Meet the team

Based in London, Motie joined PPRO in 2023 as Chief Commercial Officer, responsible for advancing the company’s global commercial strategy. As of October, he was appointed as Chief Executive Officer, where he will be leading the business into the next phase of growth and delivering industry-leading payment services for PPRO’s customers and partners.

Motie has over 20 years of experience in payments, having held a number of senior executive positions with renowned companies in the industry. He spent seven years in senior management roles at Worldpay and served as Chief Commercial Officer at payments technology company Nuvei.

Motie is a well-known thought leader in the payments sector, regularly speaking at major conferences and frequently quoted in the media on payments, fintech and e-commerce trends.

• Favourite city & why: Has to be London – it was love at first sight – from first time we met 1979 – it has an amazing past, incredible present and promising future.

Rahul has over 25 years of experience spanning strategy, investing, banking and internal finance having worked at McKinsey & Co, Passport Capital, Standard Chartered & Wayfair.

• First job: Dog walking business at age 12.

Selene has over two decades of experience in senior financial services positions, including at the open banking infrastructure platform, Yapily, and Open Banking Limited. Selene is PPRO’s Chief Legal, Risk and Compliance Officer, based in PPRO’s London office.

• Favourite city: New York City – it’s where I started my legal career and I felt so proud to call it home.

Bernie is responsible for driving the development of our cross-border tech, overseeing our rapidly expanding teams in Asia, Europe, and South America.

Prior to becoming a PPROer, Bernie served as Wayfair’s Head of Engineering, a role that saw him wear three hats: CTO for Wayfair Europe, Engineering Site Lead for Europe, and Head of Global Payments and Fraud. During his multifaceted tenure, he notched up a number of achievements, including building Wayfair’s biggest tech hub outside of their Boston HQ and establishing the company’s fraud capability from scratch.

He previously held senior engineering and product positions at Klarna, Expedia, and British Airways in a product-centric career spanning over 20 years.

Oh, and he used to be a music producer, songwriter, and musician in a previous life. So we all know who’ll be first up at the leadership team’s karaoke night.

• First music album: Video Killed the Radio Star

Eelco joined PPRO in early 2024 as Chief Commercial Officer. Bringing two decades of international sales and payment industry expertise, his track record in steering commercial success will play a key role in propelling PPRO into the next stage of growth. Prior to this, Eelco held senior leadership roles at global payment processors Nuvei and Worldpay. He is based in Antwerp, Belgium.

• First job: Working at McDonalds making burgers.

Javier leads our talented team of product specialists on a global scale, spearheading the development of our product portfolio. Collaborating closely with his team, his primary objective is to create innovative products and enhance existing ones. Prior to his role as Chief Product Officer, Javier was General Manager for EMEA and, in 2022, the Chief Operating Officer, where he played a pivotal role in establishing and managing PPRO’s worldwide business operations.

Before joining PPRO, Javier was the co-founder and COO of Latin American payments specialist allpago. He was one of the driving forces behind the company’s expansion throughout Latin America before PPRO acquired them in June 2019.

Previously, Javier was an analyst for Morgan Stanley and worked across Mexico, France, and Spain for Grupo Lar. He holds a double diploma from Universidad Pontificia Comillas and Reims Management School, as well as an MBA from ESMT.

• First job: Promoting electronic music (Ninja tune and !K7 record labels) in France.

Mariette joined PPRO in early 2024 as Chief Marketing Officer. She is a strategic marketer with 15+ years of B2B marketing experience, primarily within the fintech space, and has expertise working with scaling businesses looking to drive growth in new markets. Mariette headed up Marketing at payment platform FairFX (now Equals Group) and most recently served as CMO at fintech consultancy 11:FS. She is based in Surrey, UK.

• First job: Working in the local video store in small town South Africa

Tristan joined PPRO in London in 2016 after many years at American Express, Merchant Services and another fintech startup. He was first responsible for building PPRO’s global account management function, then in 2019 moved to Singapore to lead PPRO’s growth in the APAC region.

He is coming up to two decades of experience in the payments industry with a deep understanding of the cross-border Asian market. He continues to play a key role in maintaining PPRO’s leading position as the go-to global digital payments infrastructure provider.

• First music album: Top Gun (the soundtrack)

Bronwyn has over twenty years’ experience leading and advising international organisations in cybersecurity and technology. Her background spans technology development, cyber security, compliance, data protection, strategy and operations, across a range of organisations from international banks to FinTech start-ups, scale-ups, and regulatory institutions.

She has a passion for security culture, innovation and improving alignment to address security and fraud-related threats. She’s won numerous industry accolades, including Secure Computing’s Women of Influence Award and is frequently cited in the Top 50 Women in FinTech. She’s a Non-Executive Director and advises a number of FinTechs and RegTechs on security and privacy, strategy and product development. She joined PPRO as Chief Information Security Officer in early 2024 and is based in London.

Favourite city: The Eternal City, Rome. I’m a Classics nerd and fell in love with architecture, archaeology and pasta!

A Swedish transplant in the US, Therese has been with PPRO since 2019 managing partners and merchants. Therese has been in the payments industry since 2004 working for companies such as Netgiro (now Worldline), Digital River and PayPal/Braintree.

• First music album: I think it was a Whitney Houston album my dad bought me

Highly experienced global leader with a proven track record in Strategic Partnerships and Enterprise Customer Relationship Management gained throughout an extensive career in the payments industry.
Angela has a reputation for delivering geographic expansion markets and new product developments from concept to implementation by managing complex multi-discipline teams.

Angela leads the Global Payments Partnerships team at PPRO and prior to that she was at Worldpay leading New Market Development and Strategic Partnership teams.

• First music album: ABBA, Super Trouper

Having worked as a senior HR professional in global organisations including Amazon, the Financial Times, and Wayfair, Claire joined PPRO in 2022, now heading up the People function as People Director.

• First music album: Radiohead, The Bends

Omar is based in our Berlin office and joined PPRO in 2022 as VP of Engineering with 17+ years of experience building technology and teams. He is responsible for PPRO’s public APIs, processing gateways, LPM integrations, Card integrations and Cloud Infrastructure Management with a focus on building global products that are API-first, developer-centric, composable, reliable, secure, and auditable. Omar joined us from Wayfair, where his team built the internal payments processing platform for the fortune-500 ecommerce merchant and before that worked for various tech companies in the e-commerce & travel industries.

• First job: Internet café attendant (my “pay” was using a computer for 2h each day)

Based in Berlin office, Attila leads the Local Payments Product team across PPRO globally.
With an extensive payments background in product roles at the likes of Wayfair, Adyen, viagogo/StubHub, and others, he has also served multiple terms as an elected member of the European Advisory Board for the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) and joined the Visa European Risk Executive Council in 2018.

Shirley joined PPRO in 2022 to head up the Accounting & Tax functions. An accomplished financial and strategic leader with deep expertise in accounting and tax functions, including statutory reporting, complex accounting standards, and financial system implementations. Known for developing and coaching high-performing teams, with a career spanning public audit and industry roles spanning various industries such e-commerce, medical devices, hospitality and fintech. Career highlights include leadership roles at Deloitte, Hollister and Wayfair, consistently driving market expansion and technical accounting excellence.

• First music album: Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

Based in London, Sherief is Head of Strategic Finance at PPRO. He has 20+ years experience in strategic finance, and leading teams and companies through accelerated growth, margin initiatives, and strategic alternatives.

Tulio Gambogi leads our Partner Lifecycle & Risk Management and Card Payments domains. He is a payment nerd obsessed with solving customer’s problems and building products, with 12+ years of experience in the payments industry, having worked with customers all over LatAm, US, Europe and APAC.

Before joining PPRO, he worked for Adyen in LatAm, Santander’s fintech, PagoNxt, in Spain and also the two biggest acquirers in latin america: Cielo and Rede. Born and raised in the countryside of Brazil, he settled down in Madrid after spending a decade living and working in the busy São Paulo.

• First job: Non-professional clown, entertaining kid’s birthday parties.

Massimiliano, or Max for friends, has +25 years’ experience in international financial services spanning asset management, private banking and payments sectors, always focused on the “compliance” space. He loves working with talented people, in a challenging environment like the payments business.

• First job: Tennis teacher

Douglas’ professional journey has taken him around the world to the US, France, and Australia, where he worked across travel, defence and space. Now, thriving at PPRO as Global Head of Technical Operations, he’s exploring the ever-evolving world of payments.

• First job: Paperboy for the local newspaper.

With many years of experience in Business Partnership, organisational, talent and leadership development, restructuring, and employee relations, Anna heads up People Partnering at PPRO, based in our Munich office.

• First music album: Roxette with Crash! Boom! Bang!

Mira joined PPRO in early 2024 as Director of Data Engineering and Analytics in our Munich office. With a track record of technical delivery, passion for product, big data, and mentoring, he’s always a student of agile development methods and test-driven development.

• First music album: The Wall, Pink Floyd

Based in São Paulo, Gabriel has been with PPRO since 2016, covering various aspects of the business from provider and customer facing roles, to promoting financial automation and improving customer funds management on a global scale.
Prior to PPRO, Gabriel was an entrepreneur in the mobile payments space for 10 years, acting as a partner in the Freedom Payments Group, building financial products for telecoms and banks, both locally and globally.

• Favourite city: My hometown Rio for the natural beauty and Paris for the ‘man made’ beauty

Marc joined PPRO as Legal Director in 2024, based in London. Most recently at Yapily and Plaid, Marc brings extensive open banking and fintech experience. Career highlights include 6 years at Monitise – a mobile banking scale up in London and San Francisco and 5 years at Barclays leading the Barclays Ventures legal team and implementing PSD2/Open Banking.

• First job: Ice cream factory (it had its perks)

Almir’s professional journey spans 15 years of experience in finance, banking, and treasury across a wide variety of industries, mainly fast pace disruptive sectors like telecom, renewable energy, and fintech. Having worked in companies of various sizes, including roles at Ericsson, BayWa r.e., and Dresdner Bank, he loves being a Treasurer and has a lot of passion for the underlying business and products.

• Favourite city: Mostar, the bridge between ast and West; the city where I met and fell in love with my wife.