Richard Fraher is the founder and principal of Payment Innovation & Regulation, LLC, which offers expert witness services and strategic consulting at the intersection of the payments business, technological innovation, law and regulation, and public policy.  He also serves as an adjunct professor at Emory University School of Law, teaching the law of payment systems.

Previously Dr. Fraher was legal counsel for the Federal Reserve’s Retail Payments Office with primary responsibility for the Fed’s check and ACH services. He led the Fed’s Payments Advisory Group, iwhich identified and resolved emerging legal and policy issues in the Fed’s payments services.  He was the principal author of the Federal Reserve Banks’ rules for image based check collection and return and same day ACH. He was instrumental in the creation of the FedGlobal ACH service, drafting and negotiating agreements with foreign banks and processors and shaping private sector rules that bridge the US ACH with foreign payment systems. He is named as an inventor in two patents related to payments processing and settlement. Before he joined the Fed, he was a senior attorney for the FDIC, working primarily in support of the bank examination function and prosecuting administrative enforcement actions.

Earlier in his career, he was an assistant professor of history at Harvard, visiting scholar at Cambridge University, and professor of law at Indiana University. Dr. Fraher is currently collaborating with an interdepartmental team at Mercer University that is building a new Fintech certificate program, including a course on regulatory and compliance issues arising from innovative technologies in financial services.