Past Winners - 2021

Kelly Buchanan is a Senior Vice President, M&A Integration Executive at Mastercard responsible for orchestrating the development and execution of acquisitions to meet strategic and financial objectives. Within her time at Mastercard, she has held several positions across Operations & Technology, Customer Delivery and Mergers & Acquisitions within the US, UK and AP. With a passion for tackling complex programs of work and leading from strategy to execution, she has a wide breath of business experience coupled with strong leadership capabilities building, driving and motivating teams. As a WEF Young Global Leader, she is passionate about how technology can be used as a force for good. With an emphasis on early STEM education, her passion projects focus on ensuring young girls get exposure to technology and we cultivate their passion for it and the opportunities it creates. She is a Trustee and Board member for iamtheCODE with a goal to enable 1 million girls to code by 2030.

Chryssi’s mission is to help create a financially inclusive, resilient and sustainable financial system. She covers a breadth of professional experience ranging from regulation, risk management, treasury, and payments. Chryssi implemented treasury and risk analytics systems for blue-chip companies across EMEA. She is a thought leader in the payment sector and Founder of StarLiX, an innovative compliance tokenised payment system for PIs to enable cross-border payments to developing countries. She is also the COO of Kalgera, a FinTech early-stage company (top 30 tech firms in UK TechRound 2020) focusing on financial vulnerability. Chryssi holds an honours BEng in Civil Engineering, two MSc in Financial Mathematics (University of Warwick) and Tech Entrepreneurship (UCL). She has undertaken qualifications in Investment Advice (FCA), Risk Management (PRMIA), ML (Mindstream AI), Blockchain (UCL CBT), and Entrepreneurship (MIT). She is an Industry Associate at UCL CBT, and a Lecturer at LIBF.

Victoria Cleland is the Executive Director for Banking, Payments and Innovation. She leads the teams responsible for: • the operation and strategic development of the Bank’s payment system services, (which settles around £685 billion of sterling payments and securities transactions each day) • the Bank’s wholesale and retail banking operations, including the provision of emergency liquidity assistance • the Bank’s Fintech Hub Victoria is the chair of the CPMI Task Force on Cross Border Payments. Victoria has held several senior positions in a range of areas at the Bank of England. Most recently, as Chief Cashier, she was responsible for banknotes (from design to distribution) and led our work on digital currencies. Her previous roles also included overseeing payment and settlement systems. Victoria is the executive sponsor of our staff disAbility Network and Bicycle Users Group and is a Board Member of the Business Disability Forum.

Vivi is the VP General Manager Global Network Partnerships EMEA. Joined AXP in 2005. Worked in sales enablement and business development at 4 management levels and 2 Business Units. She is a graduate of the Leadership Program of United Technologies – Pratt & Whitney, where she worked in the USA/France, selling jet engines and services.Vivi’s Ambition is having options, exceling in what she decides to do and having fun while doing it. While her professional ambition has evolved, core to Vivi has always remained making an impact on family, friends, team, and community.Vivi earned: • MSc in Finance from London Business School • MBA from Purdue University, USA • MSc in Information Systems from London School of Economics and is an Electronics Engineer. She is a Member of 2 AXP Boards, sits on the Executive Women EMEA Committee, speaks Greek, English, French, and basic German and Spanish. Lives with husband and 17-yr old son. Vivi loves deciphering language structures, tennis and dining.

Being an immigrant into the UK from Romania at the age of 10, Ioana is the first generation in her family to attend university, a decision which was met with disagreement due to the pressure to start earning as soon as she finished school. Overcoming this with the help of a scholarship and financial support, she finished university with a First Class degree in International Relations from the Top 10 UK university, Loughborough University. On top of this, while at university, she completed a year in industry, with 12 months in Brussels in a Junior Policy Adviser role for the Confederation of British Industry, CBI. Following her studies, she secured a role on the American Express Strategy Graduate Scheme, in which she excelled and was among the few to be promoted, and onto a selective internal client-facing consulting team. As you will know by now, Ioana doesn’t like standing still and is always looking for ways to develop and is excited to see what lies ahead in her career in payments!

Originally from Mumbai (India), Karishma came to the UK in September 2011 to pursue her MSc in Strategic Marketing at Cranfield University. She returned to India in 2012 to kickstart her payments career with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) followed by KPMG India (from January 2014) working on payments projects in Asia and the Middle East. She relocated back to the UK in September 2015 as an Advisor in Strategy & Effectiveness within CIO advisory practice at KPMG UK. Karishma joined PwC UK in June 2018 and is one of the key Payments specialists in our FS Consulting Practice. Breadth of her work includes leading engagements on Payments Innovation, Product Strategy, Business Transformation and Cost Optimisation. She is passionate about creating innovative methodologies and business models to reduce operating costs and identify new revenue streams to reinvest the savings. She has co-authored payments Thought Leadership focussing on the UK and global markets (see LinkedIn)

Stacey Rylands is a senior executive with proven business and team management credentials across Asia Pacific. She has extensive experience in building high performing sales teams across diverse markets, strategy development and transformation, talent development and global knowledge of emerging and mature markets.

Stacey joined American Express in September 2019 as VP Acquisition A/NZ for American Express Global Merchant Services. Stacey is responsible for the merchant coverage strategy, onboarding of new merchants, several direct sales channels as well as third party acquiring partnerships.

Prior to American Express, Stacey was Head of Sales for PayPal Australia ( 2017-2019) where she led a team of senior sales professionals focused on creating new revenue streams for PayPal Australia across a number of diverse industries.

As an Enterprise Architect and Head of Architecture for APAC, Rohini is responsible for driving technology road maps and architecture for diverse and highly wired markets in APAC regions. Rohini has over 16 years of experience in the Payments industry and has been instrumental in owning and driving solutions working with key business and technology groups to engineer end-to-end processes and systems for new and existing clients. Rohini has a strong understanding of how technology relates to business, market, and industry, and can apply this knowledge to support the needs of our clients’ critical systems and projects.

Shauna Archibald is Head of Client Delivery for Chase Merchant Services Canada. Her experience in the payments industry spans over 20 years having served on the merchant acquiring and card issuing sides of the industry. She champions diversity and inclusion at JPMorgan Chase Canada in her roles as Executive Sponsor of Women On The Move and Co-Chair of the Black Organization for Leadership Development. Shauna is a Certied ScrumMaster® and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto.

Daria Hill is Associate Vice President, Corporate Communications & Sponsorships for Interac Corp. She is a strategic leader, responsible for all communications, including public relations, crisis and issues management, government relations, and internal and executive communications. She also leads the organization’s corporate sponsorships program and corporate social responsibility mandate.

Prior to Interac, Daria worked for TD where she managed Corporate and Public Affairs and acted as Chief Spokesperson. Before joining TD, Daria was part of Canada Post’s launch of e-Commerce solutions. With more than fteen years of experience in industries such as payments, consumer health, and technology & data, Daria Hill is a proven communications leader in the payments industry.

Terra Wallace is the Vice President of Sales Education & Engagement for U.S. Bank/Elavon. In thi sFortune 500 Company, she executes strategic learning and culture initiatives that help drive company revenue. She also serves as the President of the Atlanta Chapter African American Business Resource Group. In this role, Terra focuses her leadership efforts on driving programs that amplify black voices by creating targeted initiatives to support black employees, black communities and black businesses.

Laura Miller leads the J.P. Morgan segment of Merchant Services, the global payment acceptance and merchant acquiring business of JPMorgan Chase and a leading provider of payment, fraud management and data security solutions. As J.P. Morgan Merchant Services President, Laura oversees merchant acquiring and payment processing for U.S.-based companies. She has more than 20 years of nancial services experience and previously led the Small Business Segment of Merchant Services, leading at eam that worked directly with business owners as well as through 5,300 Chase branches. Before coming to Merchant Services, Laura was President of Chase Ink, the rm’s small business credit card.Laura is also co-chairwoman for the Northeast Region of JP MC’s Market Leadership Team and is a well-known advocate for Diversity & Inclusion at JPMC and a strong supporter of business owners and the entrepreneur community.

As the Head of Global Client Engagement for J.P. Morgan's Liink team, Angelica brings 11 years of experience across business development, strategy and sales. The team is responsible for building and launching the rm’s rst live Blockchain service, Liink by J.P. Morgan, formerly the Interbank Information Network. She previously worked as a North America Product Sales Consultant specializing in cross-border payments at Citigroup. Prior to Citigroup, she spent over 5 years working across strategy, business development, and digital marketing, sales and distribution across Viacom’s largest brands: MTV, VH1, CMT, and Logo. Angelica is an active nonprot leader, volunteer and motivator -dedicated to developing young people and fostering gender equality, diversity, equity and inclusion. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of California - Riverside and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Virginia – Darden School of Business.

Melissa attended the University of North Florida and graduated with a BBA in Management and received an MBA with a concentration in Human Resource Management from Keller Graduate School of Management. She has been happily married for 24 years and has two children, Andrew and Ainsley. Melissa is also an active volunteer at her local high school where she has volunteered her time with theatre program and provides assistance with the DECA program in ‘judging’ DECA regional events as well as assists the Career, Technical, and agriculture education (CTAE) program with cover letter,resume and interview skills annually. In addition, she volunteers for the Associate of Graduates organization to assist in supporting parents of Cadet Candidates at the US Air Force Academy Preparatory School. Over the past 6 months she has been an integral part of the school’s ability to adjust to COVID restrictions while managing the wellbeing of the both the staff, leadership and the Cadet Candidates.

Lynne J. Baldwin is President and co-founder of BHMI. She has been in the payments industry for over40 years. Before starting the company, she was VP, Chief Product Manager and a board member at Applied Communications, Inc. (now ACI Worldwide).Her earliest efforts were in creating software for finnancial banking systems as well as engineering and managing large financial software development projects. She has been instrumental in the creation of innovative payment applications, including the Concourse Financial Software Suite. Lynne is a previous member of the computer science faculties at the University of Nebraska at Omahaand the University of Texas at Austin where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a Ph.D.in Computer Sciences, respectively. She has served on the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Information Science & Technology Advisory Committee for over 20 years, and is currently Vice President of the board of directors for Nebraska Wildlife Rehab, Inc. 

Michelle Conklin joined J.P. Morgan in 2004 and is now a Managing Director, serving as the Head of Receivables Operations, which offers core cash receivables services to corporate and commercial clients, as well as select processing services for the US Federal Government.In her current role, Michelle is responsible for over 4,000 employees operating in 16 locations around the world who process 160M items and deposit $800B annually. In addition, Michelle is a member of the JPMorgan Chase Chicago Executive Committee, the executive sponsor for the Illinois chapter of the Sage Administrative Professionals BRG and is passionate about driving inclusive hiring efforts through active engagement with programs such as 2nd chances, Autism @ Work and BeST.Michelle has a bachelor’s degree in Consumer and Textile Marketing from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

As President of Mastercard Canada, Sasha Krstic is responsible for all aspects of the company's Canadian operations & leads the regional strategy to continue growing Mastercard's brand & business in Canada.

Sasha has held leadership roles in key regions across the globe at Mastercard. Most recently, she was EVP Services for Asia-Pacic. From 2016-2018, she led the Nordics & Baltics, overseeing & responsible for growing 8 diverse markets.

Sasha began her Mastercard career in Canada & brought her global perspective home in 2019. During her 11 years in Toronto, she served as SVP & Group Head, Global Products & Solutions, overseeing the development of innovative products & services to benet consumers, merchants & business partners and SVP & Group Head, Issuer Relationship Management, working closely with FIs across Canada, deepening relationships & strategically growing Mastercard's market position.

She has a B.A. in Native Studies from University of Alberta & an International MBA from the Schulich School of Business.

Megan is a seasoned leader in the Canadian payment industry. Over the past two decades she has made signicant contributions in the business as an innovative leader and role model. She has worked in numerous development and executive leadership roles throughout her career, including positions at American Express Canada, JP Morgan Chase, and TD Bank.

Megan has a proven track record for results, delivering on revenue generating initiatives like new partnerships, credit card programs and products, as well as sponsoring organizations driving leadership for women and equitable employment.

Megan has a passion for her community and contributes her time to worthy organizations like United Way and Weekend to End Women’s Cancers. Within the scope of Canadian Tire, she continues to champion education, recruitment, and diversity through her Executive Sponsorship of employee resource groups and by setting a high professional standard for her team. Megan is the embodiment of innovation, mentorship, and inclusivity at CTFS

Michelle is responsible for leading and integrating business strategy and requirements across RBC for the digital, real-time suite of payment capabilities, including the real-time rail. Michelle works with Payments Canada, Interac, the industry and the RBC program team to ensure effective implementation of program initiatives.

With over 20 years of experience in the nancial services industry, Michelle has held various leadership positions in Digital, Payments & Trade, Product and Operations support and Banks, Brokers & Exchanges. Through these roles she has acquired both depth and breadth of experience in payments, clearing and settlement as well as industry organizations that will position her well in her new role. Prior to her current role, Michelle led a team in delivering several key initiatives to improve the security, usability and features available in RBC’s commercial online banking and le transmission services platforms.

Michelle has a Master's degree in Public Administration from Western University.

Chameli Naraine is a versatile and inuential change agent with a passion for engineering the best for her clients, employees, and stakeholders. Her bold leadership style is embodied by her statement: "Follow rules to the extent you can, but also defy rules when they become a barrier to your progress."

Ms. Naraine holds an economics degree from Wilfred Laurier University. She founded the Naraine Global Fund, a philanthropic organization centered on improving the health and education of women around the world.

Ms. Naraine joined Symcor in 2008 and was appointed President & CEO three years later, responsible for the strategic direction of Symcor’s operations. She has actively structured a company wide transformation to support an aggressive growth agenda, all the while building a values-based, resultsoriented culture.

Ms. Naraine’s unique approach has resulted in an organization with increased agility and dexterity, while upholding the service level excellence it is known for.

Manoj Dugar is Managing Director and Head of Wholesale Payments for ASEAN based in Singapore. He is responsible for Treasury Services, Trade Finance and Merchant Services across Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. He leads the efforts to deliver market leading solutions, ensuring resiliency and robustness in product offering, service model and control environment. He plays an instrumental role in driving the strategy on ecommerce, Fintech and transformative technologies. Prior to this, Manoj was APAC Head of Core Cash Management and lead the rm’s product development strategy for Receivables, Payables, FX and Channel offerings across the region, ensuring corporate and nancial institution clients bene t from an integrated approach across the Corporate & Investment Bank. During his 23 year career, Manoj has held various roles in transaction and corporate banking across product management, sales, relationship management and operations.

Rasmegh is the Managing Director of SawasdeeShop and co-founder of DeeMoney, Thailand’s largest and fastest-growing cross-border payments company. Prior to pivoting into the payments and ntech space, SawasdeeShop was a market leader in the VOIP telecoms space, servicing over 2 million expat, migrant, and enterprise customers with affordable voice solutions.

In 2014, Rasmegh recognized that the telecoms space was a sunset business with OTT players such as WhatsApp, FaceBook messenger disrupting the space. In 2015, Rasmegh, along with Sawasdeeshop’s CEO Aswin Phlaphongphanich, kicked off discussions for the required licenses with the Bank of Thailand. At that time, the space was not open to non-banks. It took two years of tenacity and perseverance to push through – SawasdeeShop was nally awarded the relevant licenses for international remittances and payments in 2017.

Megha is a big believer in using technology to make a socially meaningful difference. Hence, building bridges for nancial inclusion for the underserved is a goal that gets her up every morning.

As a Thai-Indian, Rasmegh is a strong proponent of multiculturalism, generational and gender diversity in the workplace. In addition to being actively involved in the daily operations of her tech businesses, she is a passionate student of positive-psychology frameworks and learning about driving motivation to realize the potential, which she then implements with her employees. A mother of 3, she highly enjoys navigating the challenging terrain of being an entrepreneur alongside raising a teen, tween, and toddler.

Christine Tan (Jang) is Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacic–Financial Institutions Group for Wholesale Payments. She is responsible for banks, broker-dealers and non-bank FI portfolios across the region, providing strategic advice and capturing opportunities to grow the FIG franchise with both existing and new clients. Prior to this position, Christine was Head of Treasury Services, ASEAN, and was responsible for embedding the end-to-end Treasury Services model in every market across Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam—ensuring resiliency and robustness in product offering, service model and control environment. She was also the Head of multinational corporates (MNCs) for Asia Pacic for ve years and has a wealth of MNC experience in the region across multiple key markets. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Christine worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citi.

Julienne Loh is Executive Vice President of Enterprise Partnerships for Asia Pacific. In this role, she drives partnerships across new industries with a focus on growing Mastercard’s global cities, travel and tourism, trade and business development initiatives across the region.

Prior to this, she held various leadership roles in Core Products and Global Products & Solutions, including leading the consumer credit portfolio in Asia where she saw the launches of key affluent programs including Asia Pacific;s affluent women consumer program. She was also the Country Manager for Singapore, where she led all aspects of Mastercard’s business in the country, including building alliances with non-financial institutions and government agencies. She and her team were instrumental in launching the rst open loop transit prepaid program in 2009.

Julienne has been with Mastercard since 2005, with over 20 years of professional experience in business, marketing and financial sectors in Singapore. A member of the Women’s Leadership Network at Mastercard, she also serves as vice-chairperson in Junior Achievement Singapore, the world’s largest non-prot organization dedicated to promoting nancial literacy in young people.

Julienne holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the National University of Singapore and MA in Marketing Management from the University of Westminster, UK.

Yang Yang Zhang is the Managing Director of Xendit Philippines. She was born in China and moved with her parents to the United States when she was a kid. Thus, she had more keen awareness of her circumstances and being out of her comfort zone most of the time.

She started to code as early as 5 years old. Growing up as a programming obsessed person, Yang Yang earned her bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge majoring in Computer Science. Prior to joining Xendit, she was the co-founder and Chief of strategy of a crypto currency trading platform in the Philippines where she discovered the opportunities of the Philippines' financial infrastructure.

Her life and career experiences have motivated her to build up her career and realize her dream in the Philippines: to build a brand new digital payments infrastructure for Filipinos through Xendit Philippines

Megha is the co-founder and Head of Technology at Mydoh by RBC Ventures where she leads a high performing team of software engineers to solve exciting and complex problems in the world of ntech and payments. In this role, Megha denes Mydoh’s technical roadmap, manages stakeholder relationships, and provides technical direction and expertise. Prior to joining RBC, Megha has worked at TD Bank as an micro services architect, building a public API platform to support Open Banking. She has also worked as a developer in the start-up ecosystem for companies such as the DMZ at Ryerson, Sensibill, Magnet Today, and Crowdbabble. Megha is passionate about payments technology, technical systems design, diversity in recruitment, and effective team building. Megha is a graduate of Ryerson University and holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering.

Jennifer Turner, BA, LLA, is a highly credentialed banker with over 25 years financial experience working with the Public Sector, Multinational and Australian Corporates in the area of Cash Management, Working Capital Trade Finance and Structured Finance.

Jennifer was appointed Head of Large Markets & Supplier Payments with American Express in Global Commercial Services in January 2020. She manages the B2B payments performance for SME and Large customers collaborating with both Merchant and Issuer to drive customer outcomes in a competitive payments landscape.

Jennifer has held positions of Managing Director of Global Transactional Banking, Global Head of Trade Finance Sales with both International and Domestic banks.

Jennifer graduated from the University of Sydney and the University of New England and holds degrees in Laws and Arts respectively, majoring in Contract Law.

Jennifer continues to hold positions on Executive Councils for Diversity and Inclusion and is an advocate for equal opportunity.

Neena is a payments leader, specialising in Product Management and Development. She is the Director of Virtual, Cross Border and Supplier Payments Products for American Express, leading this complex portfolio of products for the APAC region. Beyond this, Neena delivers new product and capabilities to market and is accountable for driving portfolio growth and expanding market share.

Neena has 15 years’ experience in the payments industry, starting her career in technology infrastructure, moving into operations, and ultimately moving to New York and London to pursue Product strategy roles. Neena has been a Product Director for over ten years, leading geographically dispersed teams to drive business growth. Neena is an empathetic leader who is deeply passionate about employeedevelopment.

Neena’s holds various qualifications from UTS, Macquarie University, Harvard and MIT Sloan. She is also a founding board member of a domestic violence shelter, raising ~$100k per annum.

Anne has a growth mindset, uses high levels of creativity and applies disciplined principlesto identify improvement and achieve business outcomes by harnessing new technology and maximising products and capability to provide client value.

Her core strength is creating a customer centric, high performance sales and relationship culture and deep knowledge across multiple segments and industries. This is nurtured by coaching, developing and empowering teams to trust their decision making. Resulting in the acquisition of market share, growing existing customer base whilst deepening and broadening relationships. Uses strong interpersonal skills to swiftly build lasting relationships.

Utilising vast experience across transactional banking at both global and local banks, Anne has a talent for thinking outside the square, relationship building, client advocacy, continuous improvement and implementing change. Able to demonstrate the benefits of a diverse and rich skill-set across Sales, Account/Product/Relationship Management, Service, Systems and Implementation. Thrives on challenges, organisational change and motivates and energises others.

Nadia brings 11 years specialised payments expertise to her role as Manager -Open Banking and Data Strategy, spanning issuing, acquiring and network. She’s currently leading the development and execution of American Express Australia's open banking and real time payments strategies, applying her deep business development, commercial, product and project experience. As a payments consultant for over 5 years, Nadia collaborated with global payments players including Mastercard, Square, PayPal, Braintree, JCB, Ingenico, Verifone and First Data, to develop and deploy payments network infrastructure and solutions such as EMV contact and contactless, mobile, transit, 3D Secure and tokenisation. With an early background in youth development and leadership and having faced her own challenges in forging a path as a woman in business, Nadia remains passionate about fostering diversity, equity and inclusion within her sphere of influence, and supporting a new generation of women in payments.

Mary Kay currently is SVP, Global Product at Visa’s leading strategy for buyer and seller products and
solutions, driving the design, development, and delivery of new services and solutions to accelerate
2 growth as the checkout experience and point of sale shifts from traditional payment products to
digital, omnichannel payment experiences. She joined Visa from Square, where she was the general
manager and Head of Payments, overseeing engineering, product management and marketing, design, and industry relations teams. Before Square, she spent more than 11 yrs at Amazon, elevating the company’s global credit, debit, prepaid, and cash payment acceptance, issuance, and gift card programs from back-office operations into simple strategic businesses that fueled innovation across the company. Before Amazon, she led global payments for Digital River, and supported enterprise software and data processing solutions. She holds a BA and Art from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota degree.