2023 Speakers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Finzly

Booshan Rengachari founded Finzly in 2012. The company’s mission is to create a modern banking experience. Previously, Rengachari managed international technology at Well Fargo and served on the U.S. Faster Payment Task Force and as a solution proposer to the Federal Reserve Banks.

Director, Immediate Payments Product Management, BNY Mellon

Tanmoy Banerjee manages instant payments for BNY Mellon, including the Clearing House’s Real-Time Payments (RTP®) network, the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service and Zelle Solutions’ tokenized payments. Previously, Banerjee managed global instant payment product solutions as head of solution architecture at Citibank.

Chief Executive Officer, Bridge Community BankBob Steen leads an employee-owned community bank established in 1903 that serves east central Iowa communities through branches in Mechanicsville, Mount Vernon and Solon. He is a longtime advocate for banking and payments improvements.