Many colleagues, family members, friends and prospects often ask me why I founded PAARC Consulting and what are the origins or meaning of the "PAARC" in our name. Given the amount of times that I have courted this question over the past few weeks, I thought this would be a good way to more formally introduce the company and our brand new blog!
I started my career in financial services as a regulator at the North Carolina Office of the Commissioner of Banks (NCCOB). After spending my initial days as a young buck learning my way around the agency, meeting my new colleagues not only in NC but counterparts across the nation, and many of which quickly became mentors and dear lifelong friends, I found my career traveling along a much unexpected path - leading the agency's efforts in supervising the amazing and dynamic world that money transmission has become. Where the concept and evolution of Fintech originated from and where Fintech lived in its entirety during its early years. In this capacity, I had the amazing opportunity of closely supervising incumbent money transmitters like Western Union and MoneyGram and many others, to spending weeks at a time learning the ins and outs of the financial services operations of some of the most innovative companies this world has seen - Paypal, Amazon Payments, Google Payments, Facebook Payments, Amazon Payments just to name a few - as together with State Banking Agencies across the nation, we learned how these companies and their products operated, and developed a supervisory examination framework which could be applied to these newly licensed Fintech companies.
At the same time, being a regulator allowed me to experience and identify the "not so good" things and the "not to do's" from very early on in my career. I learned this by experiences with companies that didn't understand what it took to succeed long term in this industry, along with the resulting challenges they faced. These experiences, the good and the bad, are experiences that I carry with me wherever I go.
I have now been in the private sector for more than a decade serving the industry, holding senior executive compliance and risk management roles at Fintech companies, while helping the same companies along the way establish their banking, financial services and payments operations and strategies. During this time, I have met some amazing people along the way that I call not only colleagues, but dear friends, and I realized the following:
The experiences I gained in my regulator capacity were extremely fun, are quite unique, cannot be replicated in any other capacity and are undoubtedly the biggest accomplishment and asset in my professional background;
Relationships, human connections and people (especially those closely around you) are everything; and
Not many people truly understand the complexities and components happening behind the scenes across a multitude of systems, ledgers and bank accounts to process a single financial transaction, whether it's a card transaction, a cross-border transaction, a crypto purchase or transfer, to even something as simple as a deposit, withdrawal or loan payment. Mind you when you also have to take into account all of the compliance considerations and risks that are in play for each type of transaction.
Now back to why I founded PAARC Consulting and our name. Being a regulator was amazing due to the amount of exposure, number of people you meet and collaborate with in some capacity and the endless number of use cases that you encounter and need to learn and understand. But at times I felt lackluster, as if I was expected to ding or bring companies down rather than help them. I missed the "consultative" nature of being a regulator, and wanted to fill that void in a way where I was truly helping companies succeed. And doing so by focusing in areas of need for our future clients. That's why I founded PAARC Consulting - to be a guide and trusted partner that helps companies reach their goals and full potential in areas of need.
As for our name, it's an idea that came to mind at an actual park and that followed me for the past 8 years. And even though our firm may cover more ground these days than our name suggests, PAARC stands for Payments Advisory And Regulatory Compliance. We like the sound of it and decided to keep in intact. And we hope you like it too! :)
We welcome you to follow us and enjoy our Blog, as it will be our safe space where we provide valuable thought leadership content to the world!
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