A 44-year veteran of the electronic payments and security industry, Steve has been at the forefront of payment innovation in the quest for faster, better, safer and more efficient ways to transact. His consultancy, BetterBuyDesign, has advised many of the leading participants in the transacting business, including banks, networks, merchants, corporates, processors, regulatory agencies and innovative startups (including AppBrilliance, Mica.io, PaySimple, Cardinal Commerce and IrisScan).

Steve's executive stints and industry assignments included seminal roles in online commerce, stored value, mobile payments, instant payments, and now agentic commerce, where he has been ‘in-the-room’ where these major transformations in transacting took shape. He was MasterCard's first eCommerce executive; a lead consultant for the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) and SME for the Federal Reserve's Mobile Payments Industry Workgroup; and was a former Steering Committee member of the Federal Reserve's Secure Payments Task Force in the Faster Payments initiative. More recently Steve became a founding member and Board Director of the Faster Payments Council to continue to promote instant payments and joined the Merchant Risk Council to foster his work in Agentic Commerce.

Steve's first AI deployment was in 1990, for the U.S. Intelligence agencies, where his company, Cognitive Systems, Inc., fielded a sustaining money laundering detection system to combat terrorist and drug organizations. His new Sub-stack, “I Transact, Therefore I Am”, applies Steve's considerable experience over the course of his work on the challenges and opportunities that AI poses for the way we transact, beginning with a series of issues with agentic commerce.

A frequent contributor to Digital Transactions and other publications, Steve has spoken at more than 200 payments and security conferences in the past decade alone. Steve also serves as an expert witness in patent, trade secret, antitrust, and commercial agreement matters involving payments and security. His insights have helped shape the futures of online commerce, mobile commerce and instant payments. And Steve brings unparalleled expertise to payment system modernization efforts wherever truly effective digital alternatives are sought.