Strategy and execution
for payments and
fintech leaders.

Ray is a product, strategy, and corporate development leader with approximately 20 years of global experience across payments and fintech. His career has centered on expanding products and markets for incumbents, and introducing adjacent fintech strategies for disruptors.

At Visa, Ray spent over a decade in progressive strategy leadership roles, ultimately serving as regional Chief Strategy Officer for Europe — Visa's largest international region, with net revenue of $3–5B+. He was accountable for the region's overall strategic posture and led its expansion beyond core consumer card payments into value-added services, new payment flows, and previously underpenetrated verticals such as Visa Direct, B2B payments, and open banking. Notable strategic initiatives included leading the market entry strategy for Germany (Europe's largest payments opportunity at ~$2T in consumer payment volume), developing Visa's response to the EU-sponsored European Payments Initiative (incl. Wero), and establishing Visa's position on cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies. On the corporate development side, he led strategy for M&A and partnerships end-to-end: Visa acquired Tink ($2.1B) to build open banking capabilities in Europe and Currency Cloud (~$1B) to expand its value-added services offerings in foreign-currency exchange. He also forged strategic partnerships with leading European wallets, such as Vipps and MobilePay, to safeguard card payments as major industry changes in non-card funding (e.g., A2A, open banking) and consumer payment experiences (e.g., mobile P2P, QR-code payments) were underway. Earlier in his tenure at Visa, based in San Francisco, he worked on global corporate strategy — managing projects that included navigating the Russia business through sanctions developments, entering China's domestic payments market, and leading the commercialization of V.me (later Visa Checkout and Click to Pay) — while also establishing Visa's digital wallet strategy with respect to co-badged card positioning against Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

At Meta, Ray served as Director and Head of Product Strategy for Meta Financial Technologies — the product group responsible for monetizing Meta's scale of 3B+ daily active users and hundreds of millions of advertisers through payments and financial services across all of Meta's apps, businesses, and regions. He owned the payments product roadmap review with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's top management team, aligning near-term development priorities with long-term vision and strategy. His work spanned the full breadth of Meta's payments agenda, from embedding payments into messaging interfaces to enable in-chat commerce on WhatsApp and Instagram, to closing the loop from advertising to purchase to payment to strengthen Meta's core ads business. He also led a companywide strategy to optimize the cost of payment acceptance across $120B+ in annual payment volume — through network negotiations, payment mix management, and AI-powered routing — and developed Meta's subscription monetization strategy, including the launch of Meta Verified.

Prior to founding Raven FinTech Advisory, Ray incubated a venture in commercial banking with AlleyCorp, the New York-based venture capital firm founded by serial entrepreneur Kevin Ryan. Taking on the role of Chief Product Officer, he led the development of the product value proposition and business case for a neo-bank concept targeting the start-up ecosystem — a niche he identified as deeply underserved by incumbent banks, despite representing an addressable market of $160B in deposits. The work involved extensive customer discovery, including interviews with over 20 start-up founders to map pain points and identify meaningful opportunities for differentiation. This hands-on experience building a company from the ground up — from market research and customer interviews through to product definition and business case — gave Ray a founder's perspective that shapes how he engages with clients across the full spectrum of the industry.

Ray began his career in management consulting at McKinsey & Company in Seoul, advising clients across consumer electronics, financial services, and private equity. He holds a Master's degree in International Strategy and Diplomacy from the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor's degree in History and Political Science from the University of Michigan.