Steven Lim
Senior Advisor — Payments, fintech and banking technology
Steven Lim has embraced technology and digital transformation for close to three decades across the globe. Digitising health care systems, launching 2G/3G mobile, to payments industry defining moments of Visa Inc's $17.3 billion IPO, and most recently re-defining payments in travel & hospitality distribution.
His north star is cultivating values and leveraging technology for "Trusted information to the right people, to action, at the right time."
In his most recent engagement, Steven provided leadership to a new Fintech unit with HBX Group. Growing the team to 28-person, with direct accountability for a €70 million revenue target over 3 years. He enhanced and built out the audit, compliance & legal, product delivery (VCC, Foreign Exchange/Treasury/Liquidity, Customer/Client (KYC/KYB), Supplier & procurement). These programs underpinned €20 million revenue achieve in 2 years as well as enhancing the valuation of the Group's to €2.84 billion IPO.
Other highlights includes the following
Founding and sold a niche payments analytics business to a Pension group.
1) Transparency to payments cost for the industry and regulator. The platform analysed more than £18 billion of card transaction data for blue-chip clients including British Airways, Shell and Harvey Nichols, saving them upward of £12 million a year in interchange, scheme and foreign exchange costs. (i.e. minimising Merchant Discount Rates(MDR))
2) Payments regulation licensing advisory. (e.g. ANT/Alipay Financial UK/EU EMI licenses)
@Visa family of companies
- Secure over $2 billion in commitments from more than a thousand banks in CEMEA region ahead of Visa's IPO.
- Design, build and scale data & analytics team and infrastructure spanning more than 170 markets and 1.8 billion cardholders, for Visa Inc. in delivering programs in fraud, risk, marketing, sales, finance and regulatory.
- Built and scaled out Visa Europe internal consulting and analytics practice, advising and delivering Payment Service Quality programs to 80+ European banks and major merchants including Barclays, British Airways and Tesco. Including fraud, risk, payment strategy & loyalty advisory
@New Zealand/Australia
- NZ Patient diabetics database
- 2/3G mobile launch in Australia, NZ & Fiji, with real-time cross border billing
- Initial development in Cellsite-On-Wheels technology. (Vodafone deployed these for their Middle East business.)
Steven holds an Executive MBA from Imperial College London and is a regular contributor to Bank of England payments forums and Chatham House-rules industry roundtables. He brings his extensive payments and fintech expertise to select engagements at Acoustic as a Senior Advisor.