Payments advice from someone who has done it.

David Johnston is a payments specialist with more than 20 years in banking and finance across Australia and the Asia-Pacific, having worked for Westpac, ANZ and NAB. His payments depth comes from sales and leadership roles spanning the government, education, community, corporate and institutional segments — managing sales teams, running key client portfolios, and partnering with third parties to build first-in-market solutions.

He has since left the corporate world to lead a number of projects across payments, covering software, consulting and broking. He consults to ISOs, PayFacs, resellers, and enterprise and SME merchants, including establishing licences with new acquirers. Through that work he has dealt with more than 20 payment service providers across gateways, acquirers and terminal manufacturers.

He has built payment brokering software now used by ISOs and resellers across Australia, and was invited to join the Payments Consulting Network as an Associate in 2023, where his work has included running merchant services and payments orchestration RFPs across Asia-Pacific markets. He attends invitation-only industry events run by Visa, Mastercard and the banks — small, highly specialised groups — and is invited onto industry round tables.

His expertise spans least-cost routing, interchange and scheme management, merchant acquiring risk, ISO, PayFac and reseller setup, and payment gateway integration, with direct connections across the card schemes (Visa, Mastercard, eftpos), acquiring banks and PSPs. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce.