Top Expertise in Payments
Tap GVGroup's uncompromising expertise and experience.
This page profiles our principals and senior associates. Please see the Team page for an overview by practice group and our Management page for an overview on GVGroup management.
Team Profiles |
(listed alphabetically by family name) |
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As a senior consultant and head of business development for GVGroup, Kevin Atwood brings over 23 years of domestic and international experience in the financial services and electronic payments industry. Kevin’s career includes over 20 years at Visa, attaining the position of Senior Vice President, responsible for sales and partnerships with multiple top 10 issuing and acquiring banks that generated more than $40 billion in annual card sales volume. During his tenure at Visa, Kevin was instrumental in delivering numerous new products and services to Visa’s banking clients including the initial launch of several fraud reduction programs—such as the Issuers’ Clearing House Service and Anti-Counterfeit Terminal Program—which, since their introduction in the late 1980s, have continued to save issuers millions of dollars. In 2002, Kevin joined Wells Fargo Bank as Vice President and National Relationship Manager for the Merchant Processing Business. Kevin also served as a mortgage lending officer at Washington Mutual Bank, where he brought card marketing innovation concepts to the Home Loan Mortgage Banking Division. Given this deep domain experience in financial service with some of the largest card issuing, merchant acquiring and mortgage lending institutions, Kevin’s expertise covers a broad range of areas, including marketing, debit, credit and ACH products, customer life cycle management, relationship management, product innovation, merchant processing in both the physical and online environment, co-branding, commercial card products, operations, risk management and collections. Kevin holds a B.A. degree from San Jose State University.
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Jeff Barton is an Executive Consultant in the Information Technology Practice at Global Vision Group. He has an extensive track record of successfully developing key business strategies and translating them into pragmatic implementations. Jeff's combination of skills and 35 years of consulting expertise has ensured successful project completions in transaction and payment processing, data communications strategy, procurement management, operational reviews, process improvement, fraud management, electronic trading, systems integration, and applications development. He has managed a series of global projects focusing on Visa commercial card enhanced data strategy and the design and development of a processing platform to underpin multinational data consolidation and reporting, lodge card matching, data warehousing and reporting, and the flow of XML invoicing across the T&E sector. For GVGroup, Jeff helped develop the strategy and business case for, and then project managed a team of 140 internal staff and external suppliers, to implement a multi-currency, multi-language TSYS processing platform solution for European-wide corporate credit cards for a major US-based bank. Jeff's experience further includes: working with a global leader in travel transaction processing and data intelligence to review operational systems and processes; defining the requirements and procurement process for telephone-switching facilities for the British Royal Household; he also developed, managed and implemented trading via EDI for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Jeff holds a BSc with Joint Honors in Computing and Electronics from the University of Durham, England, and an MBA from the Cranfield School of Management, England.
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Johnny has thirty-three years experience in both operations and finance, with two payment processing industry leaders. During his career, Johnny held executive management positions that oversaw transaction processing operations, finance operations, reporting and financial planning and analysis. Most recently, Johnny was a Senior Vice President at Visa, Inc., responsible for various financial analysis and reporting functions. Major projects Johnny oversaw while at Visa included the design and implementation of an automated, cross-company and comprehensive customer billing system that consolidated all transaction-based charges and related data into one statement. Feeds for this enhanced reconciliation and reporting system came from multiple technology and systems platforms. Johnny was also responsible for reviewing and creating new processes to support the analysis and review of business development opportunities, headed the Visa Pricing committee, served on the investment advisory board and led numerous projects to organize and provide consistent, accurate financial and business data in support of management decision-making processes.
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Hannu, a Senior Consultant, was a senior staff with Visa USA in the Financial Research Division for the past 13 years. His primary responsibility was to manage cost and profitability studies across multiple Visa products with Member banks. Within those studies, Hannu was personally responsible for evaluating and assessing the IT systems and third party processing capabilities and costs for issuing and acquiring banks. The value of these studies has been shown by the ability of issuers to improve overall cost reductions in IT and improved efficiencies in their respective card based operations. Prior to his experience with Visa, Hannu held positions as a consultant, manager, and project manager in Information Technology primarily for financial institutions in USA. In addition, Hannu has held senior systems analyst positions in Finland and Zambia, and worked as an Information Management Consultant for World Health Organization in Pakistan.
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Senior consultant with over fifteen years of leadership experience in the financial services and high tech industries developing client relations, providing value-added consulting services, developing strategic plans, leading projects, and managing products. He has managed partnership programs that successfully generated third-party support of vital payment products and services, led technology and third-party processor projects to optimize the allocation of scarce resources and process-improvement efforts, all of which yielded multimillion dollar cost savings. He is also seasoned in financial, economic and competitive intelligence analysis.
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Danny is a GVGroup consultant, providing a broad range of research and analytical support. Danny has significant expertise in building and maintaining databases, networks, and assessing business requirements for various projects. Prior to joining the GVGroup in 2005, Danny was Director of Dealer Operations for the Western US with Door-2-Door Auctions, a San Mateo-based internet company providing services to sellers for eBay auctions. In addition, Danny has held positions as operations manager with Worldwide Express, an international shipping company, and as a sales associate for FunXS, which provided video game and sports events at trade shows. Danny holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Colorado at Boulder. |
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Armen, GVGroup Executive Consultant, is a seasoned global payments expert with over 25 years of strategic, hands-on business experience in global payments systems and new business development. He is a dynamic and multicultural specialist offering unique skill set to clients involved in payments around the world. As a trusted partner with vision to understand his client’s future business he has helped design and evaluate new products and services in today's changing marketplace. Offerings include:
- Development of connectivity products for payment cards
- Merchant card acceptance and capital funding solutions
- Cross border money transfer and bill payment services
- Alternative payment products and services, prepaid & gift
Armen has also served in executive positions at several top ten financial institutions and helped them maximize growth and revenues in today’s challenging electronic payments marketplace. As a Vice President of JPMorgan Chase’s Prepaid Product in Treasury Services he was responsible for designing and launching prepaid cards in the EU market. As a Senior Vice President at Visa USA, he expanded Card acceptance to new markets such as supermarkets, recurring payments, Quick Service restaurants and Federal Government Agencies. Armen’s expertise in card products extends to issuance of credit, debit, prepaid and commercial cards. He is also an experienced manager of technology solutions including development of best practices, BSA/AML guidelines, network policy, third-party processor contract negotiation and problem resolution.
Armen earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and a Master of Science degree in computer science from the San Jose State University in California. He authored the “Basics of Data Communications” textbook and lectured at College of San Mateo, CA. He was awarded an honorary teaching credential from State of California. Armen is a member of the United States National Masters team; represented United States at four world championships. He is an accomplished marathon runner and tri-athlete, having completed in seven Ironman competitions.
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Tom is president and founder of the Global Vision Group and heads the strategy practice. Tom has over 30 years of international and domestic experience in the financial services and electronic payments industry. Prior to creating the Global Vision Group, Tom was Senior Vice President with Visa U.S.A., holding a number of executive positions during his 11-year career there. He managed the Visa Profitability Consulting practice, as well as all of the business research functions, which included performing cost reduction and benchmarking studies, and served as Chief Economist. As global relationship manager, Tom helped US-based issuers launch programs overseas. He also headed up all of Visa's efforts to mitigate the impact of personal bankruptcies on creditors, and co-chaired a creditor coalition that helped write, introduce, and lobby bankruptcy legislation. Prior to Visa, most of his experience was directed toward assessing the business environment risk of emerging markets. Tom holds a BA from Vanderbilt University and a PhD in international trade and finance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has over 20 published articles on credit card and economic policy issues.
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Marc Perl a Senior Consultant, brings over 30 years of professional experience to GVGroup. Marc’s diverse experience includes risk management, acquirer processing, merchant POS equipment certification, product development, software development and software quality assurance. During his 20 years at Visa, he was a key member of Visa’s Risk Management team, where he developed and managed the compliance program for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) as part of the Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP). As a merchant acquiring expert, Marc built and managed Visa’s Integrated Debit platform to support merchants such as Walmart, Radio Shack, Kmart and others. His in depth experience with merchant terminals and PIN entry devices enabled him to manage the design and implementation of Visa’s Integrated Debit PIN encryption technology, called Derived Unique Key Per Transaction (DUKPT). Marc also served as project manager for Visa’s Y2K effort and assisted with the spin-off of Visa’s acquiring processor business into a joint venture with Total Systems Services (TSYS) called Vital Processing Services. In addition to his Visa experience, Marc spent four years at Bank of America developing bankcard solutions. Marc has consulted to organizations as varied as Jet Propulsion Laboratories to TSYS Acquiring Solutions and others. His early experience included computer operations, programming, creation of software development methodologies and software engineering. Marc holds a BA from California State University at Northridge. |
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Linda Perry an Executive Consultant, Linda S. Perry, Executive Consultant with GVGroup, advises merchants, processors and new acceptance and acquiring companies. Her assignments have included assisting large merchants with processing strategies, helping new acceptance entities with compliance and cost reduction, setting strategy and building a processing platform for a large value added reseller and providing payments expertise and consulting services to private equity and investment portfolio managers. Other projects included a year-long assignment as an advisor to PESystems, a company with patented technology for analyzing interchange and lowering cost for merchants.
She retired in April 2009 after 17 years at Visa, Inc. For a substantial part of her career there she served as Senior Vice President and Head of Acquirer and Processor Sales for the US. In that role she established and developed the department that managed Visa's relationships with its member-bank acquirers, third-party issuing and acquiring processors, software vendors, and independent sales organizations. She also developed a widely read industry newsletter, organized the US Acquirer Council, established an annual global executive forum in Paris, and she introduced many new products to the acquiring and processing market.
In July 2010, Linda received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Midwest Acquirers Association. In addition to these achievements, Ms. Perry served as a member of The Electronic Transaction Association's Board of Directors for the past 13 years. Upon retiring from the Board, she was honored for her contributions to the ETA at their April 2009 annual meeting.
During her career at Visa she was recognized by Transaction World Magazine as the 2007 "Mover and Shaker" (an award determined by a vote of her peers in the industry) and in 2008 was featured as an "Industry Leader" by The Greensheet, another industry publication. She is a founder of W.net and continues to serve on its Board of Directors.
Prior to her most recent position Ms. Perry was VP and Regional Manager of Member Relations at Visa. Before joining Visa, Ms. Perry was a VP at Citicorp in Chicago and held VP Positions at Michigan National Bank. She graduated 'With Distinction' with a B. A. from the University of Michigan.
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Jim Tylenda is an Executive Consultant and Head of Strategy, Product Development and Marketing. Jim's career includes more than a dozen years of consulting to payments and banking firms, as well as over twenty years of senior-level payments industry and retail banking experience that encompasses business line management in both the B2C and B2B markets at several of the largest banking institutions in the U.S. Jim has provided senior consulting expertise in the areas of product development, distribution channel improvement, and customer acquisition and retention, most recently with AlixPartners. In operating roles, Jim lead the turnaround of the FleetBoston consumer credit card business, directed all marketing programs for the Bank of New York credit card program, lead the initial marketing effort for the Citibank American AAdvantage credit card, managed the First Chicago merchant/acquiring business to profitability, and was head of marketing and planning for Citicorp Acceptance Services. Jim received his B.A. from Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, and his M.B.A. from
Syracuse University. |
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Vinod is a GVGroup principal and leads the operations & efficiency practice. He has over 20 years of success in financial services and payment system organizations, developing and managing initiatives that enhance a company’s position, brand-differentiation and competitive strengths in the marketplace. Vinod was Vice President with Visa USA for nearly a decade, where he was in charge of Issuer Risk Management and spearheaded various benchmarking and cost reduction initiatives in risk management to improve bankcard industry profitability. Prior to joining Visa in 1992, Vinod was with Bank of America, where he was on the project team that successfully implemented the Flex Project bank-wide in 12 months. He was also responsible for management of business unit financial reporting functions, spearheading one the major process-change projects undertaken by the bank. His background also includes three years project management experience developing national grid infrastructure in Africa. Vinod earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from Kashmir University and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from San Francisco State University.
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