Women in Payments

Shubhi Rao is not the kind of person who looks to back down from a challenge. In deciding where she wanted to spend her career she did something no woman in her family had done before.

During her seven years at U.S. Bank, Kristy Carstensen has always been a creator. After all, she had to define what her job would be when she accepted what was an entirely new role at U.S. Bank five years ago, that of senior vice president and chief financial officer of the Payments Group.

Driving rapid consumer adoption of faster payments and the bank-run person-to-person payment network, Zelle, has been a core role for Early Warning’s Lou Anne Alexander over the past decade.

To successfully create new payment forms and uses, it’s critical to have a highly functioning team developing and promoting their ideas — something Colleen Taylor has fully embraced at Mastercard.

While a career in payments can allow a person to touch on many different aspects of payments services, PayPal's Prashanthi Ravanavarapu can say her focus has remained quite clear.

Over five years as CEO of WEX, Melissa Smith has led the international corporate payments company through several quarters of growth through organic expansion and acquisitions. One of her signature moves is the artful use of partnerships to extend WEX’s payments technology in the fuel card, health care and travel sectors.

Jenifer Swallow has been here before, feeling the excitement of being in in an industry that was about to change commerce forever.

Whenever Facebook adds something that more closely ties its network to shopping, service or payments, it has an immediate ripple effect. And Marketplace is becoming a major part of Facebook’s influence.

The payments industry is a complex ecosystem, one that Carolyn Homberger is happy to navigate. As president of global sales for ACI the past seven years, Homberger views the payments industry as akin to "a supersonic airline driven by some of the most skilled pilots in the business."

Minal Hasan, a lawyer turned prominent fintech venture capitalist, has strong views on founder dramas, cryptocurrency, and why banks need to step up their technology game.

Patty Watson had a tenured career in the banking and payments industry before becoming a senior executive with TSYS. Her path included a 15-year stint with a financial institution that she found to be instrumental in developing her career as an innovator.

Debra Rossi has been on the front lines of payments innovation since the late 1990s, when the world of e-commerce was still in its infancy.

A motivating speech from a female executive at the Ogilvy ad agency 15 years ago helped steer Denise Pickett to new heights at American Express. As did having a family willing to move to the U.S. from Canada.

The wave of payments fraud that's sweeping the globe shows no signs of abating. Martina King has an answer in an artificial intelligence-driven platform that has drawn the interest of some of the world's largest banks, payment processors, merchant acquirers, insurance companies and gaming organizations.

Madeline Aufseeser's background prepared her well for a career as an technology entrepreneur. In her previous role as a financial services industry analyst, Aufseeser was responsible for taking the temperature of an entire industry and knowing how an event in one area could spark opportunity in another.

As the chief executive of Green Dot Bank, Mary Dent’s career has taken many turns to get to where she is today — from lawyer to executive to board member and, finally, to CEO. But one specific piece of advice stands out from early on in her career.

They laughed at her. Now she's taking their customers.

To accomplish what she has in her 10-year tenure with Mastercard, Dana J. Lorberg simply had to be two things: "I am a programmer and a girl geek."

Business payments are among the last major transaction types to cling to paper checks, an automation gap that's both an annoyance and an opportunity for Nicole Tackett.

Stephanie Ferris has had two pivotal experiences in her career at Vantiv — first, leaving a 20-year career in finance to become general manager of Vantiv’s bank referral business; and second, becoming CFO of Vantiv (now Worldpay) in March 2017.