Founding Partner

Carol Coye Benson

Carol is a founding partner of Glenbrook. Carol offered clients over 25 years of experience in product, marketing, and strategy development with leading financial services providers in both wholesale and retail financial services.

Carol’s practice at Glenbrook focused on financial inclusion, mobile payments, national payments infrastructures, and emerging technologies for financial services. She had a particular interest in national and regional schemes for credit transfer systems; the operating rules that govern these schemes; the addressing (credentials) and directories used in these schemes; and in the question of national digital currencies.

Before founding Glenbrook Partners, Carol was a managing director of the Global Institutional Services division of Deutsche Bank, in charge of marketing, client online services, and Internet development.

At Visa International, she led a group conducting early work on the use of credit cards online, and a project that pioneered database marketing and related consumer-privacy issues. Carol also founded and managed Visa’s European product-development office, where she led a series of electronic-commerce and chip-card projects designed to bring European banks online.

Prior to her career with Visa International, Carol spent twelve years with Citibank, where she managed the development and market introduction of new payments products. Carol began her career as a corporate lending officer for large multinationals at both Bank of America and Citibank.

Carol is co-author of the book “Payments Systems in the U.S.”

Carol formally retired from Glenbrook in June 2020, but remains an important friend and advisor to the firm.