August 25, 2026 -  Tim Winston, former Principal Industry Specialist of Payments at AWS, has joined the Prime Factors team, bringing more than four decades of experience in payment cryptography, compliance, and security architecture to the company.

Drawing on an extensive background in payment cryptography, data protection, and systems architecture, Winston will serve in a Field CISO role, helping customers develop security strategies for payment card issuance and processing. He will provide guidance on payment card application development, payment key management for PCI PIN and P2PE, tokenization for PCI DSS compliance, protection of cardholder data, and the use of hardware security modules.

Winston’s computing experience spans software development, cybersecurity, systems architecture, compliance assessment, and management. He was a founding team member of AWS Payment Cryptography, the first cloud-native, HSM-based payment cryptography service, where he helped pioneer secure, scalable solutions for modern payment systems. He led the compliant design of the service, guiding it to achieve major industry certifications, including SOC, ISO, PCI DSS, PIN Security, P2PE, and 3DS, demonstrating his expertise in global compliance and security standards.

Winston was a founding member of AWS Security Assurance Services, where he supported customers in planning and achieving compliance for cloud-based applications. He also represented Amazon in key industry bodies, including the PCI Security Standards Council and ANSI X9 F6, contributing to the advancement of payment security frameworks. Prior to his time at AWS, he served as a principal assessor and consultant at Coalfire, advising organizations such as Amazon.com, AWS, Microsoft, Global Payments, and JPMorgan Chase on security and compliance initiatives.

“As the payment and data security landscape continues to grow more complex, there is a growing skills gap when it comes to payment security,” said Justin Teitt, President and CEO of Prime Factors. “We believe, now more than ever, enterprises in the payments space need partners who understand both the technology and the compliance frameworks that govern payments security. They also need solutions that encode payment security knowledge into solutions that simplify payment security and compliance, a combination that Prime Factors has built its reputation upon. Tim’s experience designing and certifying one of the industry’s most rigorous cloud payment security services is a perfect example of the caliber of skills, insights, and perspectives we need to continue to guide our customer solutions and our product roadmap. We are pleased to welcome him to the Prime Factors team.”

“Prime Factors has spent decades earning the trust of multinational payments organizations, that cannot afford to get security and compliance wrong,” said Winston. “For years, I have seen a clear market fit for solutions like the Bank Card Security System and EncryptRIGHT to help reduce the complexity of meeting the security and compliance standards that the payment card industry demands. I am looking forward to the opportunity to leverage what I have learned from building and certifying secure systems at scale to help payments enterprises secure their most sensitive data as part of the Prime Factors team.”