Most vertical software platforms reach a point where payments volume is significant and payments revenue is not. That gap has a name. It has a fix. Most platforms never close it, because nobody on the team has built one before. I have. Five times.
Priced once, at launch, by someone who has since left. Never revisited. Volume climbs. The take rate quietly slides. Nobody owns the line, so nobody defends it.
Boarding a merchant is not activating one. Sold, provisioned, and sitting at zero. It is the cheapest revenue a platform will ever own. It is also the most reliably ignored.
Your processor rereads it every year. You have not opened it since the day you signed. That distance is not an oversight. That distance is the money.
“The money never disappears. It simply stops being yours.”
Carriers, MGAs, brokers, and the premium that moves through all of them. Policy administration, billing, and a payments layer that was bolted on afterward.
Utility billing, permits, licensing, citizen payments. Municipal volume is recurring and predictable, and it is routinely monetized at a fraction of what it is worth.
Cashless conversion, ATM and cage economics, sportsbook and iGaming rails. Payments here is not a feature of the operation. It is the operation.
Patient payments, claims adjudication, and the practice-management systems that touch both. Recurring collection, complex flows, and margin that rarely lands where it should.
Tuition, fees, lunch accounts, district billing. High transaction counts, thin tickets, and pricing that almost never reflects either.
Field services, property management, legal, associations. Anywhere billing already runs through your software. If the money touches your platform, the question applies.
“The vertical changes. The economics do not.”
Processor contracts, interchange, take rate, and the PayFac decision underneath all of it. The audit that finds the money, and the build that goes and gets it.
Audit · Renegotiate · BuildGrowing a payments line is a commercial problem before it is a technical one. Sales, marketing, packaging, and go-to-market, aligned into one path to revenue.
Sales · Marketing · GTMMachines are about to start initiating payments on their own. Every rail, risk model, and reconciliation assumption was built for a human hand on the checkout.
That gap is the next decade of payments. I help operators build for it before it arrives, not after.
Agentic commerce · AI-native rails“The strategy is worth nothing until someone can execute it. I do both.”
A payments business does not get built in the keynote. It gets built in the compliance review. In the integration nobody scoped. In the reconciliation logic that never makes the pitch deck. In the edge case that surfaces three weeks after go-live, in a jurisdiction nobody thought to test.
There is no framework that skips that part. No deck that shortens it. There is only the climb, and whether you have made it before.
I have made it five times. That is the entire offer. Walk the whole trail on the way up, and the go-live is a downhill.
“Anyone can draw the map. Very few have walked it.”
I have designed the APIs, set the routing logic, and made the calls that matter. When something is broken in your stack, I can find it.
“I can hold my own in the code room.”
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A portrait, rendered from the only sentence that matters.
Payments infrastructure embedded across the policy administration and billing suite, serving 150+ insurers including the top five North American P&C carriers. Built the carrier marketplace from scratch: Paymentus, Zelis, Invoice Cloud, and others. A recurring revenue line where there had been none.
An insurance-native PayFac built from concept to production revenue. Launched across the US, Canada, and the UK, generally available October 3, 2022, the fastest new product launch in the company's recent history. Full P&L ownership start to finish.
Revenue and channel leadership through five acquisitions, SafeCharge, Smart2Pay, Base Commerce, Mazooma, and Paymentez, and a record-breaking listing. Revenue grew from $246M to $725M, with roughly $4.3B in market capitalization at the TSX debut.
Executive leadership at a major payments processor through a significant period of change. Led the commercial and strategic direction of the business and delivered a successful strategic exit.
Zero to a scaled merchant payments business, then out through a strategic sale. The product, the merchant acquisition engine, the operational infrastructure, and the sales organization that made it possible. Full P&L as CEO, concept through exit.
Ground-up PayFac implementations across Adyen, Worldpay, Stripe, and direct BIN/ICA sponsorship.
“Look at what I have built. Then decide.”
I give more than the engagement asks for. I would rather the people I have worked for tell you that than tell you myself.
Allan was effectively the CEO of a new business unit.
Charged with establishing our company as a payment facilitator for the North American insurance industry, with a payments product embedded in several of our existing software solutions. He took this business from initial concept to market in less than 12 months. While doing this he built a payments organization from scratch, product development, engineering, compliance, underwriting, and adoption services. Applied Pay ended 2022 as the fastest growing new product launch in the company's recent history.
Allan helped my leadership team refine and execute our payments strategy, including some genuinely complex contractual negotiations. What set him apart was the mix of deep technical expertise and real hands on involvement, he wasn't just advising from the sidelines. His responsiveness meant we hit tight timelines without cutting corners. I'd bring him back in a heartbeat, and I've already pointed several industry colleagues his way.
Allan brought deep payments expertise to a complex problem and delivered results that materially exceeded what we expected. He audits with rigor, explains the economics clearly, and the impact showed up directly on our P&L. I'd work with him again without hesitation.
building industry-defining ecosystems.Emma Mills · Mastercard
translate complexity into clear, actionable strategy.Luis F. Amadeo · Absencesoft
a comprehensive go-to-market plan, aligning product, sales, and marketing.David Da Costa · Fmr CEO, Risk Control Technologies
as tenacious a sales leader as I've met.Nick Lien · Product & Technology Leader
a collaborative partner and a straight shooter.Peter Fanous · SVP, Paymentus
one of the most reliable professionals in my network.Curtis N. Reed · 16-year colleague
Read the recommendations in full on LinkedIn →
Engagement details are confidential. The recommendations above were published by their authors on LinkedIn, or written for Allan directly in connection with his prior roles. They speak to Allan personally, not to any current engagement.
If any of this sounds like your business, the first call tells us both.
Start a conversation→It is about what you do with what gets thrown at you. That is why I launched LAC.
There will always be another hill. Another integration. Another renegotiation. Another quarter where the economics move underneath you. That is not the problem to be solved. That is the job.
I am not here to hand you a deck and check a box. I am here for the part that comes after the deck, when the work is unglamorous and the answer is not obvious and somebody has to go and get it.
“No one is coming to save the number. Someone has to go take it back.”
I am a volunteer fire captain. On a call, there is no perfect plan, only conditions that change by the minute and a team that has to adapt and hold the line anyway. That is not a metaphor I reached for. It is where I learned to work.
The rest is the same person. Twenty-plus years in the Santa Monica Mountains, an enduro rider and outdoorsman, a husband and a father. I do the unglamorous part because I have never known another way to do it.
A structured audit of the entire payments environment. Processor contracts, interchange, integration architecture, compliance posture, and the revenue sitting unclaimed. You get a prioritized action plan you can run yourself, or hand back to me.
Start here when you do not yet have the full picture.
I run the modernization, architecture through go-live. Processor selection, acquirer negotiation, integration oversight, compliance, and optimization. Monthly retainer plus milestone fees and a share of the savings I document. My upside is your result.
For platforms ready to rebuild the right way.
Senior payments counsel outside your org chart. Strategy, infrastructure decisions, processor relationships, and board-level positioning. The depth of a seasoned CPO without adding a headcount line.
For companies that need counsel, not a project manager.
“Fixed fee or performance share, the standard does not move.”
If payments already runs through your software, there is revenue in it you are not collecting.
“You landed here. That was not an accident.”