Awards Committee - Australia

Anna Brownlee is a Director in Client Relationship Management for ANZ with Visa, focusing on business owners.

Anna has a background in professional services at PwC and Deloitte, working with large multinationals across a broad range of industries to deliver projects across compliance, strategy and operations.

Prior to joining Visa Anna worked in a dedicated payments practice helping a broad range of players across the industry from the Big 4 banks, neobanks and smaller fintechs. She has assisted financial institutions in meeting their commitments and obligations based on legislation and applying these to complex legacy payment flows as well as optimizing their processes and technology to better meet their business and customer needs.

Anna holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Melbourne and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Carolyn leads the J.P. Morgan CB International Banking team based in Sydney, Australia and is the Network Lead for APAC. Carolyn has over 26 Yeats of experience in corporate banking. She joined J.P. Morgan in March 2014 and has been leading the team for the past five years.

Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Carolyn worked for National Australia Bank over a period of 19 years in both Australia and the UK. She had responsibility for capital structuring, risk management and general relationship carriage across her client base, which most recently included emerging single commodity companies, ASX listed companies and large multinationals in the mining sector. Prior to specialising in the resources segment, Carolyn covered a diverse range of industrial companies in both a credit and client facing capacity.

Carolyn has a Bachelor of Commerce degree, majoring in Economics and Management from Wollongong University, and a Masters of Business in Finance from the University of Technology, Sydney.

She is married with two children; and plays competitive field hockey.

Emily Roberts is Vice President & General Manager, Internal Card Services for Australia & New Zealand. She is also the relationship lead for American Express’ strategic partnerships across the airline and retail sectors. Emily is a member of the Australia Country Leadership Team and a Director on the board of Centurion Finance Limited.

Emily joined American Express in Sydney in 2004 and has worked in Strategy, Marketing, Sales and General Management roles across the Consumer, SME and Merchant businesses. Prior to her current role she was the General Manager, Merchant Services for Australia and New Zealand, where she was responsible for significantly expanding merchant acceptance and improving merchant satisfaction, whilst growing revenues across both markets.

Having begun her career working in consumer insights and marketing strategy, Emily utilises customer-driven strategies to identify and exceed customer needs and deliver business growth. She has extensive experience developing and implementing strategic plans at an account, segment and market level across both B2C and B2B businesses.

Emily is a champion for Inclusion & Diversity and is an Executive Sponsor for both our Community Partnerships and the newly-established Disabilities Awareness Network. She also plays an active role in the Families@Amex network and as a PRIDE ally.

Outside work, Emily is married to Tony and has 3 children (Maddie, Sophie and Tom) as well as a new puppy, Max.

Sonja is Head of Fintech at Coles, leading the team building and delivering strategic technology solutions for payments and financial services. Coles is one of the largest EFT transactional processing entities in Australia.

Sonja is an experienced financial services executive with deep Payments expertise. Prior to Coles, Sonja served as Head of Wrap Operations at Colonial First State and as Head of Payments & Cash Operations Australia at ANZ Bank.

During her career Sonja has driven large payments and operations transformations. Sonja has previously held senior roles at NAB, Citibank and KPMG.

Sonja is a Senior Fellow of FINSIA (Financial Services Institute of Australasia).

Debra Taylor is Co-founder and COO of Fintech scale-up’s OpenSparkz and PAX Technology. She is a board member of Stone & Chalk and serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience within the industry. She has received multiple awards including in 2020, the Women in Payments - Distinguished Payments Professional, a lifetime achievement award

Alison has worked in banking for over 20 years and currently holds the position of Trade head for Australia and New Zealand leading a team of professionals responsible for import and exports, as well as our structured trade finance solutions. Prior to this role Alison spent much of her career in the UK and Europe holding positions across a number of facets of Citi's Treasury and Trade Solutions including liquidity management, cash pooling, short term investments and in sales managing global multinational relationships for the bank.”

Lisa Vasic has had a career in banking and finance spanning over 25 years. The early part of her career was spent in Retail and Wealth followed by a move to the Institutional Bank in the mid 90’s across relationship and product roles.

In the last 20 years, she has focused on specialising in Transaction Banking with management roles spanning emerging businesses, Business Development, Corporate and Institutional Banking.

In 2015, Lisa’s role of managing the Non-Bank Financial Institutions was expanded to encompass Banks with responsibilities across eight geographies, three discreet product lines (Cash, Trade and Clearing) and four sub segments. 2018 saw Lisa take on responsibility for Transaction Banking’s largest geography; Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Lisa is degree qualified holding a BA from the University of Sydney with majors in Economics and Economic History and has recently completed a Digital Transformation program at MIT, Cambridge.