Visa Appoints EA and Microsoft Veteran Chris Suh as CFO

Visa has appointed Chris Suh to succeed Vasant Prabhu as chief financial officer (CFO).

Suh joins the company from Electronic Arts (EA), where he was CFO, and will serve as Visa’s CFO designate from July 10 until assuming full responsibility for the role Aug. 1, Visa said in a Tuesday (June 20) press release.

Visa announced in February that Prabhu will retire Sept. 30 after serving as CFO since 2015 and, in addition, vice chairman since 2019.

Before joining EA, Suh served in a variety of senior finance roles with Microsoft for more than 25 years, including leading investor relations for five years and being corporate vice president and CFO of the tech giant’s Cloud + AI group, according to the release.

“I am delighted to welcome Chris to Visa’s leadership team,” Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said in the release. “His deep experience in finance and technology, plus his leadership in growing and scaling businesses, will be extraordinarily valuable to us as we continue to drive growth and better serve our clients around the world.”

In his new role, Suh will report to McInerney, sit on Visa’s global leadership team, and be responsible for the company’s financial strategies, planning, reporting and all finance operations and investor relations, according to the release.

“Visa is an incredible brand, and the company has a great culture,” Suh said in the release. “I have long admired Visa’s history of innovation and industry leadership, and I’m excited to play a part in shaping the future of payments around the globe.”

During Visa’s most recent earnings call, which was held April 25, McInerney detailed the progress and potential still extant in consumer payments and new payments flows.

“Consumer payments remain a massive opportunity for Visa,” McInerney said at the time. “Even with all the digitization over the last several decades, there is still a tremendous amount of cash and check spent globally.”

He added that “there is a very long runway for growth in this business.”

In the Tuesday press release about Visa’s transition to a new CFO, McInerney said: “We are grateful to Vasant for his outstanding strategic and financial leadership over the past eight years.”