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Executive Interview Series: Mike Lozanoff, Managing Director, Global Head of Merchant Acquiring Product & Engineering at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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The Executive Interview Series provides readers with exclusive insights from movers and shakers in the payments industry. The Payments Industry is under continuous transformation, as such this series provides diverse perspectives on everything from strategy to payments technology and to the future of the industry.

In this interview, TSG’s Market Intelligence team member Alex Ferguson sat down with Mike Lozanoff, Managing Director, Global Head of Merchant Acquiring Product & Engineering at JPMorgan Chase & Co, to discuss his two-decade journey with the company and how Chase uniquely approaches merchant acquiring.

Background: Mike is a career engineering leader turned payments product influencer. Mike has led & operated JPMC’s Credit Card Issuing and Merchant Acquiring platforms, both leading scale platforms for the Payments Industry and has recently shifted roles to lead both Product and Engineering for the JPMC Merchant Acquiring business line. Mike has a passion for influencing and growing payments talent, creating high performing cultures and teams to solve challenging business problems with modern engineering practices.

Q: Alex F.

Tell me about yourself. How did you find yourself entering the payments industry?

A: Mike L.

I found my way to payments right out of college, I joined the Chase Card Issuing business. We were working on a major migration of processors from First Data, now Fiserv, to Total Systems. It was this processor migration along with an eventual “insourcing” of the TS2 Platform into JPMorgan that really hooked me on the scale and complexity of the payments industry. 

Q: Alex F.

Starting as an Application Developer at Chase Card Services, you’ve spent the entirety of your career with JPMorgan Chase in some iteration. What has the experience been like to grow with the company the past two decades?

A: Mike L.

This will be my 20th year with JPMorgan Chase & Co. I feel incredibly lucky to have navigated through two of our largest businesses in CCB Card Services & CIB’s JPMorgan Payments. To have maintained, enhanced, and operated two of the largest payment processing platforms in our company, those being our Card Issuing Platform and our Merchant Acquiring platforms. I’ve had some other roles throughout, leading our loan originations platforms for a 1 year stint and also being part of our consumer data warehousing team. However, I’ve always felt at home in the fast paced area of Payment Processing. 

Q: Alex F.

Throughout your career you’ve worn several different hats at JPMorgan Chase. Which of your prior roles do you feel has been the most memorable for you?

A: Mike L.

I’ve really been fortunate at JPMC and I’ve been given great opportunities to learn throughout my entire time here, but I do have to say my most memorable time was being an engineering manager in our Card Services business. Over a period of 5 years, we migrated our issuing platform from First Data to TSYS. Then insourced the TSYS platform to JPMC, and then merged with Washington Mutual and converted their platform to ours. I was the lead migration engineer for that project. Some of my fondest memories working long hours to get that migration done on time. I used to tell people I got about 15 years of experience in my first 5 years at JPMC given all of the processor work we did in those 5 years. I was lucky to be young and soak it all in. 

Q: Alex F.

What was the biggest difficulty you experienced transitioning from the software engineering role in the trenches you began in to becoming a product leader more focused on the business aspects of the product?

A: Mike L.

I like to believe the transition hasn’t been too hard for me because when you’ve been in Payments as long as I have regardless of engineering being my focus, I was able to learn the business at a granular level. That said, the most amazing thing to me since joining product has been learning our pricing strategies. The economics behind our business is a level of detail I do not see elsewhere. I’ve become quite intrigued with the global economics of the acquiring industry. 

Q: Alex F.

How does a large, legacy financial institution like JPMorgan, position itself as a leader in the fast-paced payments-related technology space?

A: Mike L.

I think the first thing you need to do is embrace the scale you have. Then use that to fuel your future innovation. You also can’t be afraid to innovate and fail from time to time. If you stay complacent in payments and don’t take chances you will be surpassed quickly. When I interview people for our team I stress to them the speed at which they’ll need to operate. They must love the complexity and speed of the payment industry and I think we have a great team and I’m lucky to be part of it.

Q: Alex F.

The role of payment gateways has continued to evolve within the industry over the years with the basic functionality of simply taking transactions no longer being sufficient compared to the widespread functionality and supported payment types the upper echelon of gateways are able to offer. How is Chase continuing to innovate in the payment gateway space to remain at the forefront of the industry?

A: Mike L.

Simplifying a client’s ability to accept payments globally and leverage other services such as fraud, currency conversions, and other emerging products is a key mission of our payments business. For a period of time, I felt we had overly focused on our acquiring infrastructure for authorization and settlement and didn’t invest enough in our connectivity & value add products. However, over the past 18 months we’ve made quite a shift in where we are investing. I suspect you’ll see some major releases from JPMorgan Payments and our innovation in this connectivity arena. 

Q: Alex F.

JPMorgan Chase was recently in the news for the acquisition of Renovite Technologies in September. How will this acquisition help JPMorgan enhance and develop their merchant acquiring platform for the future?

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A: Mike L.

Like most incumbent acquirers around the globe our core acquiring systems were engineered in the early 2000’s. While they scale well, they are complex to maintain, and at times do not enable the flexibility we need to keep up with the pace of change in payments. Our Merchant acquiring business has been on a modernization journey for a few years now. We have fully developed a cloud native micro service acquiring platform. It will continue to roll out across our regional presence over the next few years. Renovite had a few interesting product capabilities that matched our vision and architectural approach to modernizing payment processing with configurable software, so rather than just license the product we acquired the company. We felt the talent and leadership team could help us move more quickly on our journey to modernize. 

Q: Alex F.

What’s next for you? What should we expect from JPMorgan Chase five years down the line?

A: Mike L.

I’ve had quite a career shift the last year expanding my role into product. This while also keeping an alignment to our engineering department. For me I’d like to continue in the acquiring business. Drive a Product Engineering culture more broadly across our payment division. I am very bullish on what is next for JPM Payments, we are expanding globally, modernizing our client facing solutions, and incrementally taking our acquiring processing to the cloud. It’s a tremendous amount of work all intended to give our customers more reliable, scalable, and feature rich solutions. I’m humbled to be in a position to influence and drive the outcomes.