InfoSec People Profile: Brett Vasconcellos, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Paywhere
By Roy Urrico
Finopotamus presents InfoSec People Profiles, a series spotlighting individuals working in information security (infosec), cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and/or information governance (IG) to protect data and transactions at credit unions, other financial institutions, and fintechs serving the financial services industry.
Giving large language models (LLMs) access to a financial institution can help accountholders but also create security and compliance problems for credit unions or banks. Brett Vasconcellos, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer of a startup called Paywhere, which allows financial institutions to safely connect to LLMs, oversees information security and information governance.
San Francisco-based Paywhere recognized that FI customers are now facilitated by ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Muse, and a growing list of other AI agents. Paywhere identified how AI agents and software programs were beginning to quickly automate the financial workflows that corporate clients had previously managed manually.
With the approaching agentic AI sea change for banks and credit unions, Paywhere recognized FIs needed a platform that worked alongside existing systems, that could handle both fiat and stablecoin rails, and keep the financial institution in complete control of its banking relationships and economics.
At the core of its platform is what Paywhere calls “programmable banking,” which they describe as empowering a credit union or bank to automate and streamline workflows, offer real-time services, and adapt to changing client needs. “We're building a highly compliant and secure system from the ground up,” said Vasconcellos told Finopotamus.
“In my role, I’m looking at how we secure, how we build this in terms of the capabilities, but also (maintain) information security and the governance around it,” Vasconcellos noted. He explained that entails authorization and accountability, agent identity, and “how do we let the banks and credit unions dip their toes in slowly into this world and build up to the more complex use cases that the customers are looking for.”
Growing Into His Role
Vasconcellos grew up in Boise, Idaho. He later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he earned a bachelor's and a master's in software engineering. “I studied quite a few information security kind of topics within the coursework there. Even in high school, I worked part-time jobs in IT and software engineering. So, I kind of grew up with it.”
Most of his professional career has been in capital markets, he explained. “When I moved to London, England, in 2006, I worked for leading software engineering teams across derivatives trading systems, equity trading systems. As you can imagine, any sort of software error or, security issue can result in very large fines or very large losses for customers.” Therefore, information security was always “top of mind.”
Paywhere was conceived and built in July 2025 by a founding team —including Girish Mutreja (CEO) Bindu Gakhar (Chief Product Officer) and Vasconcellos — with decades of collective experience at the intersection of financial markets, technology, communications, and regulatory complexity.
The team has deep expertise in high-performance distributed systems, capital markets infrastructure, fintech product leadership, and tech-focused marketing and communications. They have built platforms that process tens of billions in monthly volume, scaled API-driven payment products across global markets, and helped technology companies find their voice in competitive industries.
How Paywhere Intersects with Security
With Paywhere’s programmable banking, a credit union member or a bank customer can use their AI assistant to connect to their financial institution, noted Vasconcellos. “They use the same credentials that they would with their digital banking, but the bank can differentiate AI assistance, autonomous agents and applications from humans and apply the banks’ entitlements and permissions, across those different, categories of actors connected to banks, he said. “(FIs) can allow AI assistance to move money, but require autonomous agents to have a human approve it, for example, for a set of limits.”
Part of the process, explained Vasconcellos, “Is ensuring that (the transaction) is secure from a cybersecurity perspective, but also that the governance is in place, that we have the audit trails and the accountability (perspective). That we can confirm that payment instruction matches the user's intent that they put into their AI agent.”
Information Governance Coming into Play
Vasconcellos referred to the news stemming from major U.S. and international financial institutions—including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Charles Schwab— that are actively blocking or restricting third-party AI personal agents from accessing customer accounts. “They're concerned the authorization of an agent to pay my utility bills…sticks around (with) that connection to the bank.”
That could lead to a prompt injection attack, a cybersecurity exploit where an attacker manipulates a LLM by providing malicious inputs designed to override its developer-defined safety guardrails, system instructions, or intended behavior. “And if the human user receives an email that has a hidden prompt injection attack in it, the agent could be induced to send a bunch of money to the attacker, out of the user's bank account,” explained Vasconcello.
“The bank would have no way of differentiating the valid use case from the unauthorized use case without Paywhere in place,” suggested Vasconcellos. “That's what is scaring the big players and blocking the agents. It is kind of the first step. I think every bank will need a specific agentic channel that has the information governance controls around it.”
Agents Unwilling to Perform Certain Requirements
“A lot of folks are talking about unauthorized agents taking unauthorized actions. I think there is not enough talk about agents that won't do things that are banking requirements,” said Vasconcellos.
He provided two examples:
If a bank wants to see a multifactor authentication on a payment, the agent may be able to read a one-time code from the human's email or text message, and it may self-approve that payment.
The agent may not provide the human user with the regulatory disclosures or get the user to acknowledge or accept terms and conditions.
“Those kinds of things worry me a lot, but outside of Paywhere, that's going to get the banks and credit unions in the hot water with the regulators potentially,” indicated Vasconcellos.
Vasconcellos understands the regulators have been slow to totally define AI use. “I think the regulators eventually will need to opine on the requirements for AI enabled banking. It's kind of the industry's responsibility to put these controls in place as a reference point for regulators to build regulations around.”
He recalled his previous position as CTO at Bids Trading. “We built the ability for humans and autonomous traders to interact with each other, to trade large blocks of stocks,” Vasconcellos explained the regulators looked at this build around, what was called “conditional orders,” as a model for establishing information governance rules. “Because their customers were handling large pension funds and mutual funds, there was very high concern around their handling of confidential information.”
Infosec and Information Governance
Paywhere sees its roles as dovetailing into both information governance and information security when it comes to banking. “The information security, we have got an obligation to keep the financial institution’s data and the customer's data secure. It's more of an obligation,” said Vasconcellos. He added, Paywhere wants to differentiate itself on the governance side of things. Controlling, who has the right to see what, and the accountability behind that.
“Something that we're leaning into as a team with both Brett and Girish’s backgrounds from capital markets, that they both had to lean into working with regulators and lean really deeply understanding where the industry was going,” emphasized Paywhere CMO Arleigh Vasconcellos, (who is married to Brett Vasconcellos).
“One of the differentiators that allowed (BIDS Trading) to succeed was the fact they not only looked at the regulations as something that they had to work within, but they saw it as a competitive advantage,” said Arleigh.
She added Paywhere completely made sure that they architected programming banking with current and future information governance in mind. “I think that is a differentiator for the FIs, because it lets them know that you don't just have to blanket block everything. You don't have to say, ‘Oh, we're just going to let everybody in.’ You can, you can do it safely and you can do it in a measured way.”
Specific Threats and CU Prospects
Asked what keeps him up at night, Vasconcellos disclosed to Finopotamus: “Some of what we mentioned about regulatory disclosures and acceptance of terms and things that the (AI) agents won't do. It worries me for community banks and credit unions that aren't moving fast enough. They'll get stung by either this or money moving without authorization. I feel that we have an obligation to help the industry meet this new, rising tide of agents safely.”
As far as top information security dangers to credit unions and other financial institutions today Vasconcellos responded, “certainly cyber attackers using AI in their attacks, to both broaden the scale of attacks and personalize, highly personalized scam emails or even fake phone calls. Video calls (are) even are emerging in huge volumes across consumers.”
Vasconcellos mentioned the appetite from credit unions for Paywhere’s programmable banking has been surprisingly strong. They have had queries from credit union and CUSOs. “Most of the institutions that have actively reached out to us. They are more focused on their member experience. They see their members using AI, and are curious how (Paywhere) addresses the information security, information governance side of things.”
