FIN-SERV ADVISORS
Established in 2006, Fin-Serv Advisors offers payment consulting services to a wide range of businesses. We provide a full-service offering to traditional payment platforms, large corporates, e-commerce platforms and financial investors. Fin-Serv works with its clients hand-in-hand providing more than just advise. Fin-Serv analyses your business requirements to determine the right payment solution for your business and walks you through the process – connecting you to Global Financial Institutions, ensuring you are compliant with local regulatory requirements, developing RFP’s and reviewing technical product requirements.
OUR TEAM
Michael Liquornik
Michael is President of Fin-Serv Advisors and has served as a Senior Executive and advisor in the Payments industry for some 20 years. At Fin-Serv, Michael advises and assists clients with Payments-related subject matter expertise, developing their Global “core payments” capabilities, entering new markets, understanding local forms of payments, banking and regulatory matters, as well as providing M&A advisory services. He has worked with clients across Canada, US, and Europe.
He previously served as EVP & Chief Operating Officer of Optimal Payments Inc. and EVP, Core Payments and Operations at NEOVIA Financial PLC, each of which provided payment solutions to merchants, particularly e-commerce merchants.
Charles Crawford III
Charles (“Chuck”) has a senior advisory role at Fin-Serv. He has been an executive in payments, financial services and banking for more than 20 years. He has an incredible background, having served in an executive capacity for Optimal Payments (now PaySafe PLC), Cash Systems (now Everi), EPX (now North American Bankcard), SVP Acquiring for Merrick Bank and recently retired from The Bancorp Bank as SVP Payment Acceptance.
Chuck has deep regulatory, compliance, sales and marketing knowledge and experience and is extremely well connected within the US acquiring industry.
Ashwani Sharma
Ashwani is a technical specialist with extensive experience in Financial Services . His deep understanding of the architecture of products and models provides a unique insight into how a company in the payments space holds up from an IT standpoint. Through Fin-Serv, Ashwani supports investors through the acquisition process, ensuring the technical due diligence is completed thoroughly and objectively.
Over the last decade, Ashwani has held Solutions Architect and Director roles for several leading Financial Services companies.
Jacqueline Roome
Jacqui is a Senior Financial Services Executive and has been in the payments industry for 16 years in a range of governance roles. Most notably she has held Compliance, Credit Risk and Fraud Management roles within authorized and regulated payment organisations such as First Data International and Metacharge Limited (acquired by PayPoint Plc in 2006). She has also worked at leading online Financial Service companies, Neovia Financial Plc and Skrill Ltd.
Jacqui’s responsibility has included advising the Board of each company to ensure an appropriate Risk and Compliance strategy is adopted and rolled out across the entire business. She has developed industry standard client acceptance boarding and monitoring systems, and recruited experienced teams to implement these procedures.
In addition to her subject matter expertise, Jacqui also acts as Director, Head of Europe at Fin-Serv Advisors.
Jordan Cohen
Jordan Cohen serves as a Senior Associate at Fin-Serv Advisors. Jordan has over 25 years in the payments industry, focusing mostly in the Merchant Acquiring sector, most notably as President of Global Payments Canada GP, (subsidiary of Global Payments Inc. NYSE:GPN), one of Canada’s largest payment processors, which he joined in 2001 to lead its entry into the Canadian market. More recently, Jordan served as Chief Commercial Officer at Fintech startup Dream Payments, a Toronto-based mPOS Payment Facilitator.
Prior to joining Global Payments, Mr. Cohen was an executive with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) with responsibility for its Merchant Card Services Division. After joining CIBC in 1992, he was responsible for a variety of key functional areas within its merchant services business until assuming executive responsibility for the line of business. Mr. Cohen began his career at American Express Canada Inc. within its Establishment Services business.
Elena Sabkova, Esq.
Elena is an experienced regulatory attorney with an excellent track record in developing and implementing compliance and risk strategies and policies to support companies’ multi-state and international regulatory plan, as well as establishing relationships with regulatory agencies, supervising banks and partners. Elena has served as a senior executive (Interim CEO, CCO and General Counsel) and board director in global payments companies, including the US operations of Paysafe PLC. In this capacity, Elena has managed over 50 state money transmitter licenses.
Elena has also consulted a number of payment companies on regulatory, licensing, AML and risk, as well as other matters related to the payments industry and was involved in several major acquisitions in payments. Elena is admitted to practice law in the states of New York and Georgia and is qualified as a lawyer in Europe.
Howard Elsey
Howard has 19 years in the payments industry leading various areas of business from sales and marketing to IT and Operations. He has been involved with the start-up community through working in a corporate innovation lab, with a particular interest in developing the commercial framework for disruptive products which involved the regulatory landscape in Europe.
Expertise in payment platforms developed while working at Neovia Financial Plc where he was Director of Global Back Office Operations. He also worked for Visa Europe in digital product development and as an Innovation Partner in Visa Collab.
Rob Fernandes
Rob has over 15 years experience in payments and online services, and has worked across all functions of a start-up payments business to understand the wide range of challenges which early-stage and mid-sized payments organisations face when scaling. Rob has played a significant role in building product road maps and strategy for several high profile online payment companies, including Metacharge, PayPoint.net (now Pay360) and WePay (now part of JP Morgan Chase).
