Khalil Alami is the founder and CEO of the leading online payment gateway company Telr and has more than 22 years of proven leadership experience within the financial services, fintech, as well as the payments and card industries across the United States, UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. A well-acknowledged and globally respected industry expert, a startup mentor, and an advocate for financial education, Khalil has built multiple multi-million-dollar organizations by leveraging in-depth knowledge on international payments architecture, card processing and settlement, network security, the four-party system, as well as electronic and mobile payments. He is also a member of the Arab Monetary Fund’s (AMF) Regional Fintech Working Group, and previously was a board member of the Young Entrepreneurs Association (YEA) in Jordan. As the founder and CEO of Telr, Khalil Alami has built up the talent, operations, processes, and tech at the company, following which he closed a $15 million funding round to grow the company into one of the Top 3 online payment gateways in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Through Telr, Khalil has enabled merchants - including startups, SMEs, government bodies, and large corporates - to accept payments online through a proprietary, highly customizable, and extremely secure payment gateway offering. He is passionate about personalizing and customizing customer experiences; paying attention to how merchants are onboarded; making pricing structures viable; strengthening consumer touchpoints across e-commerce and social commerce; as well as maintaining people’s safety and security across all financial services transactions. Before Telr, Khalil founded a payments company in Jordan, for which he was able to secure a Mastercard principal membership for issuing and acquiring. The company then grew into the second largest credit card issuer in Jordan before Khalil took it public through a 2006 IPO to turn it into a $25 million company. Prior to this, he headed the Securities division at ABC Bank in Jordan and previously worked at American Express in the US. Khalil has an MBA degree from the American University of Beirut as well as a bachelor’s degree in economics, MIS, political science, and management from Purdue University.