Banking CIOOutlook: Specials Magazine

Lucas Davis has been a driving force behind the payment industry’s transformation, streamlining and securing B2B transactions. Through strategic leadership, he spearheaded the adoption of virtual payment solutions, enhancing payment efficiencies and supporting supplier enablement. In an interview with Banking CIO Outlook, Lucas shares insights on transformative technology advancements that are paving the way for a promising future and ongoing growth in the tech-driven sector. Can you describe your journey in the industry and your current roles and responsibilities at Capital One? I began my career in the credit card and business payment space around 23 years ago at American Express. Initially, I started as a small business service and sales representative. Over the years, I worked my way up through various roles, including team leader, manager of business development, and director in the global space. After 21 years at American Express, I joined Capital One as the Vice President for Commercial Cards, managing the Arizona market. My responsibilities involve mid-size customers and optimizing the payment process, especially through virtual cards, aligning with the industry’s trend toward streamlining processes. How has the payment and card space evolved lately, and what is your view on its current status? The industry has become more competitive in recent years. A decade ago, there weren't many salespeople actively pitching multiple payment platforms. Banks issued business credit cards, but they didn’t have an active sales force pushing their products. Now, numerous companies, including Capital One, have sales forces actively prospecting the same clients. The competition has become more driven, offering higher incentives and more aggressive pricing strategies. Post-COVID, the competition has intensified, with companies determined to differentiate themselves beyond traditional reward programs. The focus has shifted to creating new revenue str

Why should compliance and risk controls be embedded into payment infrastructure? After years working inside high-risk jurisdictions and complex payment environments, Gina LeBlanc and Gidget Reynolds recognized a structural flaw they had seen repeatedly: payment platforms optimized for growth often treated compliance and risk as secondary layers rather than foundational design principles. Businesses were left managing regulatory exposure, chargeback disputes, and operational uncertainty only after transactions had already moved. Determined to address risk at its source, they founded LockTrust around a simple principle: payment infrastructure should prevent risk by design, embedding compliance and intelligent controls directly into the system instead of managing problems after they occur. LockTrust operates as a compliance-native payments infrastructure platform, providing onboarding, transaction processing, monitoring, routing, custody and escrow capabilities within a single risk-managed system. As digital payments expanded across borders and regulatory regimes, this risk-first approach became the company’s defining architecture, reinforced further when Johnny Ritzer, co-founder and CRO, joined to embed compliance across onboarding, monitoring, routing, and custody. Within this architecture, Sagar Kotak, founder, was brought in to code and oversee the development of AI functions as the primary control mechanism. It dynamically adjusts onboarding flows, flags behavioral anomalies, enforces multi-layer jurisdictional checks, and reduces fraudulent chargebacks by capturing device-level intelligence..