Atlanta’s payments corridor has a peculiar gravity. Executives leave it for New York or San Francisco, chase bigger titles in bigger cities, and then, often enough, they come back. Wally Mlynarski did exactly that in March 2026, when he was named Chief Executive Officer of Elavon, the global payments company headquartered in Atlanta and a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank, which is part of U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB). It was not a stranger walking into the corner office. It was a man returning to a company he had helped shape, one product line at a time.
Wally describes himself, in the plainest terms he can manage, as “a seasoned payments executive with deep experience across the financial services and payments ecosystem.” It is an understatement dressed up as a job description. His career, when laid flat, reads like a long arc through the payments industry itself: mobile commerce and payment innovation in an era when mobile payments were still emerging, merchant services before ‘embedded finance’ was a phrase widely used in a boardroom, and now, at the top of Elavon, the work of making all of it feel invisible to the people using it.
The Grove Years
Long before he ran the company, Wally built something inside it. In 2012, he became Vice President of ‘The Grove,’ Elavon’s Global Mobile Commerce Solutions unit, and by his own account, created an innovation lab from the ground up, leading a cross-functional group spanning product management, development, architecture, QA, and design. The Grove officially launched in 2013 as Elavon’s Atlanta-based mobile innovation center, focused on mobile payments, new technology, product development, and third-party partnerships.
The center was designed to develop mobile-payment technologies and expand Elavon’s existing mobile solutions, while also creating partnerships with outside innovators.
By August 2014, he had been promoted to Senior Vice President of Global Omni-Commerce Solutions, still leading The Grove, with responsibility spanning mobile and eCommerce. A Business RadioX segment from that period called him a “recognized expert in mobile payment solutions,” a title that, in hindsight, undersells how early he arrived at a problem the rest of the industry was still circling. Then, in May 2015, Elavon promoted him again, this time to Senior Vice President of Global Product and Innovation, a role in which he oversaw global, cross-functional product-development teams and initiatives including mobile payments, EMV migration, and security solutions. In 2017, he became Chief Product Officer of Elavon, a position he held until 2019.
His first tenure at Elavon lasted about seven years, before he left the company for Bank of America in 2019.
From Product to P&L
Leaving Elavon in 2019 did not mean leaving payments. Wally joined Bank of America, where he spent nearly seven years, moving through a sequence of titles that tracked a familiar executive arc, from product leadership toward commercial ownership. He led Merchant Services and later Merchant Solutions and Receivables, ultimately overseeing a broader part of the payments and cash-flow equation before his return to Elavon in March 2026. Bank of America materials identified him as head of Merchant Services and Receivables, while industry records also listed him as Head of Merchant Solutions.
It is worth pausing on what that title change signals. Receivables is not a glamorous word. It is the unromantic middle of a company’s cash flow, the part nobody photographs for an annual report. But it is also where a payments executive proves whether they understand the full plumbing of a business, not just the part that swipes a card, but the part that gets a merchant paid. His public biography describes him as someone who ‘partnered closely with acquirers, fintechs, networks, and technology providers,’ and as a leader known for ‘advancing intuitive, client-focused payment innovation at scale.’
The Coalition and the Association
While climbing through Bank of America, Wally also took on industry roles that reflected his involvement in the wider payments ecosystem. He served on the American Transaction Processors Coalition (ATPC), and in 2023 he was appointed to the Electronic Transactions Association’s Presidential Advisory Council. He was not listed as an ETA board director; ETA identified him as part of its Presidential Advisory Council.
Those roles placed him alongside leaders from across payments and fintech, giving him a wider industry vantage point beyond his responsibilities at Bank of America.
A Georgia Tech Foundation
Before any of it, there was an engineering degree. Wally holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his earliest jobs bear the fingerprints of that training more than any payments pedigree. He started as a Quality Assurance Engineer at Intellisync, followed by roles in enterprise support, Nokia, and SK C&C USA, before joining Elavon. His professional background spans software, mobility, solutions architecture, sales engineering, and payments product leadership.
He is candid about how that foundation shapes his leadership. “My leadership,” he says, “is grounded in strong technical expertise and a commitment to customer-driven execution.” That combination of technical knowledge and customer focus has remained central to his approach throughout his career, from product development and solutions architecture to leading payment businesses at scale.
The Return, 2026
What makes Wally’s ascent to CEO notable is not that it happened, but how unsurprising it was given his earlier role at Elavon and his subsequent leadership at Bank of America. He is not an outsider brought in to disrupt Elavon. He is the person who spent about seven years shaping its product organization, left to broaden his experience in merchant services and receivables at Bank of America, and returned as CEO with experience on both sides of the equation, technology and commercial payments.
As CEO, Wally now leads Elavon, where he is responsible for delivering secure, scalable payment solutions across the company’s markets in the United States, Europe, and Canada. Elavon has described his mandate in terms of scalable, tech-led, and embedded payments innovation for businesses of all sizes.
It is a mission statement that could belong to almost any payments executive. What distinguishes his version of it is the two-decade paper trail behind it, a career spent, quite literally, inside the machine he is now responsible for running.
Also Read: FinTech Leaders Transforming Payment Innovation, Embedded Finance & Business Growth to Watch in 2026
