Kristy Cook is the Vice President, Payments Consulting for U.S. & LAC at American Express.  In this role, she oversees a multi-national team responsible for providing payment processing expertise and technical consulting to American Express merchants, processors and service providers.  Before joining American Express, Kristy spent 14 years in payments acceptance at Target where she served in several payments industry forums, and she also worked 10 years in various financial roles.

Layne LaBadie is Vice President of Business Development and National Account Management for JCB International Credit Card Co., Ltd.  She has over 20 years of experience in the payments industry.  Her current responsibilities include Relationship Management, Marketing and growing JCB card acceptance for major accounts in Electronic Commerce, Retail, and Travel and Entertainment.

Erich leads the sales team in charge of Visa’s overall relationship with merchant and co-brand partners across the bill pay segment in the US. In his role he assumes the strategic and operational responsibility for this industry vertical and also manages Visa’s relationship with a number of industry associations. In previous roles at Visa Erich managed the Fuel & C-store as well as the retail and grocery merchant segments. Prior to joining Visa in 2014 he worked for American Express on both the issuing and the merchant side of the business. During that time he held increasingly senior positions including general manager of the merchant business for a number of markets in Europe and Global roles in large B2B relationship management while based in Frankfurt a. M., London and New York. Erich started his professional career in retail banking in his native Germany and lives with his wife in Rye, NY enjoying life as ‘empty nesters’.

Cindy Hembrock is a Vice President of Product Management in Ethoca.  In her current role, she is responsible for fraud data products and data services that cross both Ethoca and Mastercard and provide insights that support all stakeholders in securing the payments ecosystem.   Previously, she held various technology roles within Mastercard, including leading engineering teams that built a variety of fraud prevention products.

Jamie Colbert has over 20 years of payments experience. She is currently a Senior Relationship Manager at Worldpay by FIS in the North American E-commerce space supporting Digital Content clients. She started as a Relationship Manager in 2008 with First Data (now Fiserv) and has also spend time at Bank of America Merchant Services and Chase. Prior to becoming a Relationship Manager, she worked in Product Management and Project Management. She enjoys building relationships with her customers and being their advocate with the card brands while educating them on the various aspects of electronic commerce.

As an international technology industry veteran, Jesus brings over 30 years of experience in commercial, marketing, strategy, operations and technology roles. Prior to Vindicia, Jesus was Head of Marketing for Amdocs in the Caribbean and Latin America region, driving marketing to significantly expand Amdocs’ sales pipeline. Before Amdocs, he was Head of Sales for Utiba (acquired by Amdocs in 2014), focusing on mobile financial services. His experience includes two years as Head of Corporate/B2B and CCO at Cable & Wireless, and 15 years with Motorola. He lives by Vince Lombardi’s motto: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” Jesus holds an MBA from Universidad del Zulia (Venezuela), a B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Universidad Rafael Urdaneta (Venezuela), and Advanced Management certifications from Kellogg Institute of Management and IESE (Universidad de Navarra, Spain).

Adrielle Andrade is a Business Development Manager at dLocal. Leading the crypto vertical, she is focused on developing relationships with strategic partners in the Industry, to help them offer the best experience to their users when it comes to Fiat Payments. Though she began her career in Logistics, Adrielle quickly switched focus to work in the payments and tech industry. She was offered the opportunity to develop and grow Latam for Ripple in 2019, which was her first contact to cryptocurrencies and the finance industry.

Kathleen Butler has over 20 years of experience in strategic client development and has spent the last 15 years at Discover Global Network.   Kathleen is responsible for client management in the telecommunications, cable and live entertainment/ticketing verticals.  She also oversees client management and global acceptance with Buy Now Pay Later providers.   Her vast experience spans across e-commerce, recurring payments, marketing, chargeback management, and operations. Kathleen is an innovative thought leader and trusted advisor working with clients to identify and solution complex issues.

Tyler Heun has extensive experience working with merchants and partners to set the future direction for their business and solve some of their most challenging problems through payments innovation. Spanning 15 years in the payments and banking space, he collaborates with some of the world's most sophisticated partners and merchants to leverage technology to optimize their payments ecosystem. He is an advisor for PaymentsEd, PayCLT, and RevTech Labs. He is also an active member of Merchant Risk Council, Merchant Advisory Group, Electronic Transaction Association, and Merchant Payments Coalition.  He resides in North Carolina with his wife and 3 kids.

Raymond has extensive experience working with merchants on transforming their payments strategy. He joined Stripe in early 2018 and is a founding member of the Payments Performance Team. The team is responsible for optimizing conversion for Stripe’s largest merchants across auth rates, authentication, fraud, and costs. Prior to Stripe, Raymond was a Senior Director at Visa on the Commerce Solutions team, driving innovative loyalty solutions like card-linked offers programs for merchants like Uber and Rakuten.

Liz is the Head of Strategic Partnerships at CMSPI a global consulting and technology firm focused on making payments more productive. Liz leads global supply chain payment partner relationships and supports merchant client payment strategies to help merchants improve transaction productivity and optimize customer paying experiences. Prior to joining CMSPI, Liz was at Amazon.com where she led strategic payment acceptance initiatives for alternative payment method acceptance, managed global acquirer relationships, and led U.S. federal payments and financial services policy. Liz has extensive policy experience in payments, financial services, emerging technology, data security, and business profitability. Liz has held senior policy and industry affairs positions at the Merchant Advisory Group, National Restaurant Association, and the Food Marketing Institute.

Matt Leman is the Head of Partnership Initiatives for J.P. Morgan’s payments business. In addition to being responsible for strategic partnerships, he is also the payments lead for the firm’s government, higher education, healthcare, non-profit and insurance segment. J.P. Morgan Payments is the global payment acceptance and merchant acquiring business of JPMorgan Chase and a leading provider of payment, fraud management and data security solutions. 

Chase Foster leads enterprise sales at Pagos, helping the world’s most sophisticated businesses increase revenue while improving their customer experiences. He has well over a decade’s worth of experience working with merchants to solve big payments challenges: from growing 3D Secure authentication and alternative payment method adoption at CardinalCommerce to promoting merchant-issuer collaboration at Ethoca/Mastercard. From there, he jumped into the complex world of global payment processing and acquiring at Checkout.com where he led US efforts on the global strategic accounts team. Chase brings a wealth of knowledge and connections to the payments and fintech space and is recognized for his ability to build longstanding partnerships.

Melanie Stout works with card-not-present, recurring revenue and card on file merchants to achieve continuous payments process improvements, reduce costs, reduce churn, and increase the lifetime value of their customers.

As a partner at Paul Larsen Consulting (PLC), Melanie worked with hundreds of merchants across multiple verticals to achieve optimal payments success.

Lam Van Lund supports merchants within the Mastercard North America Market Development team.  In this role, she is responsible for defining and driving technology enhancements to improve processing efficiencies.  In addition, she advocates and provides merchant’s voice back to internal team related products, rules, etc., to help improve acceptance, cardholder benefits and security of the ecosystem.