Past Winners - 2020

Monica Eaton-Cardone has educated merchants and financial institutions about hidden threats in the payment fraud landscape for over a decade. She established Europe’s first chargeback remediation specialist –Chargebacks911 – to tackle the £100 billion chargeback fraud problem and expose unfair practices against merchants. With Monica’s direction, Chargebacks911 pioneered the first chargebacks knowledge base for merchants, engineering an eight-step representment process that is now industry best practice for merchants in digital goods industries, allowing them to identify friendly fraud that was previously impossible to detect. Monica brings unparalleled knowledge of all sides of the risk landscape, excelling in: • Threat metrics analysis • Product and technology system development • eCommerce retention • Risk relativity • Agile process design

As a leader in the paymentsspace, Cheryl has long been a proponent of change and transformation in the industry. Cheryl is akey player in championing women business owners at Mastercard. She leads the company’s work tospotlight female business owners and helps enable equal funding opportunities for underservedcommunities including women small business owners and entrepreneurs. This year, she led thelaunch of Mastercard’s Women’s Business Advisory Council which leverages the dynamicperspectives and industry experience of its members to help ensure the solutions Mastercard bringsto market continue to meet the evolving needs of the segment. She leads and inspires her team tomake a difference and drive forward work that creates impact. Cheryl believes that when yousupport women entrepreneurs, you’re not only supporting the economy, you are supporting theirdesire to solve real needs and make a difference in people’s lives. Her work goes beyond justmaking a verbal commitment to this segment. Under her leadership, Mastercard is taking action,providing the insights, solutions and resources female small business owners need to thrive.

Rawan Shawar has been described by her peers and managers as someone who has a natural leadership style and influential presence. She is technically sound, eager to continue to learn, and works to actively share her knowledge with her peers and team to enable their success. Having come up the ranks as an engineer at ACI through sheer hard work and dedication, Rawan has rapidly grown from being a listener at product meetings to an active contributor and has received praise from her peers,managers and even customers as a result. A project manager for a large bank customer has remarked, “I want to say thank you to Rawan for her constant enthusiasm and positive attitude to addressing product issues. I absolutely know that I can rely on her to help, and to drive things through to completion. This has been a really important contributor to customer satisfaction.Thanks so much Rawan!!” As a senior software engineer and team lead at ACI Worldwide, Rawan works with a team of engineers to design, develop and test ACI products that help acquire,authenticate, switch and authorize financial transactions across multiple channels. Working with ACI’s internationally recognized banks and retail customers, Rawan and her team focus on developing and delivering code changes for customer projects preparing to go-live in production.The goal of these projects is to install and configure the payment solution that would allow these customers to be certified by financial networks such as VISA, MasterCard, Star, FD, AmEx, among others. The urgency of certification testing and go-live schedules creates very demanding deadlines,yet Rawan looks forward to celebrating every customer milestone as if it were the first.

Talbott is a strong advocate forfemale leadership and proponent of career development for females in the workplace. Traditionallyfintech has been a very male dominated industry, especially for leadership roles. A recent studyfound the average percentage of women in the C-Suite at fintech companies is 19 percent.Talbottbelieves that real change needs to be supported from the top of an organization in terms ofrecruiting, developing, retaining and promoting talented female leaders. Nearly 50 percent ofBlackhawk Network’s leadership positions are held by females, including both the CEO and CTOrole—highly unusual for the industry. Female leadership is always a main focus for Talbott, wholeads from the ground up. She recognizes the importance of female mentorship and continuouslypushes for Blackhawk to be involved in organizations supporting the advancement women inpayments. Blackhawk participates in and sponsors a number of industry and local organizations thatpromote career development for women in payments.

Mary Rosendahl leads FraudEducation, Risk and Security Product Management for the corporate online, file and mobile banking channels. Mary is the resident educator for GTS based on her formal credentials (M. Edfrom NIU), her 35 years in transaction banking, her membership of the CashPro leadership team,and her role (that she volunteered for) on the GTS employee satisfaction council (ESAT). YTD, her team has completed 135 sessions on fraud and risk, educating thousands of clients. Mary is a regular speaker at conferences and events, most recently at AFP. Mary cares passionately about her colleagues, wanting them to be ready and capable to adapt to the constant change of the payments industry. She proactively launched a weekly internal education series on treasury product management: topics included, education on market intelligence, voice of client, product strategy,commercialization, risk management. These sessions quickly became a favorite and were extended to a broader audience.

Lawrence has had a 20 year career in the payments industry, with nearly all of this time spent at Visa. She started in a rotational management training program and now leads the Global Client Services function at Visa, a team of3,000 employees responsible for providing world class operational service for Visa clients.

Throughout her career, she has played key roles in developing initiatives that have been instrumental in shaping the way payments work today. Within her team, she has led transformational change, shifting the culture and restructuring the team to be better aligned with the business and clients to provide best in class operational and technical support.

She has increased diversity across the leadership team and plays an active role in diversity and inclusion,leadership and mentorship initiatives at Visa. She was the first woman to join the Presidents management team at Visa, and she is a well-respected member of Visa’s executive management team, often called on by the Executive Committee and peers for counsel on strategic issues, critical initiatives, and new/changing company policies.

Angela has over 9 years of product management experience in payments, with particular expertise in merchant acquiring and eCommerce. At Fiserv, Angela leads global cross-functional teams to develop eCommerce solutions, POS terminals and apps for Australian businesses, and increasingly for APAC. She is trusted by the Fiserv Australia management team being regularly engaged on strategic client bids and new business initiatives. Her high quality eCommerce go-to-market content is being used beyond Australia in our global businesses. Angela builds great relationships with her colleagues. She is very strong at building an understanding that goes beyond the surface level to help understand what motivates individuals. Angela is always eager to improve her capability set leveraging a wide array of both company offered programs and external programs

Danielle led the launch of PayPal Australia’s mCommerce Trends Report and PayPal’s mCommerce Index. This bi-annual research report positions PayPal as an informed customer champion, while supporting businesses during a period of digital transformation and change. The launch of the mCommerce Trends Report in May generated 279 pieces of coverage with an estimated reach of 9.7M and the local launch of the mCommerce Index in September generated 436 pieces of coverage with an estimated reach of 13.8M. Danielle led the launch of PayPal’s global ‘Give Better’ holiday campaign in Australia. The campaign encouraged Australians to ‘give better’ over the festive season by purchasing gifts for their loved ones that gave a little extra ‘good’ – whether that be through buying sustainable products or from businesses with a social conscience. With a spend of just $300k, the campaign generated $1 million in revenue, making it immense success with a ROI of 233%. Paid media delivered 520K marketing attributed TXNs. For comparison, we achieved an average Cost Per Transaction of $0.72, with the global benchmark for a strong campaign being $0.75.

As Head of Products, Asia Pac at Blackhawk Network, Cassie Loneragan has made tremendous contributions to both the company’s business as well as the branded payments space. Her work in nurturing and developing Blackhawk’s suite of Original Content products in the region—specifically, its multi-merchant cards—have driven value both for consumers and brands alike. With the introduction of a new multi-merchant gift card in 2016, Cassie and her team not only satisfied an unfulfilled customer need but discovered a way to drive incremental value for Blackhawk’s retail partners. Aside from Cassie’s work around multi-merchant cards, her work ethic, non-compromising high standards, and unwavering support of her team and co-workers has earned her immense admiration and respect throughout Blackhawk. Her contributions have been lauded by many, including Blackhawk CEO and President Talbott Roche, who strongly supports Cassie’s nomination. Kristy current manages the Domestic Payments, Commercial Cards and Pricing & Billing product and Transformation portfolios at Westpac Institutional Bank which includes leadership of circa 30 people. She has had many years experience in Payments from product to client facing, strategy and project delivery. She chairs and manages the ongoing ‘Enterprise Payments’ transformation program and aligns stakeholders to achieve key payments outcomes. She also represents Westpac on the NPPA Operating Committee, Mandate Payment Service Steering Committee and BPay OPAG where she actively expresses a view and contributes to Industry outcomes. She is also nominated for NPPA, BPay and eftpos scheme merger Working Group. Kristy has led the successful implementation of the NPP program for Westpac, she also established and executed the Payments Technology strategy and the St George Business Bank Transactional Banking strategy in recent years. She was recently recognised with a Westpac Institutional Bank ‘Partnership’ quarterly award for her role in the NPP delivery leadership team and has received CEO recognition for the last two years for her contribution. Debra has promoted payments innovation through vision and perseverance by identifying, along with the advent of Open Banking, latent demand for innovation at POS particularly the EFTPOS payment device. Instead of ‘dumb’ terminals governed by legacy, proprietary software there was the opportunity to empower merchants with a solution based on open sourced system architecture. The payment’s network is dominated by financial institutions who are responsible for approx 95% of all EFTPOS deployments which has created a high barrier to entry. This has meant merchants especially SME’s have been held captive to a rigid, traditional offering based on proprietary software. Debra’s vision and perseverance led her to competitively secure the distribution rights for PAX Technology who are now considered the global OEM leaders Android based payment terminals underpinned by their cloud (SaaS) based PAXSTORE. By bringing PAX Technology to Australia Debra has delivered a new world of choice, real time data and customer engagement for merchants, and a flexible, seamless and digitised POS for the next generation of customers led by the digitally savvy Millennials.

Debra has promoted payments innovation through vision and perseverance by identifying, along with the advent of Open Banking, latent demand for innovation at POS particularly the EFTPOS payment device. Instead of ‘dumb’ terminals governed by legacy, proprietary software there was the opportunity to empower merchants with a solution based on open sourced system architecture. The payment’s network is dominated by financial institutions who are responsible for approx 95% of all EFTPOS deployments which has created a high barrier to entry. This has meant merchants especially SME’s have been held captive to a rigid, traditional offering based on proprietary software. Debra’s vision and perseverance led her to competitively secure the distribution rights for PAX Technology who are now considered the global OEM leaders Android based payment terminals underpinned by their cloud (SaaS) based PAXSTORE. By bringing PAX Technology to Australia Debra has delivered a new world of choice, real time data and customer engagement for merchants, and a flexible, seamless and digitised POS for the next generation of customers led by the digitally savvy Millennials. Debra richly deserves to be recognised for her unique and positive contribution to the payments industry. She has been an established entrepreneur in the fintech/payments space for 25 years during which she has also initiated 12 start ups with four successful exits. Debra’s leadership approach is exemplified by her ability to formulate and express independent thinking based on a ‘solution and resolution’ approach along with the valued and proven ability to encourage and instil payments innovation. Debra has collaborated with senior leadership from diverse range of global companies including; Oracle, IBM, Diebold, Samsung, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, NCR and Unisys. Domestically she has worked at a senior executive level with; Olivetti, ATO, St George Bank, Suncorp Bank, Westpac, NIB, Medibank Private, HCF, Qantas, Virgin, Caltex, BP, and Metcash.

Contributes to Payment Debate: - Victoria is a well-known and requested speaker in payments -most recently speaking at Money 2020 in Las Vegas, Know Identity Conference in Singapore, Fintech Australia Regulatory Roundtable, Cyber Security in Government Panellist, Asia Payments Digital ID webinar. Strives for Future of Payments- Led the Australian Payments Council Future Payments Strategy for past 5 years, Driven AusPayNet Strategic roadmap, has driven the Digital ID Strategy for Australia Proven Record of Projects: Many examples- most recently development of Trust ID framework from concept to development and leading to execution by participants High Integrity- as supported by references below Committed to mentorship- Victoria has supported many individual members in payment strategy development and policy advocacy Leads by example- many examples listed in references. Has specifically advised payment industry on Digital ID use cases and business case developments.

As Executive Vice President, Business Financial Services for RBC’s Canadian Banking division, Greg is responsible for setting the strategic direction and leading product, strategy and industry segment teams that serve Canadian small business and commercial clients through RBC’s extensive business banking network. Based on a strong commitment to its clients, Business Financial Services holds the leading market share across Canada in business loans, deposits and investments.

With more than 30 years in the financial services and payments sector, Greg has had a wide range of senior management and executive positions within RBC’s branch network and head office. Prior to his current role, he was Executive Vice President, Enterprise Services where he led Procurement; Enterprise Optimization; Acquisition Integration & Enterprise Decision Support; Strategy & Transformation; Corporate Real Estate and Enterprise Business Continuity Management. Greg has also served as SVP, Service and Operations, RBC Insurance as well as a number of regional senior executive roles.

Greg earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University. An avid community supporter, Greg currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors for Trillium Health Partners Foundation and serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Symcor Inc., Moneris Solutions Corporation and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

Sharon is an innovative leader defining and executing the strategy behind BMO’s North American Treasury & Payment Solutions (TPS) Commercial Banking business, responsible for the development, delivery and servicing of treasury management, payments, trade finance, corporate card and liquidity solutions. She inspires her team to think creatively, leading to a reimagined commercial banking digital experience and a simplified payment platform to better meet customers’ evolving needs. Having successfully advocated the need to increase the bank’s technology investment in payments, she has facilitated the rollout of an award-winning payment hub, industry-leading mobile app with multi-factor biometric authentication, and introduction of robotics process automation. She has built an impressive career in industries where there are few senior women and mentors others, promoting the importance of gender equality, inclusion and work-life balance. Her passionate involvement in BMO’s Mental Health program is inspiring as Sharon shares personal experiences that have impacted her family as she advocates breaking down stigmas surrounding mental illness. Sharon’s vision for the business and industry is valued by BMO’s leadership as executive sponsor of our Payment Modernization Program and Commercial Deposit Growth Strategy and co-chair of BMO’s Cross-Border Committee. She enthusiastically influences the payments journey through her on-going involvement with Payments Canada, recent appointment as Chair of the new Interac Innovation Board, Vice-Chair of Interac Corp’s board of directors and board member of Moneris. Her diversity of thought and focus on performance has enabled industry and charitable organizations to make a stronger impact on their communities including leading BMO’s 2019 United Way gala raising record results. She is committed to helping others succeed with two of the women she mentored now in senior executive positions at BMO. Always leading with integrity, her people-first mindset was evident by her response to the COVID-19 crisis, which focused on ensuring the safety of employees and fostering open lines of communication through weekly podcasts. She challenged the team to expedite solutions with agility to support clients including processing over $5.2B in government relief programs. Sharon is laser focused on performance while driving growth in a $3B business. Under her leadership, TPS contributes the highest ROE to BMO and achieved double-digit balance growth with her sponsorship of the enterprise-wide commercial deposit strategy. A champion for innovation, Sharon has challenged her team to build solutions to simplify banking that is scalable across BMO with her “build it once for everyone to use” approach. She utilized robotic process automation to decrease onboarding time by ~60%, partnered with Quantum Metric to rapidly improve client experience on BMO Online Banking for Business (OLBB), launched BMO Global Pay to improve payment optionality for clients, enabled track payments capability to improve transparency, and created cash flow forecasting tools empowering clients with information to make decisions. Believing client feedback is a gift, she sponsors our Client Advisory Council. Insights led to enhancing our onboarding and service roadmap improving satisfaction in the 2019 Phoenix Hecht Survey ranking BMO’s implementation of products and client support higher than all national and regional banks by U.S. mid-market clients. • Aite Group’s Impact Innovation Award, 2019 • American Banker - 25 Most Powerful Women to Watch, 2019 • Banking Technology Award for Best Corporate Payments Systems/Service Initiative, 2016 • Celent Model Bank Award for Payment Services Hub Implementation, 2019 Sharon was appointed Senior Vice President and Head, North American Treasury & Payment Solutions at BMO Financial Group in June 2016, and is accountable for defining and executing the strategy for the North American Treasury & Payment Solutions business, including Treasury Management, Trade Finance, Commercial Deposits and Corporate Cards. Sharon joined BMO in 2000, and held a number of roles in the Legal group including Vice-President, Deputy General Counsel, BMO Capital Markets and Assistant Corporate Secretary. In May 2012, she was appointed Head of Investor Relations and in November 2014 became Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Communications, Government and Investor Relations. A litigator with international law firm, Torys LLP, Sharon obtained her LLB from the University of Toronto. Sharon is Chair of the Innovation Committee and Vice Chair of the board of directors of Interac and serves on the boards of Moneris Corporation, the Writers’ Trust of Canada and BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. Canada

Marjorie Junio-Read is the Chief Financial Officer at Helcim, a payments company that makes it faster, easier, and more affordable for businesses to get paid. As CFO, she manages the financial operations at Helcim to ensure prudent fiscal management of company finances and strategic planning for future growth. She oversees the Finance and Trust and Safety teams at Helcim in addition to overseeing Benefit, Compensation, and some HR functions. In addition to her core duties at CFO, Marjorie spearheads the diversity and inclusion efforts at Helcim and is an active participant in all recruitment and talent attraction initiatives. Marjorie has been a strong advocate for supporting student programs and building a diverse and inclusive workforce throughout her career. She regularly attends networking and recruitment events to represent Helcim and meet with potential candidates including events hosted by Chic Geek, a Calgary based non-profit where tech-enabled women can advance their careers, and Tech West Collective, a group of companies in Calgary who have come together to tell the story of tech. To foster diversity and inclusion at Helcim Marjorie has launched communication campaigns to ensure all voices are heard and know that they are valued. These efforts include company-wide surveys and transparent reporting of all results. She is an advocate for the importance of recognizing and encouraging ethnic diversity as well as more subtle diversity like caregivers of adults and children throughout the organization. She also represents Helcim as a member of national groups such as the Council of Canadian Innovators to ensure both Helcim, and our local tech community, have a voice in shaping the future of our economy both locally and on a broader scale. Marjorie joined the team at Helcim in 2019, eager to contribute to the growing tech scene in Calgary. Before joining Helcim, she held progressively senior roles in the Finance and Accounting departments of a large multinational oil and gas company. These roles included working as a Treasury Analyst, Counterparty Risk Analyst, Financial Analyst, Budgeting and Forecast, Supervisor, Treasury Operations, and Treasury Manager. As Treasury Manager, she was responsible for overseeing the corporate accounting, treasury accounting, and treasury operation duties of her team in addition to management responsibilities. Marjorie brought her strong skills as Treasury Manager to Helcim to assist the company in compiling reports used for the company’s quarterly financial statements, optimizing the use of cash across the organization, managing company loans, and financing, securing capital for future growth, and monitoring financial risks and opportunities. Marjorie's management experience has allowed her to strengthen Helcim’s relationships with banks and credit unions in Canada and the US. She also has proven expertise in reviewing department processes, identifying opportunities for optimization, and streamlining opportunities to ensure Helcim can react quickly to new market opportunities, pivot seamlessly for new opportunities, and grow quickly. She lives in Calgary, AB with her husband and daughter, and holds a degree in finance from the University of Calgary and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) ® Charterholder. Invalid date N/A Marjorie Junio-Read is the Chief Financial Officer at Helcim, a payments company that makes it faster, easier, and more affordable for businesses to get paid. As CFO, she manages the financial operations at Helcim to ensure prudent fiscal management of company finances and strategic planning for future growth. She oversees the Finance team at Helcim in addition to overseeing Benefit, Compensation, and some HR functions. In addition to her core duties at CFO, Marjorie spearheads the diversity and inclusion efforts at Helcim and is an active participant in all recruitment and talent attraction initiatives. Marjorie has been a strong advocate for supporting student programs and building a diverse and inclusive workforce throughout her career. She regularly attends networking and recruitment events to represent Helcim and meet with potential candidates including events hosted by Chic Geek, a Calgary based non-profit where tech-enabled women can advance their careers, and Tech West Collective, a group of companies in Calgary who have come together to tell the story of tech. To foster diversity and inclusion at Helcim Marjorie has launched communication campaigns to ensure all voices are heard and know that they are valued. These efforts include company-wide surveys and transparent reporting of all results. She is an advocate for the importance of recognizing and encouraging ethnic diversity as well as more subtle diversity like caregivers of adults and children throughout the organization. She also represents Helcim as a member of national groups such as the Council of Canadian Innovators to ensure both Helcim, and our local tech community, have a voice in shaping the future of our economy both locally and on a broader scale. Marjorie joined the team at Helcim in 2019, eager to contribute to the growing tech scene in Calgary. Before joining Helcim, she held progressively senior roles in the Finance and Accounting departments of a large multinational oil and gas company. These roles included working as a Treasury Analyst, Counterparty Risk Analyst, Financial Analyst, Budgeting and Forecast, Supervisor, Treasury Operations, and Treasury Manager. As Treasury Manager, she was responsible for overseeing the treasury accounting and treasury operations duties of her team in addition to management responsibilities. Marjorie brought her strong skills as Treasury Manager to Helcim to assist the company in compiling reports used for the company’s quarterly financial statements, optimizing the use of cash across the organization, managing company loans, and financing, securing capital for future growth, and monitoring financial risks and opportunities. Marjorie's management experience has allowed her to strengthen Helcim’s relationships with banks in Canada and the US. She also has proven expertise in reviewing department processes, identifying opportunities for optimization, and streamlining opportunities to ensure Helcim can react quickly to new market opportunities, pivot seamlessly for new opportunities, and grow quickly. She lives in Calgary, AB with her husband and daughter, and holds a degree in finance from the University of Calgary and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) ® Charterholder.

Stacey Madge has served as Country Manager and President for Visa Canada since April 28, 2017. In her role, she is responsible for leading the Canadian market for Visa. Previously, Ms. Madge was a Senior Vice President in the International Banking Group at Scotiabank, overseeing retail and small business across 30 Latin American and Caribbean markets. Prior to her role at Scotiabank, Ms. Madge was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, where she was a leader in the areas of retail banking, mergers and acquisitions, and sales force effectiveness. In her early career, she was an analyst for mergers and acquisitions for RBC Dominion Securities. Ms. Madge graduated from Queen’s University and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Stacey lives in Toronto with her husband and three children.

Simona’s level of passion, dedication, and commitment to the Payments industry is unparalleled, contagious, and holistically embodies what a Thought Leader is all about. Simona is widely recognized and sought after for her extensive knowledge across the entire payments value and intellectual prowess, to which she consistently openly shares, and is always seeking to learn from those around her. She is often seen bringing different people and perspectives together to build out rich solutions, demonstrating a superior level of openness, trust building and acceptance of diverse thought. She is keenly aware of the rapid change and takes the effort to understand the trends and characteristics driving the change, where she brings a differentiating and unique perspective, driven from her ability to identify patterns and opportunities not easily discernible. Additionally, Simona has built remarkable trust and followership through her authenticity and passion for people. She is always looking for ways to inspire, promote, and guide people in their careers, and demonstrates the leadership behaviours that enables talent to thrive in an organization. Simona has in-depth understanding of the traditional payments ecosystem and infrastructure and has her pulse on innovation and disruption, while always providing a balanced perspective and level of integrity that is critical for arriving at solutions that serve all Canadians. With this, she has taken on a pivotal role across RBC forums (Including Innovation Council, Enterprise Payments Council, and Crypto Advisory Committee) and in the Industry (including Women in Payments Advisory Board, Board of Canadian Prepaid Providers Organization, FlipGive). As an advocate for mentorship, sponsorship, diversity, and inclusion, Simona is vocal about the importance of mentorship and sponsorship and passionately provides to individuals at all stages of their careers, through both formal and informal channels. Her positivity, passion, and commitment to mentorship and sponsorship has resulted in followership at all levels, from employees wanting to work for her, peers wanting her perspectives and advice, and industry colleagues seeking to collaborate with her. She actively speaks at diversity and inclusion panels (including Women of Influence, Executive Sponsor and Speaker for RBC Diversity Includes: ME); however, more importantly fosters a culture of inclusion day in and day out – drawing out views from all in the room, and creates a safe space that encourages challenge and debate, elevating the dialogue. Since joining RBC 3 years ago, there are endless examples of where Simona has led or provided Thought Leadership to deliver exceptional outcomes; across acquisitions, investments, new business development, industry collaboration, and strategies. A few include: 1) RBC’s Acquisition of WayPay – Simona was a driving force behind RBC’s acquisition of WayPay, utilizing her broad expertise to effectively communicate the business case and strategic rationale, playing a critical role in completing the acquisition 2) Mobile Payments – active participant on Contactless and Mobile Payments policy, playing a key role in connecting the ecosystem across Networks, Issuers, and Acquirers – more recently readying and implementing the contactless tap increase through Covid 3) Investments and Partnerships – leadership and advisory on RBC’s investments in Payments Fintech’s, including TouchBistro, Drop, and CarIQ, and on partnerships (to be announced) 4) Industry Collaboration – leading key forums with Moneris on coordinated go-to-market strategies, with Interac on Digital Identity and Digital Commerce, and at RBC including Digital Commerce and Open Banking Overall, in a world where impact is often defined by ownership, Simona has consistently played the unsung hero. Sought after for her expertise, embracing and mastering the role of the connector - Simona triangulates diverse perspectives to elevate the dialogue to drive greater collective outcomes. • Canada's Top 50 Women in Fintech in 2019 – Digital Finance Institute - August 2019 As Vice President of Payments Strategy for Cards, Payments, & Banking, at RBC, Simona leads emerging payment strategy, mobile payment products, & integrated strategic planning inclusive of data management. Simona focuses on the future payments landscape, including disruption, modernization, and the unique value propositions that will attract and engage the modern customer – B2C and B2B – partnering closely with RBC’s enterprise innovation, payments, corporate development, and lines of business teams. Prior to joining RBC, Simona held various leadership positions at American Express, Chase Card Services, Harlequin Enterprises, the Monitor Group, and has spent time in a high tech SME space. Simona is a passionate leader focused on developing talent, fostering cultures of mentorship and sponsorship, and instilling growth mindset. A graduate of the Richard Ivey School of Business, Simona is a mom of 2 active pre-teens and spends her free time in hockey arenas and art studios. Canada

Suman Sidhu, Director, Payments Modernization, leads the delivery of strategic payments technology solutions. In her role, she also ensures alignment with the Payments Canada Modernization program. Her focus is to enable her teams to deliver innovative products and solutions that positions Scotiabank as a modern, transparent, flexible and real-time ready payments industry leader. Recently, her team celebrated the release of a real-time, e-transfer payments solution for small business customers on ScotiaConnect, our business banking digital channel. The solution has significantly improved the customer experience by increasing the speed by which payments can be sent and received. She began her journey at Scotiabank seven years ago in the Corporate and Commercial Digital Channel team, where she successfully modernized the digital channel experience. Working on the successful implementation of two-factor digital authentication and other user experience enhancements, she developed her relentless focus on delivering value to customers. Suman is a proud mother to her son, Kiaan and enjoys travel and photography in her leisure time.

Jennifer leads Mastercard’s efforts in the UK to financially include 500 million excluded consumers by 2020. Her passion to ensure the power of payments can have a positive social impact goes far beyond our organisation – something the industry as a whole benefits from. Jennifer co-founded the ‘The Independent Financial Inclusion Commission’ and supported its work up until January 2018. She also chaired Project Inclusion on behalf of the ‘Emerging Payments Association’, playing a leading role in launching the world’s first inclusion specific payments comparison tool and accreditation service. Tony Craddock, Emerging Payments MD would be happy to act as an additional referee.

Her position as a financial inclusion subject matter expert has been recognised with the UK Government who recently recruited her onto the Inclusive on Economy Partnership Financial Inclusion Steering Group. Her expertise was also sought by ‘Fair For You’, an ethical alternative to high cost credit, whose Board Jennifer joined in July.

Away from financial inclusion, Jennifer also led an industry project to reduce card fraud on behalf of the Government’s ‘Joint Fraud Taskforce.

Jennifer invests in herself and in others. She recently managed and coached a Mastercard MBA student to achieve her goal of becoming a permanent employee in our New York Office. She is also an active participant in the Mastercard Girls4Tech programme, which seeks to ensure our industry attracts a diversity of talent. She is a member of Allbright the Women’s network where she has completed a course aimed at supporting female leaders called ‘Smash the Glass Ceiling’. Jennifer has also acted as a mentor for the Women in Public Affairs Network.

Under Anna’s stewardship, one of the key culture focuses of Paybase is to champion diversity in the payments industry. She has consistently maintained a 50/50 gender split in both the senior management team and across the wider workforce, ensuring that the business brings together a diversity of culture and experiences. Owing to her work in this field, she was selected to join the Emerging Payments Association Advisory Board in December 2019.

Also in 2019, Paybase has continued to receive consistent acclaim for its work in the FinTech space in general. They were named one of the top 100 UK companies to escape to in 2019 (Escape 100), they were selected from 3000 applicants worldwide to become a member of the global startup community, Startup Grind, and they were also selected to join the exclusive Tech Nation FinTech programme.

Katrina has been promoted twice in the last 4 years and is now one of the most senior female executives in Technology and across American Express. After joining the company through the graduate training programme, she moved into a series of roles with increasing scope and complexity. Developmentally, she moved to Amex headquarters in New York in 2016 to build key relationships, then moved to London in 2019 to lead the build-out of a new campus for Technology. In 2014 she earned the company’s Global Services Leadership Award and was named FDM everywoman in Technology Leader of the Year in a corporate setting.

Ellie is a Director in Visa’s Real Time Payments business, developing propositions and market engagement strategy for the new payment flows, with an immediate focus on Europe.

Previously, Ellie was a management consultant with KPMG’s Global Payments Consulting Practice. She ran a number of projects, including a Payments Operations TOM design at a large UK bank, Change Realisation Lead for a £1.4b technology transformation and driving operational efficiencies and new products that leverage the capabilities of real time payments, Open Banking and new-world payments technology.

In Australia, Ellie was a Delivery Lead for the New Payments Platform (NPP), the industry-wide initiative to implement real-time, data-rich payments across 65 Australian financial institutions. KPMG acted as the Programme Management Services Organisation in this five year programme, the largest systems upgrade and technology implementation in Australian financial services history.