- Key insight: Elavon, U.S. Bancorp's payments and merchant acquiring business, just appointed Wally Mlynarski CEO, his second stint at the company
- What's at stake: Elavon faces stiff competition from other payment companies and fintechs that focus on merchant technology.
- Forward look: Elavon will focus on new uses for AI while maintaining a personal touch with clients.
Wally Mlynarski had just finished greeting well-wishers who snaked around him at the Georgia World Congress convention center, getting ready to launch a new chapter in his payments career.
"This is like a homecoming," Mlynarski told American Banker at the Electronic Transaction Association's Transact event in Atlanta on Wednesday night. "Transact was one of my first events when I started at Elavon in 2012."
Elavon, U.S. Bank's merchant acquiring unit, Wednesday named Mlynarski as CEO following about seven years at Bank of America, most recently leading Merchant Solutions. Mlynarski succeeds Jamie Walker, who will lead U.S.digital assets and money management organization after serving as Elavon CEO since 2017.
"I'm returning to colleagues and clients that I know well," Mlynarski said. "The industry is changing rapidly and I'm ready to go."
Second stint, with AI 'all around'
Before BofA, Mlynarski worked for Elavon, including a role as chief product officer from 2017 to 2019. Earlier in his career, he worked for CorFire, the mobile commerce wing of technology firm SK C&C USA.
"Mlynarski's return to Elavon makes perfect sense," Eric Grover, principal at Intrepid Ventures, told American Banker, noting Mlynarski's past experience with the company. "He knows Elavon, and U.S. Bank knows him. Running a wholly owned subsidiary with its own P&L and open‑market mandate offers far more autonomy than managing an internal, cross‑sell‑driven division at BofA."
At Elavon, Mlynarski will be responsible for developing and selling payment products and support for business clients in the U.S., Europe and Canada. Mlynarski will report to Mark Runkel, vice chair and head of Payments: Merchants and Institutional at U.S. Bank.
"Wally's extensive industry expertise will play a critical role in our continued growth as we deliver scalable, tech-led and embedded payments innovation for businesses of all sizes," said Runkel in a release. "His visionary leadership — combined with his deep understanding of our business — positions Elavon to continue helping customers solve their most complex payment challenges."
Mlynarski is rejoining Elavon as the entire industry grapples with the burgeoning threat — and promise — of artificial intelligence, which can enable a new era of shopping and payments while also threatening existing ways of doing business.
"AI is all around right now," he said. "It's embedding itself in almost everything."
Elavon's new AI initiatives include Elavon Pay Defence, which uses machine learning to aid payments security, identifying abnormalities that can spot suspicious transactions. Elavon parent U.S. Bank recently launched a
In other deployments, Elavon in January launched Elavon Live Payments, a collaboration with Mastercard to enable businesses to send invoices and collect customer payments with a few clicks on a computer or smartphone.
"Mlynarski inherits great assets. Elavon is a scale, full‑stack legacy acquirer with a dominant position in airlines and deep penetration in hospitality across North America and Europe," Grover said. "However, nobody would characterize Elavon as high-growth and the growth narrative is getting tougher. [And] looming over all of this is the fast-evolving and much-hyped shift toward agentic AI commerce. It's likely to accelerate the velocity of transactions and radically alter the nature of risk assessment."
The key for AI and other advancements such as cloud computing is to make work more efficient without losing the personal touch, according to Mlynarski.
"What we're looking to do is work with clients on how AI can reduce friction without replacing human interaction," he said. "People still want to engage with people."
Elavon's competition
Elavon is one of the
Its competitors include a mix of legacy payment processors and fintechs, such as JPMorganChase and Bank of America, bank technology sellers including Fiserv and payment technology firms Adyen, Stripe, and PayPal.
"Acquirers will have to figure out how to underwrite and interact with a raft of autonomous AI bots, through dedicated application programming interfaces and screen-scraping — adding a new layer of complexity to the business," Grover said.
Beyond AI, Elavon's other recent moves include adding
Elavon also recently launched Avvance, a
U.S. Bank's other BNPL options include
Given the pressure on these payment companies, payment experts expect more product innovation.
"Merchant acquiring is a challenging business to navigate and is getting more complicated every day," Aaron Press, research director of worldwide payment strategies at IDC, told American Banker. "This is especially true for the legacy players, who have to balance their existing technology base with demand for new technologies and capabilities."
These older firms have one significant advantage in the form of their installed base, but new technology means that they can't count on those relationships to be as sticky as they once were, according to Press.
"Not only are customers constantly being pitched new functionality, but thanks to advances like cloud deployment migration is less burdensome than it used to be," Press said.
