Simi Adene, a financial technology expert with experience spanning Discover Financial Services, now part of Capital One, and Access Bank, has played key roles in payment security, fraud prevention and technology integration across major financial institutions.

At Capital One Adene served as Principal Product Manager within the PULSE debit payment network, where she was deployed by leadership to lead three teams within the Quality Business Unit.

Her responsibilities included overseeing testing infrastructure for high-volume payment validation, developing automated risk controls and strengthening payment systems designed to protect consumer transactions.

She said the experience reinforced the importance of treating fraud prevention as an integral part of payment-system design rather than something addressed after losses occur.

Adene’s work on integration started with Access Bank as she led Technical integration between Access Bank Platform and it’s acquired platform on two different occasions (Diamond Bank and Intercontinental Bank), which culminated in her appointment at Discover in February, 2025 to lead Discover/Capital-One integration on Credit Cards.

She believes the lessons from those experiences extend beyond individual institutions, particularly as banks increasingly rely on interconnected digital platforms to process payments and manage customer information.

“Fraudsters do not wait for a merger to be completed. They look for the gaps created when systems, processes and customer information are being moved from one environment to another,” Adene said.

“When financial institutions merge, technology integration is only one part of the challenge. The bigger question is whether payment and fraud-control systems can continue to recognize and stop suspicious transactions as data moves across different platforms,” Adene said.

According to her professional record, her work at Discover contributed to the prevention of more than $12 million in potential fraudulent transaction losses, while machine-learning infrastructure helped improve automated fraud capture by 40 percent.

Adene also spearheaded the initiation and buildout of an end-to-end System Integration Testing platform across network business areas, an experience that has become particularly relevant following Capital One’s acquisition of Discover.

She noted that integration points between different systems can present significant challenges because institutions may have different transaction rules, fraud thresholds, data structures and monitoring processes.

“You cannot assume that because two systems work perfectly on their own, they will work perfectly when integrated. Every connection, every data field and every transaction path has to be tested,” she said.

Her approach places emphasis on end-to-end testing, parallel monitoring, data integrity and clearly defined controls before and after major technology migrations.

“During an acquisition, protecting customers has to remain the priority. A successful integration is not just about completing the migration; it is about ensuring that customers do not feel the disruption and that their money remains protected,” she said.

With Capital One’s acquisition of Discover bringing together two major financial services businesses and Discover’s payment-network assets, Adene’s experience highlights the increasingly important role of product and technology leaders who understand both payment infrastructure and fraud prevention.

Her career, spanning banking, payments, technology and large-scale system integration, reflects a growing industry reality: securing financial transactions requires not only sophisticated fraud-detection technology, but also rigorous testing of the systems through which billions of transactions move.