On a Saturday morning in Georgia, Alisa Barber walks into her garden and starts asking questions. Which flower is this? Why are the roses struggling? Has the rain done too much? Her most-used personal app is PictureThis, a pocket field guide that identifies a plant from a photograph and offers a diagnosis. Barber began gardening during the pandemic. What she liked first was the solitude. Then she noticed how neatly the practice fit the rest of her life: look closely, stay curious, learn the details and nurture whatever is trying to grow.
Monday brings a larger garden. As Chief Marketing Officer of Paysafe, Barber leads a global function inside a payments company assembled through years of acquisitions. Its products sit between merchants and customers at moments that are both ordinary and consequential: paying for dinner, funding an online game, booking a trip, moving money through a digital wallet. When Barber arrived in late 2022, the company was shifting its emphasis from acquisition-led expansion toward organic growth. Marketing needed to become one organization with one way of explaining why all those transactions belonged together.
Her brief was operational before it was ornamental. Centralize teams across the world. Establish a unified brand architecture. Put data behind decisions. Increase merchant acquisition for payment processing and consumer engagement for wallets. Then make a family of brands feel like a family rather than a directory.
That distinction matters because a logo can change overnight while habits take longer. Regional teams have their own audiences. Product names carry recognition. Salespeople need language they can use in a live conversation, and consumers need a promise they can understand without studying the corporate family tree. Barber’s work sits in those seams. The marketing system has to preserve local usefulness while creating global recognition, and it has to show enough commercial evidence that the rest of the company sees brand as an operating asset rather than a coat of paint.
A career built inside the plumbing
Barber grew up in South Georgia and studied marketing at Florida State University’s College of Business. She points out, with a note of satisfaction, that she is actually doing what she went to college for. Her payments career began at Penley, an early startup built around identity-verification needs connected to the USA PATRIOT Act. A chain of acquisitions eventually carried her into FIS, where she stayed for more than seventeen years.
That long tenure was less a single job than a practical education in how money products reach people. She built demand generation, consulted with clients on marketing and worked on direct-to-consumer programs. The range matters. Payments marketing has to speak several dialects at once: the language of enterprise buyers, the immediate needs of consumers, the constraints of regulation and the numerical vocabulary of a finance team asking what the work produced.
In 2020, Barber stepped outside payments to lead marketing for the Americas at customer-engagement company Verint. The detour gave her a view of marketing from another industry and a close look at a CMO she admired, Celia Fleischaker. Barber remembers how Fleischaker elevated marketing while staying grounded in outcomes. Another model was longtime colleague Chris Peterson, whose leadership Barber describes as grit joined with grace. These were examples to study, not personas to copy.
“What we did yesterday is not good enough for tomorrow.”Alisa Barber on adaptation
When payments called her back in 2022, the return came with a bigger canvas. Paysafe operated across consumer wallets, online cash and merchant processing, with brands including Skrill, Neteller, PaysafeCard and PagoEfectivo. Barber’s team had to reveal the shared logic beneath that variety.
The transaction as opening scene
The public expression arrived in February 2024: a refreshed identity, a brighter palette and the line “It starts here.” The phrasing recast payment from a dull conclusion into an opening scene. A transaction is where the holiday becomes real, the dinner begins or the player enters a game. Trust remains the foundation, but the emotional value sits in what happens next.
It is a useful piece of positioning because it gives a technical company somewhere human to stand. Barber talks about turning transactions into experiences, particularly in entertainment categories such as iGaming, video gaming, travel and leisure. The promise is not that anyone will admire the payment rail. It is that the rail will disappear cleanly enough for the experience to continue.
In Peru, that idea became deliberately visible. For the 2025 launch of a PagoEfectivo mobile wallet, the campaign moved out of dashboards and into Lima. The city wore the brand’s yellow across billboards, transit wraps and LED displays. Mall visitors spun a wheel, met soccer personalities, completed games, took photographs with mascot Leo Pagoncio and entered prize draws. Actor Carlos “Cachín” Alcántara served as ambassador. Within months, the wallet had attracted tens of thousands of sign-ups, accompanied by higher platform activity. The campaign later earned a SAMMY Award for experiential and event marketing.
For a technical product, begin with the life moment it unlocks. Build the story around that moment, then use behavior and outcomes to test whether the story traveled.
Barber’s favorite test for an event is even simpler than a conversion chart. As she leaves, does somebody ask, “When’s the next one?” She heard that question after a London gathering for women in video gaming. The remark turned attendance into community, and a one-off program into something worth repeating.
Clear direction, room to shine
Barber’s leadership language is full of paired ideas. People want clear goals, she says, and they also need to be heard. They need direction and a space in which to shine. Data is essential, but outcomes must stay connected to people. Technology grows more capable while human skill becomes more valuable.
Her phrase for personal development is “be your own chief knowledge officer.” A company can provide training, but a fast-moving industry makes passive learning expensive. She urges employees to use courses, podcasts, conferences and industry conversations, then take responsibility for stitching the knowledge together. AI intensifies that demand. Barber expects it to change far more than content production, enabling increasingly personal communication with each consumer and merchant. Yet she thinks the people who fare best in an AI-shaped world will be those who can still collaborate and communicate well.
“The people who are going to do the best in an AI-driven world are ones that still can work with others very well.”Alisa Barber on the human edge
That belief also shapes her work with women in payments. Most of Barber’s own mentors were men. At Paysafe she has intentionally mentored women through year-long pairings, and in 2026 she joined the Women in Payments USA Advisory Board. She distinguishes sponsorship, which can advance a defined career goal, from mentorship, which becomes a more personal conversation about the person someone hopes to become.
Her advice for finding a mentor is wonderfully unceremonious: invite the person to lunch. Ask about the route they took. Call occasionally. Be bold enough to make the request. Careers, in Barber’s telling, accumulate through relationships until the person who once advised you becomes a colleague, collaborator or friend.
Finding the yes inside no
For people entering payments, Barber offers a compact operating manual. Expect the industry to change. Speak up. Ask questions. Be bold. Become a change agent. And when an idea meets “no,” inspect the answer. Perhaps it is wrong now but right in six months. Perhaps it needs a better business case. The task is to find the conditions under which the answer could become yes.
There is no romance here about change for its own sake. Her record at Paysafe connects transformation to concrete systems and results: a centralized team, a common architecture, a global rebrand, new product launches and campaigns measured in adoption. In 2025, CMO Huddles included her among its Top 102 B2B Marketing Influencers. In early 2026, Paysafe’s marketing group received the BIG Innovation Awards’ team honor for work spanning the rebrand, experiential programs and new initiatives. Barber described the achievement in collective terms: one team aligning around a clear vision and executing at global scale.
Her walk-up song makes the same move. She chose Alicia Keys’ “Girl on Fire,” then promptly widened the spotlight. It was not only about her, she explained. The whole marketing team was on fire. The choice is playful, but the instinct is consistent: translate the individual prompt into a group story.
Back in the garden, the metaphor practically writes itself, and Barber is happy to notice it. Growing flowers resembles growing a team. Both reward attention, curiosity and care. Both also resist total control. Some seasons bring too much rain. A rose fails. A campaign misses. The lesson is found in the next look, the next diagnosis and the willingness to adjust before tomorrow.