Barry Hester

• Project lead for a successful 50+ jurisdiction U.S. money transmitter licensing project for a payment processor client.
• Legal and regulatory compliance subject matter expert for the digital transformation of a $30+ billion bank, including in respect of customer terms and conditions and third-party service provider contracts.
• Compliance counsel undertaking due diligence and deal negotiation for various payments and bank M&A matters, including $2+ billion merger of public company in the government payment services space.
• Lead regulatory counsel for an innovative payments-as-a-service accounts payable platform, including in relation to virtual card payments and revenue share arrangements.
• Lead counsel to numerous retailers negotiating card acceptance and other merchant services agreements with major processors and card networks.
• Project manager for multistate NMLS and other license application, change-in-control, change in control person, and similar filings.

Barry Hester provides transactional and compliance advice to clients in financial services, including banks, broker-dealers, trust companies, and major retailers, as well as payment processors, card program managers, and other data processing or fintech firms. Barry seeks to obtain efficient results and to provide actionable technical guidance whenever possible.

Barry has years of experience supporting innovative deposit, debit/credit card, broker-dealer, and wealth management lines of business. 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 core processing, merchant acquiring, banking-as-a-service, and similar strategic commercial agreements. Barry also drafts customer-facing terms, conditions, and disclosures and compliance policies as part of overall go-to-market and product development and launch support.

His practice also reaches bank operational compliance matters relating to overdraft protection, deposit sweep and treasury management services, unclaimed property, FDIC pass-through insurance, public deposits, brokered deposits, bank receivership, check fraud, elder abuse, authentication, interactive voice response, record retention, the E-Sign Act, and the wire room. Areas of technical focus include Regulation E, Regulation DD, Regulation Z, Regulation CC, Regulation V, Regulation B, debit and credit card network rules, NACHA rules, FINRA rules, FinCEN rules, Suspicious Activity Reports, privacy, and cybersecurity matters as well as money transmitter licensing, non-bank lender licensing, virtual currency/DeFi, and securities matters.

Bar Admissions

• Georgia

Education

• Georgia State University (J.D., 2009)
• North Carolina State University (Ph.D., 2008)
• University of Georgia (B.S., 2001)

Memberships