E-commerce payments enabler Reach names Mike McGirr VP, compliance

With more than 20 years’ experience in the payments space, McGirr, the former SVP of Risk and Compliance at payments platform Adyen, will be responsible for driving the execution of Reach’s risk and compliance programs, and allowing the business to reach its ambitious growth targets.

As cross-border ecommerce volumes continue to surge to an expected $1.2 trillion in 2022, and businesses seek expansion into new markets, compliance is fast becoming a critical component for merchant success. The financial and reputational damage caused by non-compliance with regulatory and payment scheme demands can threaten the survival of a business. Costly penalties, recurring charges and even license withdrawals face merchants which lack the resources and in-house expertise to meet rigorous compliance obligations. For example, failure to implement PCI-DSS standards for online card payments can result in fines of up to $500,000 depending on merchant category or location.

With payment acceptance impacted by differing regulations and payment industry mandates across various markets, businesses are seeking to outsource risk and liability functions so that they can focus on their core business operations. Reach’s expertise in handling compliance obligations on behalf of clients has been a major factor in its strong growth over 2021, and will take on even more importance in 2022 and beyond as ecommerce taps into new customer bases worldwide.

As a core part of his new role, McGirr will build and lead a new compliance and risk team at Reach, dedicated to scaling out existing manual processes systematically. By utilizing his unrivalled expertise to build on existing risk and compliance controls, and embed an understanding of this throughout the entire company, McGirr’s appointment will support Reach’s high expected business growth while maintaining value add for new and existing clients and partners.

This news follows an exciting 12 months for Reach as the business made four high-profile hires, acquired additional office space in the Edison building in Calgary, Canada and achieved a fourth consecutive year of 50% year-on-year growth in line with its rapid expansion plans. With this impressive growth and its ability to unlock a global customer base for merchants through its streamlined payments, tax and fraud platform, Reach is now set to embark on its rapid expansion plans.

Discussing the importance of risk and compliance in scaling a global cross-border payments platform, like Reach, McGirr comments: “I’m delighted to be joining such a forward-thinking and solutions-driven business as Reach, which has always placed great emphasis on not only breaking down the numerous barriers for merchants’ own risk and compliance procedures, but for their customers, too. Card fraud is predicted to cost $408.50 billion in losses globally over the next decade, so merchants cannot afford to not be compliant: investing in a robust and agile platform from Reach is an obvious solution.”

“2022 promises to be an exciting year for this rapidly-scaling company and there’s never been a better time to innovate and ensure risk and compliance is truly embedded throughout the entire team. From our leaders to our global territory teams, we all must have an understanding of how critical risk and compliance controls are if we’re to avoid the catastrophic pitfalls that can impact merchants when embracing cross-border ecommerce.”

The Reach platform, which has been designed to help merchants benefit from selling locally whilst also trading on a global scale, enjoyed strong growth through 2021. With ecommerce becoming increasingly popular from both a B2C and B2B perspective in recent years driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, localized payments processing provides huge rewards for small and medium businesses looking to compete with the big players in the industry.

Sam Ranieri, CEO at Reach, commented on why McGirr’s appointment supports the ambitious plans for future expansion: “After a period of exceptional growth for our business, we’re thrilled to welcome Mike onboard as our new VP of Compliance. As we move into 2022 and beyond, his wealth of experience will help us to remain compliant on a global basis and tackle business challenges as they arise. With his knowledge and support, we are well placed to continue disrupting the global ecommerce space into the future and enable retailers to make the most of cross-border ecommerce opportunities.”