Leaders In Payments

Payments is getting smarter, faster, and more automated and that makes one question feel urgent: where does trust come from when the tech starts acting on our behalf? We sit down with Marielle Mekkaoui, Head of Marketing at Payabli, to talk about why the future of payments is still human, even in an AI-first era. We get into what embedded payments should actually look like inside vertical SaaS pla...

Checkout is getting faster, smarter, and more invisible, but the stakes feel more human than ever. We talk with Jaime Hawkins, Managing Director, North America at Ingenico, about what it takes to build technology that quietly works in the background while people stay front and center. From her roots in industrial engineering to years of client-facing operations, Jaime explains how process thinking...

Payments are getting smoother on the surface, but the real story is what happens underneath when something changes, breaks, or needs to scale fast. That’s why our conversation with Ann Berkmeier, Chief Administrative Officer at Dash Solutions, centers on a simple idea with big consequences: companies don’t scale by accident, they scale by design. From her early work in large-scale banking migratio...

AI is racing into payments, but the uncomfortable truth is that speed without trust turns into risk fast. We sit down with Garima Chaudhary, VP of Financial Crime and Compliance AI at ThetaRay, to unpack what it really takes to modernize AML and sanctions compliance while keeping humans accountable for outcomes. Garima shares her career journey from engineering and operational risk into the high-s...

Payments are not just transactions anymore. They are software experiences, API connections, and full business operating systems, and that shift changes what leadership looks like across fintech. We sit down with Kim Molinaro, Head of ISV at Fiserv, to trace her path from fashion-focused marketing and early sales roles into 24 years in payment processing and partner growth, and to unpack what makes...

Payments look like pure software until you move countries, get hit with fraud, or watch a “guaranteed” settlement date slip. That’s where the real story starts, and it’s why I loved talking with Kristin Reischel, Senior Director of Solutions and Partner Marketing at Rapyd, for our Women Leaders in Payments Month series sponsored by Payroc. Kristin shares a refreshingly honest career path: Boulder,...

Payments don’t fail as an abstract metric. They fail for a freelancer waiting to get paid, a small business trying to accept the locally normal method, or a customer who gets told “we don’t support how you pay.” That’s why our conversation with Clarice Lehman, Alternative Payments Operations Lead at DLocal, keeps landing on one theme: the future of payments has to stay human, even as the industry...

Payments are getting smarter and more automated, but the real question is simpler: are we making life easier for the humans behind every transaction? For Women Leaders in Payments Month, we’re joined by Kimling Lam, Chief Marketing Officer at Fortis, to talk about what “the future is human” actually looks like inside fintech, embedded payments, and modern go-to-market teams. Special thanks to Payr...

Payments are getting faster and more automated, but the hardest part still isn’t the tech. It’s trust. We talk with Rachel Costello, VP of Platform Growth at Maverick, about why the future of payments is human and how leaders can keep empathy, judgment, and real partnership at the center while AI and automation reshape everything around us. Rachel shares her career path into fintech, from early wo...

A failed payment is never just a technical error. It’s a customer stuck at checkout, a merchant losing revenue, and a moment where trust is either reinforced or broken. We sit down with Alexandra Dolia, co-founder and COO of Akurateco, to talk about what payments leadership looks like when you refuse to treat the industry like a black box and you build teams that can explain what’s happening end t...

Payments look instant and invisible until something goes wrong. That’s when you find out whether you’re working with a faceless system or a team you can actually trust. We sit down with Alex McCandless, EVP of Marketing and Training at Payroc, to get specific about what “people powered” really means in fintech and why transparency and access to real decision makers still matter in a world of autom...

Payments are getting smarter, faster, and more automated, but the stakes are still deeply human. I sit down with Gunita Bindra, CRO of Paymode New Business Development at Bottomline , to talk about what it takes to lead in fintech when AI is reshaping how decisions get made and how money moves.  Along the way, Ganita shares her path from computer science in India to roles in software engineering,...

In this milestone 500th episode of the Leaders in Payments Podcast, I bring together seven respected leaders from across the payments ecosystem for a special look at the state of the industry. Rather than a traditional one-on-one interview, this episode features perspectives from Jim Oberman, CEO of Payroc ; Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, President of SoFi Tech Solutions at SoFi ; Greg Cohen, CEO of For...

Checks still power a shocking amount of insurance money movement, and that single fact creates slow claims, higher operating costs, and an open door for fraud. Greg Myers sits down with Ian Drysdale, CEO of One Inc, to talk about what it really takes to drag property and casualty insurance payments into a modern digital payments era without breaking the workflows carriers rely on. We unpack how On...

Mailing checks to pay off a credit card in 2026 sounds like a joke, but it is still a real debt consolidation workflow at scale. Greg Myers sits down with Jose Bethancourt, Co-Founder and CEO of Method , to unpack why liability payments are uniquely messy and what it takes to make them feel as seamless as modern fintech promises. Jose shares his path from growing up in South Texas near the Mexico...

Fraud doesn’t usually announce itself with a flashing warning sign. It shows up as a chargeback, a fake account that looks “normal,” or an account takeover that slips through the exact same checkout flow your best customers use. Greg Myers sits down with Tamas Kadar, Co-Founder and CEO of SEON , to unpack how modern fraud actually works and how digital businesses can protect revenue without buryin...

A “successful” card payment can still leave merchants waiting days to actually access their money, paying layers of fees along the way, and carrying fraud risk that never truly goes away. That gap between authorization and settlement is where cash flow gets squeezed, reconciliation gets messy, and margins get quietly taxed, especially as more commerce shifts to e-commerce and other card-not-presen...

A $400,000 B2B card payment sounds simple until a processor flags it, the finance team cannot reconcile it, and the invoice sits open while DSO creeps up. That gap between delivering product and collecting cash is where B2B payments either become a growth engine or a constant operational headache. I sits down with Thomas Cecil, Co-Founder of PAYRA, to unpack how modern accounts receivable automati...

AI is moving from “helpful assistant” to autonomous actor, and payments leaders are about to feel the difference. I sit down with Russell Moore, Co-Founder and CEO of Amotivv , to get concrete about what breaks when generative AI and agentic AI leave the lab and touch regulated data, customer outcomes, and real money movement. We talk through why so many AI initiatives stall after a promising proo...

Payments don’t fail because teams lack ambition, they fail because the infrastructure can’t keep up with what customers expect. We sit down with Mike Milotich, CEO of Marqeta , to unpack how modern issuer processing is changing card issuing from a rigid bank product into configurable, real-time payments infrastructure built for innovation. We trace Mike’s 20-year journey across American Express, P...

Payments are speeding up everywhere, but the real story is what that speed breaks and what it demands from the people running the rails. I’m joined by Jennifer Barker, Global Head of Payments and Trade and Depositary Receipts at BNY , for a clear-eyed conversation about what’s changing in the payments industry and what leaders should do next when complexity keeps piling up. From her journey throug...

Paper checks are the easiest payment method to hate and one of the hardest to remove. They are slow, expensive, fraud-prone, and deeply baked into legacy workflows. Greg Myers sits down with Steven Faust, CEO of Dash Solutions , to unpack what it really takes to modernize business payouts and why disbursements have become one of the biggest growth engines in the payments industry. We dig into how...

Moving money is easy to describe and brutally hard to do well at global scale. When your network supports thousands of clients across 90+ countries and touches thousands of currency pairs, you start to see a different map of what’s changing in payments and what’s just noise. Greg Myers sits down with Debo Sen, Head of Payments, Services at Citi , to unpack what that vantage point reveals about the...

The mid-market is where tech decisions get dangerous. You are big enough that uptime, security, and delivery speed matter every day, but you are not big enough to burn cash on massive consulting retainers or absorb the fallout from a shaky vendor. That “valley in the middle” is exactly where David Robinson lives, and it is why he built Stratos Development Group to offer right-fit technical leaders...

Cross-border payouts are one of those problems everyone complains about and then quietly accepts: high fees, slow settlement, and endless workarounds to get money into the hands of real people. I sit down with Cyril Mathew, Co-Founder and CEO of Latitude , to talk about why “faster money movement” only matters when the recipient can actually spend it in local currency, not just hold a stablecoin b...