Keynote Speakers
Amy Webb
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Future Today Institute
“Quantitative futurist” Amy Webb pioneered a data-driven foresight methodology that is now used by hundreds of organizations worldwide. These models help businesses spot industry disruptions early enough to create new revenue or mitigate risk. Webb also advises leaders of government, military and central banks on risk and opportunity. Her quantitative approach to foresight was built using her academic experience in economics and game theory. Books she has authored include The Genesis Machine, The Big Nine, The Signals Are Talking and Data, A Love Story.
Sean P. Roche
Former Associate Deputy Director, Directorate of Digital Innovation, Central Intelligence Agency
Sean Roche has more than 30 years of experience in dealing with thorny issues on behalf of the CIA, Department of Defense and other federal organizations. He served as the second-in-command of the CIA’s Directorate of Digital Innovation, its first new directorate in more than 50 years. The directorate was created to accelerate the integration of advanced digital capabilities across all the CIA’s mission areas and is responsible for a wide range of espionage missions, including cyber intelligence, open source collection, secure global communications, worldwide mission information systems, data curation and data science. Roche successfully built the directorate’s annual budget to more than $3 billion while overhauling legacy personnel systems and practices to create the CIA’s first digital workforce.
Federal Reserve Hosts
Austan Goolsbee
President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Austan Goolsbee leads the Chicago Fed, which conducts research and monitors local economic conditions to support formulation of monetary policy, supervises and regulates banking organizations, and provides financial services to banks and similar institutions, as well as to the U.S. government. He also serves on the Federal Open Market Committee – the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policymaking body. Goolsbee was the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from 1995 to 2023; a member and then, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 through 2011; and served on the President’s cabinet.
Ellen Bromagen
First Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Ellen Bromagen oversees the operational and financial performance of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, is vice chair of the bank’s executive committee and a member of its loan committee. She joined the bank in 1990 and has held a variety of payments managerial, financial planning and corporate accounting positions during her career. Before assuming her current role in 2015, Bromagen was executive vice president and product manager of the customer relations and support office, which managed the nationwide FedLine® Solutions electronic payments and information delivery network before the formation of Federal Reserve Financial Services in 2021.
Mark Gould
Chief Payments Executive, Federal Reserve Financial Services
Throughout his career, Mark Gould has provided Federal Reserve executive leadership at the intersection of payments, technology, strategy and operations. Since 2021, Gould has been responsible for the Federal Reserve’s full portfolio of cash, retail and wholesale payment services across the United States, working to deliver a fully integrated suite of payment services and unified customer experience for financial institutions nationwide. Gould’s Federal Reserve career began in the retail payments division of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where he served as the chief operating officer and first vice president from 2014 to 2021.
Shonda Clay (emcee)
Executive Vice President, Chief of Product and Relationship Management, Federal Reserve Financial Services
Shonda Clay le
ads integrated product development for the Federal Reserve’s portfolio of payment products, as well as its engagement and communications with financial institutions and the payments industry. In addition to leading Federal Reserve Financial Services (FRFS) customer relations, customer experience, marketing communications, research and payments improvement initiatives, Clay also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s executive committee. She joined the Federal Reserve in the 1980s and championed the Federal Reserve’s work that led to the Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System (Off-site) white paper in 2015 and the Federal Reserve’s subsequent payments improvement initiatives.
Loretta J. Mester
President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Loretta Mester participates in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy and oversees more than 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. She serves as a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee. Before taking on her current role at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 2014, Mester was 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.
Panel Session Speakers
Panel: Global Payments
Melissa Tuozzolo (moderator)
Global Head of Client Services, Global Payments Solutions, HSBC
Melissa Tuozzolo rejoined HSBC this year to lead the division’s client service and post-sales support for all regions and clients. From 2022 to 2023, she led the Bank of America team responsible for international and financial services payments and oversaw the migration to ISO 20022, implementation of strategic SWIFT initiatives, the transition to real-time 24/7 payments and payments infrastructure modernization. Earlier, she worked for Citi, most recently as head of payments financial market infrastructure within its treasury and trade services division. Tuozzolo first joined HSBC in 2013, becoming North America head of international payments in 2016.
Archie Hesse
Chief Executive Officer, Ghana Interbank Payment & Settlement Systems (GhIPS)
GhIPS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ghana’s central bank with a mandate to transform Ghana into an electronic payments society. Archie Hesse joined GhIPS in 2007 as the general manager in charge of projects and business development, and supported implementation of the National Biometric Smart Card Banking and Payment System (e-zwich), Cheque Codeline Clearing (CCC) system, Ghana Automated Clearing House (GACH) and National Switching and Processing System (gh-link™). Hesse was appointed GhIPS CEO in 2012.
Thomas Lammer
Deputy Head of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CMPI), Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
Thomas Lammer joined the CPMI Secretariat in 2019. Previously, he worked for more than eight years at the European Central Bank, most recently as principal market infrastructure expert/team lead in the oversight division. Earlier, he was a senior financial sector specialist at the World Bank. He started his career at Austria’s central bank in 2001, where he managed payment infrastructure implementation projects.
Sopnendu Mohanty
Chief Fintech Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
Sopnendu Mohanty is responsible for creating development strategies, public infrastructure and technology-driven innovation policies for MAS. He has more than two decades of public and private sector experience in technology, operations, digital finance and investment strategies. He has championed API Exchange (APIX), the Singapore Fintech Festival, Singapore Financial Data Exchange, and wider use of Singapore payment rails and experimental programs, such as Project Ubin. In addition, Mohanty advises many international global advisory bodies on fintech, innovation and inclusion.
Sunayna Tuteja
Chief Innovation Officer, Federal Reserve System
Sunayna Tuteja was named the Federal Reserve System’s first chief innovation officer in 2021. Her global experience includes leading change and innovation at the nexus of finance, technology and policy. Previously, Tuteja was the managing director, head of digital assets and distributed ledger technology at TD Ameritrade. Her work there included commercializing frontier technology, as well as building and investing in the next generation of products and experiences in collaboration with partners in big tech, fintech, start-ups and the venture capital ecosystem in North America and Asia.
Tom Zschach
Chief Innovation Officer, SWIFT
Tom Zschach is responsible for driving innovation across Swift, as well as collaborating with the Swift community and partners to create new growth opportunities and position the company for the future. Zschach joined Swift in 2020 with a focus on developing new growth strategies to further solidify Swift’s position as an industry leader. Previously, Zschach served as the chief information officer at CLS Group and earlier, LCH.Clearnet, one of the world’s leading multinational clearing houses.
Panel: Instant Payments in the U.S.
Reed Luhtanen (moderator)
Executive Director, U.S. Faster Payments Council
The U.S. Faster Payments Council (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. Luhtanen manages the organization’s daily operations and works with the FPC board and members to execute the FPC’s strategic plan while ensuring inclusive, transparent dialogue with all FPC stakeholders. Before joining the FPC, Luhtanen spent 15 years at Walmart, departing as its senior director of global treasury. Luhtanen was recognized as one of PayBefore’s “Top Ten Payments Lawyers” in 2015 and by the Electronic Transactions Association as a member of its “Forty Under 40” class in 2019.
Rusiru Gunasena
Senior Vice President, RTP® Product Management and Strategy, The Clearing House
Rusiru Gunasena leads the RTP product management and strategy team. He is a payments and fintech leader with more than 20 years of experience across multiple industries, and a strong advocate for digital payments innovation. Before joining TCH in 2022, he was Jack Henry’s managing director of the JHA PayCenter™, a faster payments hub that provides financial institutions with seamless connections to the RTP network.
Rupa Krishnan
Managing Director, Head of Global Real-Time Payments, JPMorgan Chase
Rupa Krishnan joined JPMorgan Chase in 2022 to head its instant payments offering. Previously, she was head of platform product and engineering for PayPal and earlier, vice president of network products for American Express.
Bernadette Ksepka
Vice President and Deputy Head of Product Management, FedNow® Service, Federal Reserve System
Bernadette Ksepka leads FedNow Service product management with a focus on defining its release roadmap, requirements and vendor evaluations. She also plays a key role in the FedNow Service’s Agile/SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework®) model and works with the Federal Reserve Financial Services customer relations team to manage outreach to industry stakeholders. Ksepka joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2005 and has held positions in the markets group and its former wholesale product office. She is a certified SAFe Agilest® and member of the Agile Center of Excellence leadership team.
Matt Marcus
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Modern Treasury
Modern Treasury provides payment operations software for companies to move and track money with confidence. Marcus co-founded Modern Treasury to alleviate the pain points his team experienced while building a payment operations system at mortgage lender LendingHome (now Kiavi Funding). Previously, he worked at First Round Capital and Ultimate Kronos Group.
Peter Tapling, APRP
Managing Director, PTap Advisory, LLC
Peter Tapling is a serial entrepreneur who has started companies in security, risk, identity and payments. His current advisory efforts are focused on investments, productization and go-to-market strategy in payments, risk, authentication/identity and emerging technologies, such as blockchain, central bank digital currencies, 5G (fifth-generation broadband cellular networks) and the internet of things (IoT). He is a technology advisor to Nacha’s Phixius peer-to-peer network, a member of the U.S. Faster Payments Council board of directors and the Association for Financial Professionals, and an Accredited Payments Risk Professional (APRP).
Panel: Innovation
Maria Smith (moderator)
Vice President of Payments and Financial Services, Walgreens
Maria Smith joined Walgreens Boots Alliance in 2021 to lead strategy and execution and deliver a single strategic roadmap for all financial services, including digital wallet, load/reload accounts, gift cards, ATM and money remittances. She also is an advisor to the board of the Latinx Executive Alliance.
Ginger Baker
Chief Network Officer, Plaid
Ginger Baker joined Plaid in 2020 and was promoted from head of financial access to her current role in May 2023. She now oversees profit and loss for Plaid’s personal finance products, consumer surfaces and data access initiatives. With her team, she works to unlock digital innovation across the financial services ecosystem. Plaid is a financial services company that offers a technology platform to enable fintech and digital finance applications to connect with users’ bank accounts. In her earlier career, Baker was head of on-demand liquidity at Ripple; head of product, financial services at Facebook, where she founded the mobile financial services product group; and director of payments at Square.
Stacy Greiner
Chief Operating Officer, DailyPay, Inc.
Stacy Greiner is responsible for operations at DailyPay, a provider of earned wage access and other on-demand payroll services. Her role includes driving scaled growth leading operations, customer service and the company’s “people team.” Before joining DailyPay in 2022, Greiner was general manager of Dun & Bradstreet’s sales and marketing solutions division. Her experience includes senior executive roles at Cisco and IBM, where she led globally diverse product, marketing, and data & analytics organizations.
Tom Greenwood
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Volt
Volt is a technology developer and product innovator with a focus on new generation real-time payments infrastructure and open banking. Tom Greenwood is responsible for managing its strategic relationships, developing strategy, planning and driving international expansion. Previously, Greenwood founded IFX Payments in 2005, a multi-billion dollar turnover fintech business operating across Europe and the Middle East.
Nirmal Kumar
CTO and Chief Product Officer, Aliaswire
Nirmal Kumar is a fintech executive with deep expertise in payments and financial services, and a founder of Aliaswire, a fintech company that provides bill payment services to financial services and other companies. Since joining the company in 2006, he has served as head of product, chief technology officer, vice president of engineering, director of product engineering and a financial software engineer. Kumar holds number of patents and Aliaswire has received numerous industry awards for payments technology that optimize the way businesses pay and get paid.
Panel: Digital Currency
Avivah Litan (moderator)
Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
Avivah Litan is a member of the Gartner team that covers artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. Her background in blockchain innovation; AI trust, risk and security management; and many aspects of cybersecurity and fraud, including the integration of AI with these domains; is useful as she writes and provides advice about securing and protecting blockchain applications, AI models and data. Before joining Gartner, Litan worked as a director of financial systems at the World Bank.
Austin Campbell
Founder and Managing Partner, Zero Knowledge Consulting and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
Austin Campbell is a consultant, professor and writer who has been in crypto since 2018 and has two decades trading and structuring various financial instruments, including stable value and bank-owned life insurance wraps, catastrophe bonds and mortality swaps. Previously, he ran stable value trading at JPMorgan Chase, was co-head of digital asset rates trading at Citigroup and head of portfolio management at Paxos Trust Co.
Dante Disparte
Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy, Circle
Circle is a leading global financial technology firm and the issuer of USDC, a digital dollar or stablecoin that has supported more than $10 trillion in cumulative transactions and is a global payment network in more than 190 countries. Dante Disparte joined Circle in 2021 and also serves as founder, chairman and CEO of Risk Cooperative, a strategic risk advisory and insurance brokerage firm. Earlier, he was a founding executive of the Diem Association (formerly Libra), which previously operated the Diem payment network.
Tony Richards
Chair, CBDC Steering Committee, Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, Australia
Tony Richards retired from the Reserve Bank of Australia at the end of 2021 after serving as head of payments policy and leading the bank’s work on retail payments, crypto-assets, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), instant payments and financial market infrastructures. He now is a senior advisor at the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre and consults on payments, economics and financial issues.
Matthias Schmudde
Head of the Payment and Securities Clearing and Settlement Division, Deutsche Bundesbank
In addition to his current role at Deutsche Bundesbank, Matthias Schmudde is a member of the Eurosystem Market Infrastructure and Payments Committee (MIPC), Eurosystem Advisory Group on Market Infrastructures for securities and collateral (AMI-SeCo), and the Digital Euro Project Steering Group. He also is involved in Eurosystem-related initiatives, such as the European Commission’s European retail payments strategy and European Central Bank’s investigation of a digital euro.
Panel: Security & Risk Management
Julie Conroy (moderator)
Head of Risk Insights & Advisory, Datos Insights
Julie Conroy covers fraud, data security, anti-money laundering and compliance issues based on her insights from more than a decade of hands-on product management experience working with financial institutions, payments processors and risk management companies. Before joining Aite-Novarica Group in 2010, she was vice president of product solutions with Early Warning Services, where she managed a suite of fraud-prevention services that provided clients with more than $1 billion per year in loss avoidance. Under Conroy’s leadership, Early Warning Services launched multiple new solutions. She also was a key member of the team that facilitated the spin-off of Early Warning Services from First Data Corporation to Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and BB&T.
Ben Colman
Chief Executive Officer, Reality Defender
Ben Colman is the founder of Reality Defender, a provider of deepfake detection. Over the past 15 years, Colman has been an angel investor, advisor, board member and/or founder to help scale up companies at the intersection of privacy, AI and cybersecurity. Previously, Colman led cyber commercialization at Goldman Sachs.
Dave Excell
Founder, Featurespace
Dave Excell drives the innovation strategy of Featurespace, a behavioral analytics software company helping organizations fight financial crime and achieve regulatory compliance. Featurespace’s ARIC software platform learns the patterns associated with legitimate customer behavior, enabling accurate detection of emerging business risks and threats and helping clients make accurate real-time decisions about how they manage their customers.
Michael Timoney
Vice President of Payments Improvement, Federal Reserve Financial Services
Mike Timoney designs, develops and implements key elements of the Federal Reserve Financial Services strategy for payments security. In particular, he and his team focus on scams, fraud definitions, improving fraud data, and research on fraud, cyber threats and emerging technologies. Before joining the Federal Reserve System in 2019, Timoney was senior vice president and senior fraud policy specialist with Bank of America. He has more than 25 years of experience in financial services, treasury management, fraud prevention and mitigation.
Jonathan Welburn, PhD
PhD, Senior Researcher, Cyber & Intelligence, RAND Corp.
Jonathan Welburn’s research includes the economic consequences of large cyber risks and opportunities for enhanced cyber deterrence. He leverages methods from operations research, computational economics, decision and risk analysis to elucidate emerging macroeconomic systemic risks, the potential for market failures, estimation of global interfirm (supply chain) networks and models of economic disparity. Welburn also is a faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a member of the Aspen Cyber Group, the Society for Risk Analysis and the Decision Analysis Society.
