Otto Benz is Payments Director for Nationwide Building Society, which he joined in 2021. He is responsible for delivering valuable and resilient payments experiences to its members, as well as influencing across the UK payments industry. He looks after all forms of payments processing at the Society, as well as Open Banking. Previously Otto has held lead roles for payments at other financial
institutions.
Otto is a graduate of Queens’ College Cambridge, where he read engineering, and he is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology. He has developed his career at IBM, Swiss Bank, Accenture, Virgin Money and Lloyds Banking Group. Over that time, he has worked extensively in programmes of change and technology and has had leading roles in strategy engagements and operations. He has wide experience in financial services, working mainly in retail and investment banking, focussing on payments, clearing and settlement.
Otto has been a Director of BACS and Payments UK, and he participated in the Strategy Forum of the Payments Systems Regulator, where he co-chaired the workstream in charge of creating the vision for the New Payments Architecture. Otto now sits of a number of industry bodies coordinating action in payments and access to cash including at UK Finance, and for Pay.UK’s New Payments
Architecture programme.
