Nikos Petrakis currently holds the position of Country Manager for Visa Greece. In this role, he is tasked with the development and implementation of Visa’s market strategy.
Prior to joining Visa, he was the Vice President of Operations at Teleperformance Greece.
With over 25 years of experience in Retail Banking, Nikos has developed a strong expertise in various areas such as Investment Products, Operations Management, and Payments.
His career began in 1996 at Citibank Greece, where he held several senior positions in Investment Products, Operations Management, Cards, Merchant Acquiring, and Portfolio Management.
From 2013 to 2014, he led Diners Club Greece. He then moved on to serve Alpha Bank as a Deputy Director from 2015 to 2016, where he was responsible for the development of the Investment Products offering.
From 2016 to September 2021, Nikos was with Piraeus Bank. He initially served as a Manager of the Merchant Acquiring and e-Payments unit, and a year later, he took on the role of a Senior Director of the Cards Business division.
Nikos Petrakis holds a BA Hons in Business Administration from the University of Hertfordshire in England.
Discussion Framework: The checkout is becoming a multi-rail environment. Cards will remain deeply embedded, while instant account-to-account payments are moving further into everyday commerce. This discussion will examine how card schemes, instant-payment networks and payment infrastructures are evolving, and how merchants and acquirers will manage multiple rails behind an increasingly seamless checkout.
Central Question: Will cards and A2A compete for the checkout or evolve into complementary rails, dynamically selected according to the customer, merchant and transaction?
Discussion Framework: Merchant acquiring is evolving beyond transaction processing into a broader merchant-services model combining physical and digital acceptance, omnichannel commerce, SoftPOS, unattended payments, data, fraud prevention and value-added services. This panel will explore how the acquiring model is changing, what merchants increasingly expect from their providers, and how acquirers can stay relevant.
