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.

As General Manager Payments and Financial Services at Australia Post, Deanne Keetelaar is responsible for a broad range of products and services for consumer, business and government customers.

Previously, Deanne was General Manager Payments at NAB, where her portfolio included domestic and international payments, and commercialisation of the New Payments Platform.

With more than 15 years’ experience in Financial Services, Deanne brings a passion for delivering great customer experiences through innovative solutions. Her skill in creating high performing businesses and teams draws upon her experiences across multiple industry verticals in product management, business development, quality improvement and risk management.

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

Felicity Blake is the Country Manager for FIS New Zealand. Felicity brings more than 20 years’ experience in the payments industry to the role, where she is based in Auckland, New Zealand. Her key focus is developing relationships to build strategic partnerships in the complex environment of payments technology. Felicity is well connected with the payments industry, both in New Zealand and internationally. Felicity is a leader in driving thought leadership, and as an active member of Payments New Zealand, she brings her global knowledge and expertise to the local conversation on payments innovation in the region.

Felicity is a passionate advocate of diversity & inclusion and regularly contributes to programs in this area

Libby Roy is the VP and Managing Director of PayPal Australia. In this role Libby will be focused on managing the company through the separation from eBay Inc. this year and building PayPal as an independent digital wallet provider for consumers and a payment partner for merchants in Australia. Libby will also work collaboratively with Australian businesses and industry partners to help respond to the evolving payments landscape and accelerate and enable commerce in Australia. As part of her role, Libby sits on the Australian board and serves as an executive committee member of the PayPal Asia Pacific leadership team.

An experienced, performance-driven business leader, Libby joined PayPal in 2015 following a record of successful leadership of large, complex professional and financial services firms, with a particular focus on those that are highly regulated and require careful governance of technology. Her experience has mostly been gained in global companies where she has been accountable for divisional bottom line results and has led functional areas including marketing, operations, product development and sales.

Libby has repeatedly delivered results by driving change in complex businesses across geographies and legal structures. She most recently served as Director of AMP Corporate Super, where she was responsible for over $25bn in funds and where she developed a flagship new business model to help meet the changing regulatory and consumer environment. Previous to this, Libby was a senior executive at American Express across Asia Pacific and a Principal in leading management consultancy, Booz.Allen, where she advised and led major growth, change and restructuring programmes.

Libby has significant experience at board level as both a chairperson and member of numerous joint venture and subsidiary boards in both the travel and financial planning industry. A graduate of Curtin University of Technology in Australia, Roy was awarded an MBA with distinction from the University of New South Wales in 1995.

Sonja is responsible for leading Colonial First State’s Wrap Operations business in Australia. The role involves driving operations excellence in the fund administration and custody of platform assets, business support and servicing to support a leading Wrap platform for members and advisors.

Sonja joined Colonial First State (CFS) in March 2019.  CFS forms part of the Wealth Management division of CBA, bringing together the Group’s funds management and distribution capability.

Sonja is an experienced financial services executive with deep Payments expertise.  Prior to Colonial First State, Sonja served as Head of Payments & Cash Operations Australia at ANZ Bank for 7 years.  During her career Sonja has driven large payments and operations transformations.  Sonja has also worked at NAB, Citibank, KPMG, State Street and Arab Bank (Austria). 

With a degree in Arts and post graduate qualifications in Banking & Finance and eCommerce from Monash University, Sonja has more than 20 years’ experience in financial services and payments.

Lisa Vasic has had a career in banking and finance spanning over 20 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.
Lisa’s responsibilities have included Relationship Banking roles across diversified portfolios to Telecommunications and Media companies.
In the last 15 years, she has focused on specialisation 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.

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.

Anita is responsible for leading Mastercard’s Prepaid Program Management business across Asia Pacific. The role involves driving the company’s end-to-end prepaid management division and product value proposition to support best in class consumer & corporate prepaid payments products for issuers, merchants and consumers.

Anita has worked for Mastercard for six years, previously leading the prepaid finance team in Asia pacific. A specialist in the financial services and payments industry, Anita has developed strong qualifications in business collaboration, commercial acumen, and performance driven leadership. In her current business role, Anita focuses on the development and execution of prepaid program optimisation strategies and the enhancement of program management servicing capabilities to drive long-term volume and revenue growth. Anita has worked with issuer and merchant partners to develop best in class prepaid payments programs across key strategic markets including, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and India. As part of her role, Anita sits on the Australian and New Zealand boards for the Prepaid Management Services businesses and is part of the Australasia Mastercard leadership team.

Prior to Mastercard, Anita worked across different industries including financial services, telecommunications and FMCG. With a degree in Commerce from the Australian National University, Anita has more than 15 years’ experience in finance and business leadership across Asia Pacific.