About Sue Onians

Sue Onians (Susan Onians), founder of Cantab Advisors and senior payments risk and compliance advisor

Cantab Advisors is led by Sue Onians, a global payments and risk management specialist with over two decades of senior leadership experience across the US, Europe and Asia. She has deep expertise in scaling innovative, secure, cross-border payment networks through strategic vision, creative partnerships, and responsible technology-driven risk and compliance frameworks.

As VP at Visa Direct, Sue played a key role in the exponential growth of Visa's real-time cross-border ecosystem, leading strategic partnerships and enterprise-wide risk and compliance frameworks that enabled ecosystem growth from early stage to reach over 4 billion Visa cards and 11B endpoints worldwide and over 12 billion transactions per year. She led the European rollout of Visa Direct from zero to 600 million endpoints in just two years, negotiated directly with the French regulator to establish card-based money movement guidance for the French market, and led the network optimisation to support major fintech launches, including PayPal, Revolut, Facebook, and Square CashApp across Europe.

Sue's work at Visa spanned the full breadth of the ecosystem from closing Tier 1 issuer agreements and building partnerships with risk and compliance service providers, to leading AI and ML-driven risk detection and control models, designing policy standards for high-risk use cases including cryptocurrency and cross-border money movement, and building automated onboarding processes to reduce client onboarding time by 50%.

Prior to joining Visa, Sue held leadership roles in Orange Group in Europe, where she led loyalty and lifecycle marketing programmes across France, Europe, and the Middle East, and at Maxis in Malaysia, where she led client services and marketing roles as the company grew from 30,000 to over 8 million subscribers. Earlier in her career she worked as a Principal Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, advising Fortune 500 companies on business strategy, privatisation, and mergers and acquisitions across telecoms and energy sectors in London, Europe, and the Far East.

Sue is fluent in French and has working proficiency in Spanish, and has worked with clients and partners across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She holds the ACAMS Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) certification. Sue is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and works with clients globally.