Standard Chartered’s David Rego Named Head of Payments

Standard Chartered has named longtime executive David Rego as its new head of payments.

The London-based financial services firm announced the appointment in a news release provided to PYMNTS Monday (Dec. 12), saying Rego will oversee the transformation of the company’s payments business.

Rego has served in a number of roles with Standard Chartered since joining the company 15 years ago, most recently serving as global head of liquidity, deposits and escrow solutions, a job he will continue to hold until a successor is named, the company said.

“Our payments capabilities are fundamental to the client proposition of our corporate, commercial, and institutional banking business,” Philip Panaino, the company’s global head of cash, said in the release.

“David’s deep cash management expertise and strong client focus will raise the bar on our ability to dynamically respond to our clients’ evolving needs and continue to offer them innovative payments solutions.”

Recent research by PYMNTS shows that companies have begun to recognize the need for new payment solutions Panaino references.

We found that 9 out of 10 chief financial officers we surveyed said their companies were either investing in payments digitization or have plans to do so.

Meanwhile, this prioritization of digital payments is also gaining support by helping companies maximize operational efficiencies, though the most attractive areas of future investment mentioned by CFOs were those that dealt with fraud prevention, risk management innovations, working capital and credit solutions.

Findings from “Digitization Strategies: How CFOs Are Prioritizing Digital Payments to Maximize Efficiency,” a PYMNTS and Corcentric collaboration, show that 83% of finance chiefs said their digitization investments led to improved fraud prevention and risk management functions.

In addition, a little more than three-quarters of the CFOs surveyed said the investments led to improvements in their management of working capital and credit — an especially important area seeing as how most of the CFOs said they expect the economy to dip into a recession.