‘If you have the health insurance, America is a great place to get sick’

Living in Atlanta, Georgia, is very different from Ireland, says Jonathan O’Connor. “No one walks anywhere and there’s little to no public transport. We have six cars, one for each of the kids and one for the dog, who has nerve issues getting into a high car so we got him a mini.”
O’Connor, originally from Sutton in Co Dublin, went from the Institute of Education to Portobello College, where he attained a BA in accounting in 1995. His first job at TSB Bank in the mortgage department was too mundane for his career vision. Six months later he went to London to work with JP Morgan’s foreign exchange middle market where he realised everything was starting to be computer driven.
He returned to Ireland and completed a master’s in IT for strategic management with Staffordshire University out of what was then DIT Kevin Street.
His next move was to Kindle Banking Systems, which sold software to banks in emerging countries from its base at East Point Business Park in Dublin.
“I was given six weeks’ training and they sent me off to Haiti, where I installed a bank system, and I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I was back four weeks and they sent me off to Warsaw for seven months.”
His next assignment was in Johannesburg, where he installed Y2K upgrades for nine countries in Africa. “It was a funny time with all these Irish people running around in navy suits carrying floppy discs in suitcases.”
On a return trip to Dublin, during his stint in Africa he made what he describes as his best career move. “I met this beautiful woman called Susan, who was working in the office, and she gave out to me because I was late with a report. Convincing her to marry me is the best sales pitch I ever made.”
In 2001, Jonathan moved to EuroConex, which became Elavon – a big employer in Arklow and Dublin at the time. He then went to First Data and ran ecommerce for the UK and Europe between 2006 and 2012.
“The CEO asked me to relocate to Atlanta to the head office, and I worked there until 2018 as senior VP of institutional sales: that company became Fiserv. I was interested in crypto and the emerging markets, so I took the role of chief commercial officer at Trust Payments in Atlanta, in a job that saw me commuting to the UK and Malta extensively.”
He did this until 2023, when everything stopped. “For most of my life, my brain treated my body like an inconvenience. Suddenly I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in my spine,” he recalls.
His days of international commuting were over, and for the next year he had to dig deep as he underwent multiple surgeries and a specialised form of therapy called proton radiation.
“While expensive, if you have the health insurance, America’s a great place to get sick. The treatment options are second to none,” he says. “Ironically my surgeon spent time as a specialist registrar in neurosurgery in Beaumont Hospital, so we struck an immediate relationship. You need health insurance over here. Even the dog has his own plan and he has a weight to reach every quarter.”
O’Connor joined Synovus Bank in March 2024 where he is now divisional chief executive of merchant sponsorship and the services division called Maast.
Networking is an important part of his journey and he found good connections at the Irish Hibernian Society, where he was involved in fundraising for the St Patricks Day Ball in Atlanta.
He sits on two fintech boards in Atlanta including the board of American Transaction Processors Coalition (ATPC), which used the recent college football match between Florida State and Georgia Tech in the Aviva Stadium to blend fintech and sporting opportunities and build bridges between Dublin and Atlanta.
“Since I started going north of 50 years of age, mentoring and knowledge transfer is a big part of what I do. I enjoy working with young graduates and am no longer working 16 hours a day – trying to keep it below 10.”
“Atlanta is a transient city but what I love about the US are the possibilities. In business, failure is accepted and you are encouraged to get up and do it again.
“In terms of opportunities, America brings a different type of lifestyle. We live in the south, where it’s very hot. We miss Irish food but the benefit here is an outdoor lifestyle that the three kids enjoy. They are all American now, each of them in college in three different states.”
O’Connor has a second home in Rosemary Beach, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico where he holidays and which his wife runs as a vacation rental. “The only issue now is that as we get older, our parents are too and that’s a difficult part of life at the moment.”