Chari has added former Visa executive Aurélien Pichon to its board as an independent director as the Moroccan fintech shifts from serving retailers to building financial infrastructure for banks, telcos, corporations and fintechs across Francophone Africa.
Pichon served until recently as Global Head of Client Operations and Services at Visa, where he led a worldwide organization of close to 5,000 people. He was elevated to the global role in 2024 after heading Operations and Client Services for Visa’s Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) region, which includes the markets where Chari operates. He is based in the Middle East.
Pichon spent more than two decades working across technology, data and payments, including senior roles at Thomson Reuters and Google before joining Visa.
His appointment comes as Chari, founded in 2020 by Ismael Belkhayat and Sophia Alj and headquartered in Casablanca, expands beyond its original B2B commerce and retailer-distribution business into regulated financial infrastructure.
The company is developing agency banking services that turn neighborhood shops into cash-in, cash-out and financial-service points. Chari says its agency-banking network is expected to grow from thousands to tens of thousands of points of service.
Chari is also building fintech-infrastructure-as-a-service through its BaaS business, making its financial rails available to banks, telecommunications companies, corporations, fintechs, startups and other financial institutions.
That expansion puts greater emphasis on the infrastructure connecting financial institutions with merchants, rather than solely on Chari’s direct relationship with retailers.
Pichon’s experience running large-scale payments operations is intended to support that shift. Chari said his board mandate will focus on payments expertise at scale, institutional relationships across Africa and the Middle East, and operating discipline as it expands its infrastructure business.
His experience spans issuers, acquirers, processors and regulators across emerging markets, according to Chari. The company also pointed to his work building and running large service organizations as it prepares to industrialize its infrastructure for third-party clients.
“What Chari is building is the unglamorous, essential layer of financial infrastructure — the famous ‘last mile’ that actually reaches the merchant around the corner,” Pichon said in the announcement. “I have spent a significant amount of my career close to the institutions that power small and medium businesses, that operate as B2B end to end, that issue and acquire; Chari is now close to the millions of small businesses that make up the real economy in this region.”
“That combination is where the next decade of payments in Africa will be decided, and I am delighted to be joining the board at this stage,” he said.
Chari co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ismael Belkhayat said the company was looking for someone with direct experience operating payments businesses at the scale it aims to reach.
“We did not look for a name. We looked for someone who has personally run payments operations at a scale we intend to reach, and who understands both the institutional side and the merchant side of this business,” Belkhayat said.
Belkhayat said Pichon brings experience from Chari’s region as well as other high-growth markets including Asia and Latin America.
Chari is a Y Combinator alumnus and has positioned its BaaS business as a way to make its infrastructure available beyond its own retail network. The strategy broadens the company’s potential role in the payments ecosystem from distributing financial services through merchants to providing infrastructure that other financial-services providers can use.
Pichon’s appointment comes as Chari develops that infrastructure business alongside its Super App and agency-banking operations across Francophone Africa.
