Richard Fraher is vice president and counsel to the Federal Reserve System Retail Payments Office (RPO), based at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

He joined the Bank in 1998 as a senior counsel and was promoted to assistant general counsel in 2002 and to VP and counsel to the RPO in 2009.  Before joining the Bank, Mr. Fraher was a senior attorney with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Earlier in his career, he was an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, visiting scholar at Cambridge University, and professor of law at Indiana University. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a J.D. from the Harvard Law School. He currently teaches The Law of Payments Systems at the Emory University School of Law.

Mr. Fraher leads the Federal Reserve legal team that supports retail payments services and has primary responsibility for the Operating Circulars that structure the Fed’s check and ACH services. He was the Federal Reserve Banks’ lead lawyer for creating the rules for the Fed’s image based check collection and return services. He is one of the architects of the Federal Reserve’s FedGlobal services, was a principal author of the rules of the International Payments Framework Association, and is an inventor of two patented payments processes.  He is a member of the RPO’s Senior Leadership Team, speaks frequently to banking industry leaders about legal issues that arise from technical and operational innovation in payments, and plays an active role in shaping discussions about the future of payments law.

He is currently working with Fed colleagues on potential future Fed payments services and on identifying risks posed by technical and operational innovation in financial services and how regulation might address those risks.

Mr. Robey joined MSB Compliance with over 15 years’ experience in the Banking, Financial Technology (FinTech) and Financial Services industries. Most recently, he served as Chief Compliance Officer of Bitcoin Depot, the largest virtual currency ATM company in the southeastern United States. In a quickly-developing financial technology space, Mr. Robey grounded business growth in BSA/AML principles through effective risk assessment, policy and procedure development, establishing due diligence standards, conducting employee training and identifying new suspicious activity typologies. He has presented for Atlanta Metropol’s fraud group regarding compliance best practices for cryptocurrency ATMs along with Atlanta’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office.

At Embassy National Bank, Mr. Robey served as VP – Retail Banking Manager and later as BSA & Compliance Officer. His portfolio concentrations initially included revenue generation, deposit growth, banking operations, and product development. Later as BSA Officer, he developed and implemented a BSA/AML compliance framework for customers including money services businesses such as money transmitters, virtual currency firms and check cashers.

Prior to Embassy, Mr. Robey coordinated and managed EFT implementations projects at the FinTech giant FIS for six years and began his financial services career at the University of Virginia Community Credit Union as a teller, later becoming Supervisor of the Credit Union’s Card Services (debit and credit) department.

Mr. Robey earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. He has achieved recognition as a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) through the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) and is a graduate of the Georgia Bankers’ Association (GBA) Compliance School. He also serves as Chair of the Atlanta ACAMS Chapter Working Group on Virtual Currency.

Mr. Hester is Counsel in Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s Atlanta office and a member of the firm’s banking and payments practices. He specializes in regulatory compliance, financial technology (Fintech), bank operations, and payments laws. He is solution-oriented and leverages years of experience as in-house counsel for a leading financial institution where he was the lead attorney for deposit, credit card, broker-dealer, and wealth management lines of business. As Associate General Counsel at EverBank and Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), Barry supported contract, vendor management, new products, BSA/AML/OFAC, advertising, sales practices, and governance functions. He counsels clients on Regulation E (Electronic Fund Transfers Act), Regulation DD (Truth in Savings Act), Regulation Z (Truth in Lending Act), Regulation CC (Expedited Funds Availability Act), Regulation V (Fair Credit Reporting Act), Regulation B (Equal Credit Opportunity Act), debit and credit card network rules, NACHA rules, FINRA rules, FinCEN rules, Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), privacy, and cybersecurity matters as well as money transmitter licensing and securities matters.