Deana Rich

About me:

Deana is an accomplished thought leader within the payments acquiring industry, highly respected for her integrity, payments risk management, legal and regulatory compliance expertise. She is a sought-after expert who has spoken on many risk and compliance topics as well as why the payments industry should self-regulate on “hate and harm” and how the pandemic changed the risk environment for merchants and their payments providers.

Steering Infinicept as Co-CEO, founder and board director, she was instrumental in the Angel and Series A fundraising, company strategy, board governance and business planning. Her journey in the payments industry has been fueled by a passion for cutting-edge innovation in embedded payments, risk management, compliance and SaaS solutions. Deana and the Infinicept team have transformed the Payment Facilitator experience, offering comprehensive tools from underwriting to transaction management to payouts, ensuring clients enjoy more control, flexibility and profitability.

Deana founded Rich Consulting in 2004, building upon her experience starting up an acquiring program at a sponsoring Bank, cleaning up a program at an ISO and ensuring compliance at an aggregator. With this varied experience, she helped clients understand risk tolerances, recognize vulnerabilities, initiate effective procedures to manage exposures, and implement the right risk policies, processes and systems. In 2014, she extended her consulting experience and deep industry knowledge into co-founding Infinicept.

With a background in consulting and a focus on risk, fraud, compliance and regulatory financial risk management, she has dedicated over three decades to honing policies and operational strategies that fortify acquirers and ISOs against vulnerabilities. Highly respected for the way in which she approaches everything with knowledge, understanding and ethics, Deana has been sought after to educate and build, not only both sets of the Electronic Transactions Association’s (ETA) Guidelines, but also state and federal regulators knowledge of the payments industry throughout her career. At the helm of Infinicept, she streamlined payment facilitation and redefined industry benchmarks for compliance, efficiency and control.

Deana, leveraging her Economics Degree from UCLA, is a founding/incorporating member, board director and former president of the Association of Payment Professionals (APP, formerly known as MAC). She leads the ETA’s Payment Facilitator Committee as its current Co-Chair, was a member of ETA’s President’s Board Advisory Council and has led and served on several ETA committees. She was ETA Member of the Year, received an Industry Achievement Award from Midwest Acquirers Association (MWAA), and was honored with the Making Waves Award from PayTech Women, formerly known as Wnet.