Ben Love

Ben Love has spent 28 years inside the payment industry, working across 36 countries, which is a strange thing to discover you've done when all you originally wanted was a job. He has served as CEO of Castles Technology International and Newland NPT North America, and held senior positions at Bank of America, Visa, Clover, Vantiv, Ingenico, and First Data, where he helped lead the US EMV migration at scale. If you ever stood in a checkout line in 2016 wondering why the chip reader was so slow, he accepts partial responsibility.

Nobody handed Ben a map when he started. He learned the industry the slow way, one baffling acronym at a time, and he remembers exactly what that felt like. These days the best part of his job is being the guide he never had: mentoring newcomers, teaching students and career switchers, and making the case that payments is the largest, most welcoming industry hiding in plain sight. He can explain what actually happens in the two seconds after you tap your card, unprompted, at length. He is, as you can imagine, a lot of fun at parties.

His daughter is now studying fintech, which he chooses to interpret as a five-star review of the dinner table conversation. Ben is the founder of TXN360, an boutique payment acceptance consulting firm, and writes about payments, business culture, and how big companies and small ones learn to move in the same direction. Born in Edinburgh and raised in Cape Town, he now lives in Alpharetta, Georgia, with his wife, two children, and a growing collection of GoPros, purchased in the sincere belief that the adventures will follow. He has read over 600 business books so you don't have to.