Chris Balfour, Founder

Chris Balfour founded PAE after more than 27 years at Visa working across network design, product, and large‑scale client engagements. His experience spans everything from core VisaNet behavior and VAA tuning to STIP policies, incident response programs, and live‑site troubleshooting with some of the world’s largest issuers and merchants.

Chris’s work is outcomes‑focused and pragmatic. The goal is not to generate binders of best practices, but to define concrete changes that your teams can implement — and to connect those changes to lifts in approval rates, reductions in false declines, and fewer operational escalations.

Every engagement is grounded in production reality: real messages, real declines, real latency, and the constraints of existing systems. PAE fits into your current risk, auth, and operations structures instead of trying to re‑organize them.