Julie Lickstein – NMI

Long before she negotiated acquisitions, Julie Lickstein negotiated an apartment lease. When she and her husband moved in together, she pushed back on the rent, then did the same with their wedding vendors, chasing better terms on everything from flowers to catering. These days, her oldest son has picked up the habit too, negotiating the bedtime routine with the same persistence his mother brings to her role as General Counsel of NMI. For Lickstein, that instinct is less about winning a negotiation than finding a practical, workable deal that has become the foundation of a legal career built on solving problems rather than simply flagging them.

Julie Lickstein | NMI | General Counsel

NMI is a global payments infrastructure platform that enables software companies, independent sales organizations and other payments partners to build and scale payment experiences by embedding payment processing directly into their own products. Its technology works behind the scenes across a wide range of industries and use cases, powering transactions from transit to retail. Since Lickstein joined as General Counsel in June 2023, NMI has grown from a company with strong individual offerings into one bringing those capabilities together as a broader, unified payments platform. Lickstein and her legal and compliance team have grown alongside it and played an increasingly important role in enabling that growth.

Building toward one platform

The clearest sign of that growth arrived in May, when NMI completed two acquisitions in the same month: Dwolla and Fee Navigator. Both deals expanded NMI’s capabilities and moved the company further toward the vision set by its Chief Executive Officer: giving software companies and payments partners more of what they need through a single payments platform. Before the acquisitions, Lickstein says, NMI had strong pieces of that vision but was still missing some key components.

Dwolla, with roughly 60 employees, brought money movement capabilities to NMI, along with its own established contracting structure, sales support processes and operational systems built over years as an independent company. That scale makes the integration more complicated from a legal standpoint. Lickstein’s team is now working to bring Dwolla’s contracts onto NMI paper, so customers can sign a single agreement covering the full suite of NMI products.

Fee Navigator presented a different kind of challenge. This smaller company brings to NMI an AI-driven pricing tool that helps payment providers model and optimize how they price services for their customers. Because Fee Navigator never had its own legal team, Lickstein’s group has been able to build its legal processes from scratch rather than unwind existing ones.

Much of the credit for how smoothly the deals have moved, Lickstein is quick to note, goes to NMI’s Chief Strategy Officer, who has led corporate development through three acquisitions during Lickstein’s tenure with the company. That partnership means legal and compliance are involved through the acquisition process, from due diligence and risk assessment through contracting alignment, regulatory considerations and integration planning. That broader business perspective is familiar territory for Lickstein, but a different dynamic than the one she experienced earlier in her career. She moved outside the legal department to serve as Director of Business Operations during an acquisition; she oversaw the operational side of merging two companies into one. That experience continues to shape how she approaches her role at NMI, looking not only at legal risk but also at what a decision means for the business as a whole.

A team built on trust

Lickstein built NMI’s legal and compliance function from the ground up, and she is now its longest-tenured member. The team has grown since her last profile and now includes two additional lawyers (and they are currently hiring for another), plus two non-lawyer legal professionals and a compliance group of three. Because she recruited every one of them herself, she has come to see the group less as direct reports and more as partners in the work.

“I think of the people on my team as colleagues and teammates rather than as me being their boss,” Lickstein says.

That trust took time to build. Lickstein evaluates new hires less on their first month, when everyone is still finding their footing and learning about the payments industry, and more on how they perform sixty to ninety days in, watching whether they ask thoughtful questions and show good judgment under pressure. During the hiring process, she still calls the new recruits’ prior colleagues and supervisors before extending an offer, believing reference conversations can reveal a lot.

That approach matters because the team’s remit has expanded alongside NM’s growth. Rather than operating simply as a review or approval function, legal and compliance increasingly work with teams across the company as products, partnerships and strategic initiatives take shape.

Leading with perspective

Lickstein describes her leadership style as centered on keeping people engaged in work that challenges them, understanding what each team member wants to develop toward and giving them room to grow in that direction. She sees a parallel in raising her three children aged six, four and one, where she enjoys watching them discover their own interests and encouraging them to pursue what excites them. Her daughter, for example, recently took up piano and tennis, and Lickstein says she loves seeing her enthusiasm grow as she finds the things she is passionate about.

“I want people excited about the job and the work, and to be engaged,” Lickstein says.

That same sense of intention shapes how Lickstein manages her own time. She is deliberate about setting boundaries around work and making space for the everyday routines that matter to her family, whether that is being there for after-school activities, having dinner together or doing bedtime.

She applies the same grounded thinking to how hard the team pushes itself. Borrowing a line from NMI’s Chief Financial Officer, Lickstein reminds her group that the stakes, while real, rarely call for panic.

She also encourages her team to keep risk in perspective and take ownership of decisions where appropriate. For Lickstein, that comes down to trust: she wants her team to feel confident making calls independently because she trusts their judgment.

“Our CFO has often said that we’re not saving lives here,” says Lickstein.

That perspective resonates with her personally. Her father is a doctor, so she grew up with a clear sense that some jobs carry very different consequences. It helps her keep pressure in perspective and give her team the space to make decisions without every issue needing to be escalated.

That outlook extends to how she views her own performance, including the inevitable missteps that come with running a larger team than she has ever managed before.

“I am not a perfect parent, and I am not a perfect manager, but I am always trying to improve and learn from my mistakes,” Lickstein says. It’s the same lesson she shares with her children: mistakes are part of learning, but the goal is not to make the same one twice.

Legal as a strategic partner

Beyond the acquisitions, Lickstein’s team is involved in all facets of the NMI business, from advising on new product ideas and strategic initiatives to ensuring employment, IP, commercial contracting, compliance, and corporate governance matters are being handled appropriately. Increasingly, the role is about getting involved early enough to help the business find a way forward, rather than assessing a decision after it has already been made.

One recent exciting project has involved building the legal and compliance framework behind a new surcharging feature, which will let merchants pass along a fee for credit card payments, which has its complications given the patchwork of state laws and card network rules. Her compliance team has also been focused on work tied to Canada’s Retail Payment Activities Act, a new regulatory framework that marks one of the first times NMI has come under direct oversight from a government regulator, a notable shift for a company that operates largely on the software side of payments and reflects NMI’s growing regulatory responsibilities as its platform and capabilities expand.

Artificial intelligence runs through much of NMI’s work too. It is increasingly showing up not only in how the company operates, but also in its products and the experiences it is building for customers. The acquisition of Fee Navigator added AI-driven pricing capabilities to NMI’s platform, helping payment providers make more informed pricing decisions. NMI is also thinking about how its payments infrastructure can support a future in which software platforms and AI agents increasingly initiate and manage commerce. NMI’s leadership and Board, including a Chief Operating Officer who joined through the Dwolla deal, is taking a deliberate approach to AI adoption as well. Lickstein’s team has worked alongside security and other teams to establish the governance required to support it. That includes an internal policy governing how employees use AI tools, paired with training, risk assessment and an inventory of tools in use. Her own team already leans on AI for research and first drafts of documents and emails, though she is careful about where that reliance ends.

“There is a huge difference between leaning into AI and solely relying on it,” Lickstein says.

As NMI continues bringing its capabilities together into a more unified platform, where customers can sign in once and reach every product they need, Lickstein sees the NMI vision getting closer, even if the two newest acquisitions still have some integration work ahead of them. She expects compliance to take on a bigger role in the company’s next chapter, as NMI expands its capabilities and operates in an increasingly complex payments and regulatory environment. Her interest in operations and strategy is already evident in the way she approaches the General Counsel role. Legal, in her view, is not simply there to identify what a company cannot do. Its value comes from understanding the business well enough to help determine how it can move forward responsibly and successfully. For now, she remains focused on the job in front of her: building a legal and compliance function that can help NMI scale, innovate and make good decisions as the business evolves, whether that means integrating an acquisition, launching a new product or navigating the next regulatory challenge.