As president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Loretta J. Mester participates in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy, and oversees 1,000 employees in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh who conduct economic research, supervise banking institutions, and provide payment services to commercial banks and the U.S. government.
Prior to being named president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Dr. Mester had been executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. She joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in 1985 as an economist, becoming senior vice president and director of research in 2000, and executive vice president and director of research in 2010.
Admiral Michael Rogers is the former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), the former chief of Central Security Service, and the former commander of US Cyber Command. Rogers assumed those posts in April of 2014 and retired in June of 2018, marking 37 years of service. He put the NSA through its largest reorganization in 20 years and led the creation and operationalization of the nation’s cyber mission force, culminating in the elevation of Cyber Command to the senior-most command level in the DOD.
As director of the NSA, Rogers oversaw the largest intelligence organization in the US government. He worked across all three branches of the U.S. government to develop and implement cyber policy solutions and execute intelligence and cyber operations, partnering particularly closely with the DoD, DHS, FBI, Department of State, the Congress, the FISA court, and the U.S. and global intelligence community as well as foreign civilian and military cyber organizations.
Montgomery also directs financial management strategies and operations for the Federal Reserve System’s Financial Support Office. He serves on the Enterprise Payments Committee, the Committee on Spending Stewardship, and several other governance and advisory committees. He is a former chair and current member of the Federal Reserve’s Conference of First Vice Presidents.
Professor Sawhney is a globally recognized scholar, teacher, advisor and speaker in strategic marketing, technology marketing and e-business strategy. His research and teaching interests include collaborative marketing with customers, IT and business value, technology-enabled business transformation and business innovation in large companies. Business Week named him as one of the 25 most influential people in e-Business. Crain’s Chicago Business named him a member of “40 under 40”, a select group of young business leaders in the Chicago area.
Dondi Black
Dondi leads Market Engagement and Ideation for the Banking Solutions division of FIS that spans global banking, payments, merchant, network and loyalty programs. Dondi leverages her vast experience in banking and payments to assist in the development of long term product strategies and innovation opportunities for the U.S. and International markets. Prior to her current role, Dondi worked in retail banking as a Product Manager and Consumer Credit Manager. Dondi also served as a Consumer Compliance Officer focused on Community Development for a southeast retail financial institution. As a Product Manager and Consumer Compliance Officer, Dondi was engaged in the development and deployment of products and strategies that were central to revenue growth objectives on an annual basis. She began her banking career in account sales for First Horizon, N.A..
Jim Cunha
Jim Cunha is the Senior Vice President of Secure Payments and FinTech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Cunha leads the Federal Reserve’s Secure Payment efforts, which seeks to improve the safety, security, and resiliency of the U.S. payments system, by helping the industry reduce payment fraud. Cunha is also spearheading the Boston Fed’s efforts to study, explore, and engage with distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, to determine applicability, potential benefits, and risks for internal and external uses. He is specifically focused on the evolution of the technology and its potential impact on the financial services sector. He is also responsible for the Bank’s initiative to build and test a prototype central bank digital currency, called Project Hamilton. Cunha has worked at the Boston Fed since 1984. Prior to that, he worked at Fleet National Bank. He holds a bachelor’s in accounting and philosophy from Northeastern University and a bachelor’s in computer science from Rhode Island College.
Eric Dunn
Eric has been part of the Quicken business since its early days – he joined Intuit, Quicken’s previous owner, as employee #4 in 1986, when Quicken was the only Intuit software product. Over the course of his 20 years at Intuit Eric served as the CFO through the 1993 IPO and merger with ChipSoft (TurboTax); he was a programmer who worked on almost all of the early versions of Quicken; was the first general manager of the Quicken business; was Intuit’s first CTO; and then led Intuit’s payments business during an additional tour of duty in 2010-2015. Eric retired from Intuit in 2000 to pursue a second career in technology investing, first as an angel investor and then as a General Partner at Cardinal Venture Capital. Eric has served on the boards of directors of dozens of companies and organizations, including five public companies.
Trace Fooshee
Trace Fooshee is a senior analyst in Aite Group’s Fraud & AML practice, covering fraud and client security issues. Prior to joining Aite Group, Mr. Fooshee enjoyed leading business transformation initiatives primarily in the financial services industry between 1995 and 2019 with his most recent role as Head of Enterprise Fraud Strategy at SunTrust Bank. Drawing from more than 10 years of experience as an anti-fraud executive both within the industry and as a management consultant, Mr. Fooshee’s research focuses on exploring how fraud executives, fraud control solution providers and industry groups balance fraud risk with client experience, operational efficiency and regulatory compliance in the context of emerging innovations and a constantly changing landscape.
Brad Garlinghouse
Brad is the CEO of Ripple and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to Ripple, Brad served as the CEO of file collaboration service Hightail. From 2009 to 2012 he was President of Consumer Applications at AOL and prior to that he held various executive positions at Yahoo! from 2003 to 2009, including Senior Vice President. Earlier in his career, Brad helped to pioneer the VoIP industry as CEO of Dialpad Communications. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of OutMatch and has held board positions at Ancestry.com and Tonic Health.
Chris Hamilton
Chris Hamilton is the CEO of BankservAfrica, operator of South Africa’s payments infrastructure and Africa’s largest clearing house. Over the last four and a half years he has worked on bringing real-time, data-rich digital payments to the South African economy and developing domestic and cross-border real-time solutions in Southern Africa. He was previously CEO of the Australian Payments Clearing Association, which coordinated the design and implementation of the Australian real-time platform, NPP. Hamilton was born in Sydney, Australia and started working life as a lawyer.
Shamir Karkal
A true FinTech pioneer, Shamir Karkal played a crucial part in building the infrastructure that would pave the way for online banking. In 2009, he co-founded Simple, the first bank of its kind in the United States, and later headed the Open Platform at BBVA. Shamir was drawn to serve smaller companies, co-founding Sila in 2018 with the goal of empowering financial innovations. Shamir studied physics and computer science at Bangalore University and is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, and enjoys jiu-jitsu, long-range target shooting, and studying history whenever possible.
Wee Kee Toh
Wee Kee is the Specialist Leader for Distributed Ledger Technology in the FinTech and Innovation Group (FTIG) of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). He leads Project Ubin, a collaborative industry project which explores the use of Distributed Ledger Technology for clearing and settlement of payments and securities. Wee Kee also works with Financial Institutions and FinTech companies in the development and adoption of nascent and innovative financial technologies.
Chip Kohlweiler
Navy Credit Union
Chip has worked within the financial services industry for over 20 years, primarily in Fraud and Security leadership roles. Chip started his career and worked 15 years at SunTrust Bank. At SunTrust, he helped develop their enterprise fraud strategy and implemented tools to execute that strategy. After SunTrust, he went to work for Deloitte in the Czech Republic as an anti-fraud senior manager. He was responsible for developing a Center of Excellence for financial crime consulting in Central Europe. Eventually, he moved back to the U.S. continuing to work for Deloitte, but focused primarily on payments and enrollment related anti-fraud projects. In June of 2016, he joined Navy Federal Credit Union as VP of Security. In that position, he leads the Fraud Management, Physical Security, and Court Order Operations teams. At NFCU, he leads their Fraud Council and is the primary business sponsor on their key anti-fraud initiatives focused on authentication and application fraud.
Adrian Lovney
Adrian commenced as the inaugural CEO of NPP Australia Limited in September 2016. Launched to the Australian public in February 2018, the New Payments Platform provides Australian businesses and consumers with a fast, flexible, data-rich payments system for making their everyday payments, and provides a platform for future growth and innovation.
Reed Luhtanen
Reed Luhtanen is Executive Director of the U.S. Faster Payments Council (FPC). The FPC is an industry-led membership organization whose mission is to facilitate a world-class payment system where Americans can safely and securely pay anyone, anywhere, at any time and with near-immediate funds availability. Reed is responsible for managing the daily operations of the organization and working with the FPC board and membership to execute on the FPC’s strategic plan while ensuring inclusive and transparent dialogue with all FPC stakeholders. FPC members include business end-users, consumer organizations, financial institutions, payment network operators, technology providers, and others. Reed has extensive experience in the payments industry and has served on myriad industry bodies, most recently an officer on the FPC Board of Directors; the Federal Reserve-sponsored Governance Framework Formation Team, which created the U.S. Faster Payments Council; and the Corporate Advisory Group for The Clearing House’s Real-Time Payments System. Prior to joining the FPC, he spent 15 years at Walmart, departing as senior director of global treasury, where he was responsible for the company’s payments-related public policy and public relations initiatives, network and processor relationships, and establishing Walmart’s payments acceptance strategies.
Sushil Malhotra
Sushil is a Partner and Managing Director in the New York office of The Boston Consulting Group. He is an expert in leading transformations for Financial Institutions. He is a topic expert in emerging payments, organization change and lean.
Yuval Marco
Yuval Marco is the general manager of the NICE Actimize fraud & authentication management line of business, responsible for the success and growth of NICE Actimize and its clients through its award winning Fraud & Authentication solutions portfolio. As the leader of this business, Yuval is responsible for driving and overseeing product strategy, marketing, delivery and go-to-market planning across the Fraud portfolio, while closely partnering with our clients. Yuval has over 16 years of experience in delivering market-leading solutions to Fortune 500 companies to improve customer experience and regulatory compliance, while decreasing operational cost.
Andrew McFarlane
Andrew became Payments Canada’s Executive Director of Modernization in March 2020 and is currently responsible for leading the modernization of Canada’s core clearing and settlement payments infrastructure. As a member of the Accenture team, Andrew has been a valuable contributor to our Modernization program since early 2017, working with our member financial institutions and other stakeholders in Canada to gain their support for modernizing payments. Prior, Andrew consulted extensively in the financial services industry with Accenture in Ireland, in addition to leading the consulting firm’s open banking activities globally and shaping Accenture’s response to the Payments Services Directive 2 (PSD2) in Europe.
Neha Narula
Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative, a part of the MIT Media Lab focusing on cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, and blockchain technology. While completing a PhD in computer science at MIT, she built fast, scalable distributed systems and databases.
Catherine Parsons Dhamija
Catherine Parsons Dhamija is a Partner in the Human Capital Consulting practice at Deloitte. She has served Financial Services clients for almost twenty years and spent almost four years serving the U.S. Federal Reserve as they embarked on standing up two industry-led taskforces on Faster & Secure Payments and the creation of the Faster Payments Council. It was during that time that she became interested in and fascinated by the complexity of the Payments space. She is now the lead HC Partner in Deloitte’s Canadian Payments practice.
Jason Revelle
Brighterion
Jason Revelle has been building and supporting enterprise-caliber systems for over 23 years, starting his career in technology with Mastercard, and returning in 2012 to help differentiate their payments networks through real-time cybersecurity and intelligence solutions. In between, Jason spent time in a variety of disciplines within small and large companies, most recently at Boeing working across subsidiaries to develop an AWS digital enablement platform for their commercial airline customers, offering decision support and optimized fleet management for air operations. After working alongside us at Mastercard for several years creating global scale products based upon our world-class AI, he joined our team in 2018 to lead our growth into the next evolution of solutions and services.
Tim Ruhe
As Fiserv’s Vice President of Payment Strategy and Partnerships, Tim is responsible for ensuring the long-term success of Fiserv clients through partnership-based innovation and co-creation. This includes partnerships in real-time payments and data-driven payment experiences across both Consumer and Commercial Payments. Prior to his current role Tim held multiple product development leadership positions at Fiserv, leading Fiserv’s entry into mobile banking, integrated money movement, P2P payments, and mobile banking. Prior to joining Fiserv, Tim he held leadership positions at CheckFree, Corillian, and several early stage technology companies.
Carl Slabicki
Carl Slabicki is the Head of Strategic Payment Solutions for BNY Mellon’s Treasury Services. In his current role, Carl is responsible for the Payables and Receivables product group that delivers specialized solutions to optimize payment flows for a multi-segment corporate client base, bank clients in a private label capacity and strategy to selectively partner with FinTechs to enhance and scale of services across the market.
Lex Sokolin
Lex is a futurist and entrepreneur working on the next generation of financial services. He is the Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world. Lex focuses on emerging digital assets, public and private enterprise blockchain solutions, and decentralized finance and autonomous organizations.
Kathy Strasser
Kathy Strasser is the Chief Operating Officer of IncredibleBank who thrives on building high-performing teams to deliver profitable growth for the business. A 25-year veteran of the payments industry, Kathy claimed she would never work at bank. After 20 years at Deluxe (formerly Wausau Financial Systems), in 2015 she joined IncredibleBank. With her passion for digital technology, five years later has led the bank through a digital transformation, positioning it as a recognized leader in Community Banking.
Daniel Szmukler
In his current role at the Euro Banking Association, Daniel is in charge of business development, thought leadership, innovation, events and educational activities. He runs the association’s working groups, the EBAday conference and EBA’s professional training seminars and schools. Daniel completed a first term of office as Head of Communications and Corporate Governance at EBA CLEARING from 2002 to 2012. From 2001 to 2002, Daniel was a Payment Systems Advisor to the European Banking Federation (EBF) in Brussels. He began his professional career in 1994 with SWIFT in Brussels. Daniel holds graduate degrees in business administration and management from Boston University, Mass. and from the University of Brussels, and an undergraduate degree from Florida Atlantic University, FL.
Connie Theien
Connie Theien serves as the senior vice president of industry relations and the faster payments strategy leader for the Federal Reserve System. Theien leads efforts to engage payments stakeholders in advancing strategies for improving the U.S. payment system and in collaborating to encourage implementation and adoption of faster payments in the United States. Theien leads stakeholder engagement by supporting various industry and Federal Reserve work groups and initiatives. She also leads the engagement strategy for the Fed Payments Improvement Community, a group that includes thousands of stakeholders from across the payments ecosystem, to improve the end-to-end speed, efficiency and security of payments in the country. As part of the Federal Reserve’s payments improvement leadership team, she established and managed the Faster and Secure Payments Task Forces, a coalition of 500+ stakeholders that worked from 2015-2018 to lay important groundwork for advancing payments speed and security.
Ken is the first vice president and chief operating officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Together with the Bank president, Montgomery leads the strategic direction and effective management of the Reserve Bank’s regional and national responsibilities. In a national capacity, Montgomery is leading the Federal Reserve System’s FedNowSM Service to support faster payments in the United States with interbank real-time gross settlement and integrated clearing.
Mohanbir is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology, the Director of the Center for Research in Technology Innovation and the Chairman of the Technology Industry Management Program at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.