Beth Costa is a payments industry veteran with 30+ years experience as a payments consultant and industry practitioner.

Beth is a partner in the firm’s Payments practice and Retail Banking practice in the Americas.  She specializes in payment products, with an emphasis on payment networks and solutions (including general purpose, cobrand, and private label debit, credit, and prepaid), online banking, e-commerce, mobile payments, loyalty and rewards, ACH, and EBPP. Beth has provided results-oriented advice as well as execution and implementation assistance to merchants, banks, networks, and technology companies on issues of strategy, product development, business entry/exit, consumer preferences, merchant perspectives, and benchmarking.

Beth brings a unique blend of experiences and perspectives to her clients, having worked both in industry and also as a consultant.  Her industry experience includes leadership roles at banks and payment processors, as well as C-level responsibilities with Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX).  Her diverse background ensures that she provides a 360 degree view of payments from consumer, merchant, network/processor, bank (and MNO) perspectives – across any form of payment or channel.

Prior to joining Oliver Wyman, Beth served as Chief Product Officer, Chief Strategy Officer and Interim Chief Marketing Officer at MCX, a consortium to major U.S. retailers developing a next-generation mobile payments and commerce platform.  In this capacity, Beth developed product and marketing strategies, framed MCX’s go-to-market strategy, built privacy and data permissions rules for the MCX network, framed pricing structures, and defined the revenue model for the company.  In addition to MCX, her client consulting experience includes:

• Payments optimization strategy and implementation for large retailer yielding multi-million dollar annual cost savings.
• Developed distribution opportunity for major bank for growth in core banking segments and payment products.
• Risk management strategy for major payments network.
• New payment product strategy and implementation based on needs of core customer segments.
• Defined comprehensive set of merchant acquiring requirements and operational processes for new entrant.
• Credit card business case and re-entry strategy and execution for major bank.

Beth holds an M.S. in Statistics and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics, both from Carnegie Mellon University.