi-processor environment — including the country-level implementation blockers, such as national identification-number requirements, that never appear in a vendor's documentation.
Client and employer specifics, and the underlying figures, are available in conversation.
Sectors I know cold
Most of the platform problems I have spent my career fixing were visible at diligence and priced as if they were not. If you have a live payments deal, or a portfolio company where the platform has become the constraint, that is a short conversation worth having.