A payment terminal is most successful at the precise moment nobody thinks about it. A customer taps a card. A green check appears. Coffee, shoes, dinner or software changes hands. Underneath that tiny ritual sits a dense mesh of banks, networks, security rules, devices, cloud services and merchant tools. The technology is elaborate. The experience is supposed to feel obvious.
Leah Rasori has spent much of her career working on the same compression problem in marketing: how do you turn complicated infrastructure into a promise that a busy business owner can understand? Her résumé passes through the companies that built successive layers of modern commerce - Verifone, First Data, Fiserv, Sovos and Global Payments. The products changed. The central discipline did not. Start with the customer. Strip away internal complexity. Make the useful thing clear.
At Global Payments, where she became chief marketing officer in 2024, that discipline has become an organizational assignment. Rasori leads global brand strategy, product marketing and revenue-focused initiatives. Her team is helping consolidate a house of brands into a single identity while also changing the status of marketing itself: from a service desk for requests into a customer-centered growth function that works alongside product and sales.
The startup before the C-suite
Rasori’s first exposure to marketing did not arrive in a corporate brand room. She grew up working in her parents’ startup. The experience gave her an early view of what business looks like before the departments, dashboards and specialist vocabulary arrive. In a small company, a product story is not an exercise in positioning. It is the explanation that persuades someone to trust you, buy from you and come back.
That origin still shows in the audience she talks about most warmly. While serving as CMO of tax software company Sovos, she described a passion for simple, easy-to-use technology for small businesses. It is an important preference in an industry tempted to narrate its own machinery. A merchant does not wake up wanting more payment infrastructure. The merchant wants a lunch rush that moves, a checkout that does not fail and a system that frees staff to do something more human.
She also knew early that she wanted to work in technology and eventually reach a C-level role. The route was directional rather than rigid. Rasori has called it a “what’s next” mindset: keep moving toward the next opportunity, then build the skills the larger job requires. She earned a BBA in marketing from Georgia State University and an MBA in marketing from Mercer University, grounding an operator’s education in the Atlanta institutions closest to where she would build her career.
“Get used to the feeling of being uncomfortable.”Leah Rasori on building a technology career
Discomfort, in her telling, is not a theatrical appetite for risk. It is the ordinary sensation of taking on work before every answer is available. Rasori says some of her most meaningful wins began with a blank slate: an unclear space, a new function, a project that had not yet acquired a playbook. She values the moment when that work becomes a company success, but she talks just as readily about the people who learn to lead while building it.
The invisible IPO lesson
One of Rasori’s stated career highlights was leading marketing for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. An IPO compresses a company in a different way. Years of product decisions, market bets and operating history must become a coherent public story. Customers, employees and investors all encounter that story with different questions, yet contradictions become costly. The marketer has to find the durable center.
Her later roles widened the aperture. At First Data, and then Fiserv after the companies combined, she moved from marketing leadership into performance marketing. That title carries a useful argument: marketing should not end at attention. It should connect activity to demand, pipeline and growth. At Sovos, where she became CMO in 2022, her remit included brand marketing, client communication, demand generation and the entire customer journey across a company operating internationally.
Sovos also placed her in another kind of invisible infrastructure. Tax compliance software exists because rules, reporting systems and transactions do not naturally line up. The customer buys confidence that a complicated obligation will be handled correctly. Rasori’s job was to make that confidence understandable and to help a global marketing organization operate with shared practices.
Treat positioning as an internal agreement before treating it as an external campaign.
Use recurring one-to-ones for career coaching, not only project status.
One name for the counter
Global Payments presented Rasori with the same pattern at a larger scale. Payment companies accumulate capabilities over time through development, partnerships and acquisitions. That can be rational inside the company and bewildering outside it. Each product may have customers and advocates. Together they can sound like a shelf of unrelated answers.
The multi-year brand transformation her team described in 2025 is an attempt to remove that tax on attention. The work has involved unifying a complex house of brands into one global identity and finding alignment across markets and stakeholders. That sentence is tidy. The job underneath it is not. A global identity asks regional teams to surrender familiar language. It asks product groups to explain how their offering belongs to a larger system. It asks sales to trade a collection of pitches for a common promise.
Genius, launched in May 2025, became the visible proof. Global Payments introduced it as a single point-of-sale command center, beginning with restaurants and bringing multiple POS products into one configurable platform. The word “single” does much of the strategic work. To a restaurant operator, the value is not a tour of corporate architecture. It is the possibility that payments, ordering and business operations can behave like one system.
A year later, the product story had moved into AI-assisted hardware and new self-service kiosk formats. Rasori’s public commentary stayed close to operations: teams collaborating, dealers getting tools to grow, restaurants simplifying work, staff serving customers more easily. Even when the technology gains a fashionable adjective, her framing returns to the merchant’s day.
A brand becomes useful when the company’s complexity stops becoming the customer’s homework.The operating idea behind one global identity
The people metric
Rasori’s career advice is unusually procedural. Build a network. Find sponsors as well as mentors. Tell your manager where you want to go, then use one-to-one meetings for coaching on how to get there. Each instruction assigns a job to ambition. A mentor offers perspective. A sponsor spends credibility in a room you may not yet occupy. A manager helps translate a distant title into the next capability and assignment.
Her own involvement with Wnet, now PayTech Women, supplied planning tools and mentors as she moved into more senior roles. She has since argued that women in technology need both a stronger talent pipeline and cultures where they can thrive. Early exposure creates interest. Training creates readiness. Leadership behavior determines whether people can do their best work and stay.
This helps explain why her proudest answers do not end with the IPO or the CMO title. Rasori has said she feels the greatest accomplishment when team members succeed and grow into leaders. It is not false modesty. It is an operating measure. A transformed marketing function cannot depend on one executive. It has to leave behind judgment, confidence and more people able to make decisions.
Colleagues’ public recommendations describe a leader who pairs market understanding with availability to coach, who can restructure a function while keeping people moving together. Those observations fit the pattern in her own words: support systems make difficult pivots possible, and the smaller wins of team growth compound.
The next useful stretch
There is a personal symmetry in Rasori’s work. The child inside a family startup learned that a company has to explain why it matters. The executive inside a global payments business is doing the same job across far more products, markets and constituencies. The scale changed. The demand for clarity did not.
Her story also offers a less polished version of career planning. Pick a direction. Say it aloud. Find people who can teach and sponsor you. Accept assignments where the page is still blank. Become comfortable enough with discomfort to keep moving. Then, when you reach the larger room, help someone else enter it.
For Global Payments, the work ahead is to make the new identity real in every encounter, from a sales conversation to a handheld at a restaurant table. For Rasori, it is another version of the question that has followed her through fintech: can a complicated company make life simpler for the business on the other side of the counter? The answer will be measured in adoption and growth. It will also appear in a quieter signal - how little of the underlying complexity the customer is forced to notice.