Walid Barakat is the Senior Vice President of Governance, Risk and Compliance for Global Payments. He is responsible for executing the strategy for PCI Compliance, Merchant Compliance, IT Risk Management, Financial Audits and the Cloud Business Office. He leads a team of over 30 to drive effective collaborations to ensure compliance, minimize organizational risk and keep pace with dynamic integration business demands.

An active member of the PCI Board of Advisors, Walid has had the opportunity to present at PCI Community Meetings across Canada and Europe to share insights on establishing proactive and scalable PCI programs as well as leveraging PCI ISA’s to set an organizational compliance culture.

Having acquired 21 years of payment card industry experience, Walid has applied best practice process development across quality assurance software testing, project coordination, application delivery enablement, data center migration coordination and security monitoring control implementations.

Most recently Walid has partnered with Cloud Engineering and Information Security teams to align with compliance standards as the organization has embarked on a cloud first strategy to deliver worldwide payment solutions.