Cristina Doros to Lead Visa Business in the Caucasus

Exclusive Interview

Visa appointed Cristina Doros as its new Regional Manager for the Caucasus region. In her new role, Ms. Cristina Doros will focus on driving electronic payments in the Caucasus region by increasing Visa’s footprint in these marketplaces, and enhancing Visa value proposition for banks, merchants, and cardholders.

“We are excited to announce the appointment of Cristina Doros to the position of Regional Manager for the Caucasus. With proven management and leadership skills, an in-depth knowledge of payments and a strong understanding of the regional business, I am confident that Cristina will lead the business to greater heights reflecting the importance we place on the countries of the Caucasus region,” said Vira Platonova, SVP, Group Country Manager for Visa CISSEE.

Cristina Doros has more than 20 years of experience in retail banking, information technology, innovations, cards and mobile payments. Cristina joined Visa in 2016 to lead the regional Core Products team. Later Cristina has been acting as a Vice-President, head of Solutions, Visa CISSEE since 2019, overseeing Core products (Debit, Credit and Premium), Loyalty platform development, Digital Solutions and Push Payments, all foundational for the electronic payments development. Outstanding milestones of Cristina’s professional successes include enhancement of Premium benefits, launch of Loyalty program in Ukraine and Belarus, contribution to launching Tap to Phone SME technology, etc.

“After my fascinating experience as a head of Visa CISSEE Products team, I am thrilled to lead Visa business in the Caucasus region. This is an exciting and challenging opportunity to bring more innovations and benefits to our clients and partners and to strengthen our presence in the market, shaping the future of payments and driving innovations across the region.”- Cristina Doros said.

What is your view of Georgia’s potential in becoming the regional hub electronic payments?

First of all, I don’t think it would be surprising for anyone to see our headquarters for the Caucasus located in Georgia. If you look back at the history of card payment development, Georgia has been at the front and center of many regional milestones in cashless. Starting from 2009, when we first launched contactless payments in the region, here in Georgia up to tokenization and Pays and many other amazing innovations, Georgia has always been displaying impressive results. And here we come to several factors which contributed to these results, one of them being the user’s readiness to embrace innovation. People in Georgia are very open to innovation. In some markets you might get push-back, people can be reluctant or hesitant, but we don’t see this here. When the question came where the hub would be for a cluster, of course Georgia’s leadership in innovation and technology were among the factors that determined our choice.

Being here allows us to be in the middle of the technology development and close to our long-standing partners and new ones - like Space, merchants, fintechs etc. More importantly from Tbilisi we can effectively manage other markets in the Caucasus.

What is the biggest challenge for opening an office and leading a team here in Georgia, representing the whole Caucasus region?

Frankly, we don’t see many challenges in it because we have had a local presence here for quite some time already, with a team on the spot, though quite a small team. Now we are growing the team significantly and that is a great result. As in any other new set ups, opening hub here requests a thoughtful approach, understanding where resources can be most useful, how to effectively serve the clients in Armenia and Azerbaijan from here etc. Of course, we carefully analyzed which location would be the most useful for our resources and services. With opening a hub office in Tbilisi, we will be much closer to our clients, will be able to react much faster and will shorten go to-market time. Overall, we believe that Tbilisi is the best place for us, from each and every standpoint.

We really enjoy being here for many reasons: people’s warmth, hospitality, the nature, history etc. and as I mentioned, being here allows us to be in the middle of the technology development.

What innovations does Visa plan in the region?

Visa does have some specifics in innovations development across the regions. However, I would say that the innovative approach of the company is the same worldwide: we are innovators by nature. I would like to highlight a few things to support this point of view. We have several dimensions while discussing innovations, the first would be – brining new solutions to the market, the second is convenience and finally yet importantly - rethinking us as the company. As an example of the last, in 2016, Visa opened up worldwide its networks through the API’s (Application Programming Interface); we developed a Visa platform and allowed any type of player to enter and integrate through the service. It is literally opening up our networks and allowing our partners to use these services.

Georgia is maintaining its position as an innovation leader, something that this country and us can be extremely proud of: Georgia is now #1 globally by contactless penetration in domestic transactions with over 95% contactless penetration.

Here in Georgia we will continue to support Georgian partners to roll out the most innovative, the most advanced, safe and convenient payment solutions in the country.

Apple Pay was recently launched in Georgia, how has it affected cashless payments so far?

Launching Apple Pay in the market was a big thing of course and the impact we see is indeed impressive. Since its launch in September, domestic tokenized transactions in face to face (at physical merchants) grew 7 times, just in three months.

In addition, I would like to mention that overall mobile payments is not something new to Georgia. Several Georgian banks have offered mobile wallets to their consumers prior to the launch of Apple Pay, although they were available only for Android users. During certain time, where Android-based users were literally able to pay with their phones, Apple consumers could not enjoy the convenience of mobile payments. Considering that penetration of Apple in the region is quite high, bringing this new opportunity to the market was a big deal.

The power of Apple Pay is in two things: the first is the strength of the brand, the second is that IOS is a closed operating system - you cannot install bank applications on it and this is a certain limitation. In terms of pure technology and convenience, I would say they are almost the same - Apple Pay or banks’ mobile wallet applications.

Could you elaborate on the partnership between Visa and Space neobank?

We are excited to have an awesome partnership here with Space. It was a venture for us in a way, but the partnership has shown huge results. Space uses a neo-bank approach, which is a progressive and very different banking experience. It demonstrates the transformation from something difficult-to-understand into something really simple, useful, convenient and fun. While big banks are reluctant going into these areas, the neo-banks don’t shy away from such endeavors, and show affection and love towards their consumers.

One of Visa’s main promises is security against financial fraud and cybersecurity, how does Visa approach security in the region?

I would emphasize that the company’s strategy and the technologies we use against fraud attacks will not be specific to any region. It is an overarching approach and concept that we have at Visa. Security has always been our highest priority, and in the tradeoff between innovation and security, we always choose the latter. Our motto at the company is, ‘responsible innovation’. In terms of security, we have layers and layers of all types of protection you can think of.

Our approach today is grounded and not limited to the several pillars and I will highlight two of them. First is devaluing data: Visa has deployed technologies like EMV chip and tokenization that transform sensitive account data into a form that cannot be used by criminals for fraud. Visa Token Service replaces sensitive account information, such as the 16-digit account number, with a unique digital identifier called a token. The token allows payments to be processed without exposing actual account details that could be potentially compromised.

And second will be harnessing data: Visa’s network — VisaNet — is a powerful tool in the fight against fraud. Visa’s Cyber Fusion Center brings together the latest innovations to coordinate cyber defense operations and enable rapid response and information sharing. The Cyber Fusion Center harnesses petabytes of data to develop threat detection models and help data scientists better visualize and respond to threats.

Our approach to security and fraud protection is paramount to us, we did that, and we will always do that.

What are your plans for Georgia for 2020?

Our strategy in Georgia is specifically focused around three key pillars. The first is innovations, bringing new, convenient and secure payment tools and experience. This is where we see huge potential, supporting Georgia as a market to transform it into a cashless economy. There are studies in this field which clearly show the positive impact for the national economy when we move from cash to cashless. That remains our #1 priority.

The second pillar of our strategy is what we call ‘everyday spend’, meaning that we want to help people to get used to electronic payments in everyday life. We will continue helping people to better understand payment tools, to see the advantages and incentivize them to start paying cashless more.

Another pillar is premium products. Premium customers are affluent consumers bringing much of business for banks. That is why we are developing premium products and focusing our attention on that as well. We want to make payments not only easy, secure and convenient but also rewarding for the users. Now I can proudly say that Visa Premium Products are the best of its class.

So, these are the three key areas we are focusing on. The overarching theme for all of these pillars is the local presence. As I have mentioned earlier, we truly believe that ‘Global Visa is proudly Georgian’.

By Beka Alexishvili

19 December 2019 17:38