Worldline, leading European payment service provider, has appointed Stefaan D’Hoore as Group Chief Risk & Compliance Officer (second line of defence). D’Hoore joins the Group Executive Committee and will report directly to CEO Pierre-Antoine Vacheron.
Stefaan D’Hoore, Group Chief Risk & Compliance Officer, Worldline
D’Hoore arrives with over 20 years of international experience spanning payments and financial services, having held senior leadership roles at two global giants: Visa and GE Capital.
At Visa, which D’Hoore joined in 2017, he rose through multiple leadership positions across Asia-Pacific and the United States. As Regional Risk Officer for Asia-Pacific, he managed network security and regulatory relationships while spearheading the rollout of artificial intelligence across regional teams. Before that, he was based in San Francisco with global risk management responsibilities.
Prior to Visa, D’Hoore served as Chief Operating Officer for Risk at GE Capital, overseeing EMEA and APAC operations, and held Chief Risk Officer roles in both Europe and the United States. He launched his career at JP Morgan as head of client relations within Global Custody.
“I am very pleased to welcome Stefaan as Group Chief Risk & Compliance Officer,” said Pierre-Antoine Vacheron, Chief Executive Officer of Worldline. “He will oversee our global risk management, compliance, and financial crime prevention functions, which are essential to Worldline’s operations. Stefaan brings strong experience with regulators and financial institutions at a critical moment in our Group’s transformation.”
D’Hoore holds a Master’s degree in Law from KU Leuven and an MBA from Vlerick Business School, both leading Belgian institutions.
Risk & compliance boost urgency in EU fintech segment
Strong risk & compliance leadership is now essential for European fintech companies. DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) came into full force in January 2025, requiring firms to prove operational resilience across their entire ICT supply chain. NIS2 and the EU AI Act layer further obligations on top. Into that already pressured landscape has arrived a tool that highlighted new and acute cybersecurity threat: Anthropic’s Claude Mythos identified thousands of major vulnerabilities across software including all major operating systems and web browsers and called for decisive and proactive risk management.
Cybersecurity specialists consider such AI capabilities a serious challenge for banks and their older technology infrastructure. This concern also strongly resonates for payment processors like Worldline, whose infrastructure underpins billions of transactions and needs to be both legally compliant and secure. For fintechs, the threat is even deeper, as advanced AI used by fraudsters can target not only payments themselves but also e-commerce disputes and other rule-based systems in financial niche.
“The debate around Anthropic’s Mythos has centered on what advanced AI could do to bank infrastructure. That is the right conversation to have. But there is a parallel threat already in motion that the industry has been slower to confront: the use of AI to manipulate the payment dispute system itself, not by breaking in, but by exploiting the rules from within. What Mythos clarifies is the direction of travel. The same autonomous chaining capability that alarms cybersecurity experts can be applied to any rule-based system, including the thresholds and policies that govern chargebacks. Unlike software vulnerabilities, those cannot simply be patched.”
Monica Eaton, Founder & CEO, Chargebacks911
In this evolving cyberthreat landscape, enahancing risk management units both technically and expertise-wise is essential for global payment players.
