FirstPartner is pleased to announce that Ken Ritchie has joined the team, bringing extensive global expertise to its transit ticketing and payments practice. He will support FirstPartner’s clients in navigating mass transit and urban mobility payment strategies, B2B payments propositions, and the development of global partner ecosystems.

Ken is a highly skilled senior leader with over 25 years of business and business development experience, the last 15 of which have been focused on payments.

During his time at Visa, Ken spotted an early gap in mass transit acceptance and built the go-to-market from the ground up, growing Visa’s acceptance footprint to more than 200 cities worldwide and delivering 25%+ year-on-year growth. He also led the build-out of Visa’s B2B proposition through VCS and headed the Agentic Commerce go-to-market across EU, CEMEA and AP.

Prior to Visa, Ken spent four and a half years at Mastercard as Senior Channel Manager / Senior Business Development Manager, driving channel strategy and new business acquisition across enterprise merchants, acquirers, and technology partners throughout Europe. Earlier still, at Cybersource, he signed the company’s largest reseller — a deal that reshaped the scale of that channel.

“From signing Cybersource’s largest reseller to building Visa’s mass transit acceptance business from a blank page to more than 200 cities worldwide, I’ve seen firsthand how the right go-to-market and the right partnerships can transform a market,” said Ken. “I’m thrilled to join FirstPartner and bring that experience to bear, helping agencies, technology providers, and payments businesses turn opportunity into scale.”

If you want to contact Ken Ritchie at FirstPartner e-mail him at kritchie@firstpartner.net or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenhritchie/

FirstPartner is one of the leading management consultancies focused on transit ticketing payments and payments consultancy. We support clients such as:

• Card payment scheme’s – Visa
• Systems Integrators (SIs) – AECOM, ARUP and Accenture
• Specialised Technology Vendors such as Indra, Hitachi and Conduent
• Transit Authorities such as Transport for London (TfL), MARTA (Atlanta, US), Miami-Dade (Miami, US) and Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW)       

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