Our Mission

We live in a highly dynamic technology environment. Our clients experience this in many different ways. The markets for their products are changing. New business models are emerging that could be exceptional opportunities for their organizations, or existential threats. Our mission, as a company, is to help our clients chart and navigate these stormy waters to ensure their survival and success. Successful clients enhance our own success.

Our Focus

We focus on clients who are driven by technology. This includes organizations that offer technology-based product or services, or those where technology represents an integral part of their operations. In all cases, their future success is driven, at least in part, by understanding how changes in technology are likely to have an impact on their organizations.

What we do

Our clients engage us to provide them with the insight and advice on how to succeed in a rapidly changing world. In doing so, we draw on our experience of more than three decades in entrepreneurship, innovation, product development, marketing, market research and analysis, competitive intelligence, technology foresight and strategic advisory services.

Who we are

Christie Christelis is the founder and president of Technology Strategies International Inc. (TSI), a Canadian technology market research and strategy consulting firm. He is Canada’s leading payments industry analyst and has been tracking developments in the Canadian payments industry for more than twenty five years.

In the payments sector, Christie has provided advisory services to clients on EMV implementation, virtual currencies, fintech, mobile payments and wallets, P2P payments, debit payments, smart cards, payments and loyalty programs, simulating payments markets, and benchmarking machine learning algorithms for e-commerce authentication. He has also conducted payments market studies on payments markets in Canada, USA, Europe, Tunisia and South Africa. TSI publishes the Canadian Payments Forecast and Canadian Consumer Payments Survey on an annual basis and has conducted foresight reports on virtual currencies, BNPL and tokenization. He has presented papers on the adoption of advanced payments technologies at payments conferences in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and South Africa.

In the broadcast sector, Christie has been managing and executing projects on broadcasting accessibility for Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. He has managed four grant funded programs focused on live captioning. For more details on these projects please see the Live Captioning Canada website.

He has designed and delivered in-depth technology and regulatory training programs to fixed and mobile operators, broadcasters, regulators, training institutes and government ministries from more than 20 countries around the world under the auspices of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization.

An electronics engineer by background, Christie went on to complete a post-graduate diploma in signal processing and control systems. He worked as development engineer in the aersopace sector for several years before moving into engineering management and then project and program management. He has a certificate in Program Management from the American Graduate University and an MBA from the University of South Africa. Christie has worked at the sharp end of technological innovation and co-founded a number of technology startups that successfully commercialized their products.

Partners

Mansour Aaron Karimzadeh is the CEO of the Secure Payments Academy. He applies nearly 25 years of experience to his leadership role. His background includes payment and transaction processing systems in the financial industry. He has been instrumental in implementing many large card and payment processing projects worldwide specializing in smart cards, EMV, NFC, digital payments, online fraud, digital currency, tokenization, 3DS etc. – including projects in the UK, Canada, USA, Latin America, Middle East and Australia.

He served as a Board member of Global Platform and Chair of its Marketing Center. He previously managed a smart card consultancy and software company that was acquired by ACI Worldwide. At ACI he served as VP of Operations and Director of Smart Cards Unit. He was elected to the EMV Migration Forum (US Payments Forum) Steering Committee. He also chairs its Communications and Educations Working Committee and member of its Debit, Mobile, Transit Committees.

Mansour has been providing payments consulting and training based on his experiences from the field working with acquirers, issuers, merchants and payment technology vendors around the world for the past 10 years. He runs the training entity www.securepaymentsacademy.com providing training internationally. The Secure Payments Academy™ (SPA) provides payments training workshops for all new dynamic security training based on the EMV technology and other advanced payments technologies, that cover the latest trends and best practices in global payments. SPA’s expertise and knowledge is generated through its consulting business practice under www.scil.us. This unique knowledge base is applied throughout each workshop or training session.

Mike Vaselenak is a specialist in payments systems product strategies, with over three decades of experience.

He has defined payments product strategies and specified software and services under those strategies for leading corporations including top tier banks, merchants, card networks, loyalty programs, crown corporations, telcos, credit unions, and governments.

Mike has developed in depth research analyses on payments topics including tokenization and ISO20022, and was the lead author of TSI's report titled Retail Payments Tokenisation in Canada: The Paths to Success for Canadian Payments Stakeholders. Mike has co-chaired industry forums on prepaid cards, and multi-application card issuance. He has also lead Canadian Institute sessions on new payments technologies, prepaid, gift, and stored value cards, and payments compliance. Mike has also presented at multiple conferences including Payments Canada Summit, Canadian Institute, Cartes North America, and ACT Cardware.