This move sees the payments veteran throw his experience and reputation behind a startup focused on using payments data to optimize revenue collection and assurance across Africa.

Deger founded Payworks in 2012 and grew the business across Europe, the US and Africa, raising $17 million before selling to Visa in 2019. Deger then led Visa’s payments processing business, Cybersource, as Head of Europe. Deger now serves as advisor and investor in early stage technology companies.

Revio is a payments optimization platform that leverages transaction and customer data to help businesses reduce payment failures and customer churn. Through a single API, the company boosts merchants’ success rates with locally-optimized payment methods and smart payment routing, failover, and retries.

“Revio uniquely tackles the challenges of payment fragmentation and failure in emerging markets,” said Deger. “The platform has the potential to radically transform unit economics and ease of doing business on the continent, for both local and multinational companies.”

Ruaan Botha, founder and CEO of Revio, shared: “It’s a pleasure to welcome Christian to our advisory board. His deep omnichannel payment expertise and experience of scaling a global business will be extremely valuable to our next phase of growth.”

Deger expressed, "I have been impressed with Revio’s team and unique approach to payment optimization. I look forward to working with the team to help drive the company's growth and success."

In November last year, Revio announced an oversubscribed Seed round of $1.1m, led by global financial technology investor, Speedinvest, joined by RaliCap, The Fund, Two Culture Capital, and several strategic angel investors. It is currently focused on expanding its platform capabilities to include additional payment analytics and workflow automation, to better serve clients in new and existing markets.