Olga Bencini founded AcceptLocal, a payments and compliance consultancy built to help merchants, platforms, and financial institutions move money globally, safely, and in line with the rules that govern it. AcceptLocal is Olga's full-time practice — she works as a hands-on consultant for organizations that need someone who can see an entire payment program end-to-end: banking and network infrastructure, compliance and risk, and the AI systems increasingly embedded across all of it. She has spent over 20 years owning the money-movement rails behind high-volume cross-border payment platforms — architecting banking relationships, card-scheme licensing, and network economics from the ground up, and leading payments, risk, and engineering organizations across North America and Europe. Olga founded AcceptLocal in 2014 as a BIN-sponsored MSB and built a proprietary real-time cross-border funds transfer network, taking it from licensing through banking partnerships, settlement mechanics, and P&L. She has also directed next-generation payments infrastructure for a US commercial bank, spanning ACH, RTP, FedNow, card issuing and acquiring, and stablecoin (USDC) settlement. Her expertise spans the full network stack: card scheme rules (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX) since 2007, issuing and acquiring, cross-border FX, and the regulatory licensing — EMI/MSB, PCI DSS, NACHA (2026 Operating rules), FINTRAC/FinCEN — that lets partners onboard and scale across jurisdictions. She holds a Master's degree in Economics, IT and Management, and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (ACAMS) and a PCI Security Standards Council-certified Payment Card Industry Professional (PCIP). Olga also completed Harvard's Data Science Initiative certification in AI Governance & Agentic AI, and has authored enterprise AI governance frameworks and agentic-automation specifications for reconciliation, treasury, and compliance workflows in regulated financial environments — including hands-on experience with enterprise AI platforms such as Anthropic's Claude and Microsoft's Copilot/Azure AI. She brings that same rigor to AcceptLocal engagements, helping clients build responsible, auditable AI into their money-movement and compliance operations, not just their payments stack. Olga has worked across North America and Europe throughout her career and works with AcceptLocal clients wherever they're based. Reach out through the contact page to discuss payments, compliance, or AI governance needs.
