Barry Hester

Barry Hester leverages his prior experience as in-house counsel for a leading financial institution to provide clients with strategic advice, compliance insights, and practical guidance in addressing their financial services transactional and regulatory matters. Barry seeks to obtain results efficiently and to provide actionable, technical, market-based guidance.

Barry provides transactional and compliance advice to banks and special-purpose financial institutions, as well as payment processors, card program managers, and other data processing and fintech firms. Barry has years of experience supporting innovative banking and payments businesses. He enjoys working on digital transformation, automation, and other consumer and B2B financial services projects, especially those involving novel bank-fintech partnerships. Clients call on Barry to structure and negotiate banking-as-a-service (BaaS), core processing, merchant acquiring, and similar strategic commercial agreements as well as assessing state licensing risk and pursuing such licensing or innovative bank charters.