Melissa Shields is a senior payments executive with extensive knowledge in subscription, payments, and product verticals.  With a passion for innovation in the space, she has led initiatives to expand and simplify recurring transactions as well as evolve new acceptance strategies with Fintech partners.

As the Director of Payment Strategy and Operations at Starbucks, Melissa and her team of experienced partners are charged with providing the payments strategies for both card present and card-not-present experiences throughout Starbucks.

Sharon Drabeck is Senior Director, Treasury & Risk Management, for
iHerb, an ecommerce retailer that delivers health and wellness
products to 185 countries in 86 currencies, utilizing over 40 payment
options. She is responsible for the strategic management of iHerb's
corporate treasury, risk management and payment processing
relationships.

Jonathan Lee is on the Payments Operations team at Netflix in Los Gatos, CA. His team works to ensure that subscribers have a seamless experience by maximizing authorization rates and minimizing payments-related churn. Jonathan works closely with strategic market leads, finance, and engineering teams for global initiatives and optimizations.

Maggie Cheung is the SVP of Operations at Spokeo in Pasadena, CA. She leads the Payments and Fraud, Customer Care, and the B2B teams. She is responsible for ensuring a frictionless payment experience and providing top-notch customer service for the subscribers. Her team works closely with the engineering, product, and finance teams, as well asvendors, to drive customer satisfaction and to reduce subscriber churn. She understands the critical role that payments and customer service experiences play in the customer journey and is committed to providing a secure, convenient, and seamless payment experience for all the customers.

Cathy McGarry is Director of Treasury Operations at Northwestern Medicine, a premier academic health system in Chicagoland area. As a strategic business leader, she has established a proven track record of driving organizational transformation through successful system implementations that enhance working capital effectiveness and streamline processes. With her extensive experience, she leverages her expertise in Banking Solutions, Payment Processing, PCI Compliance, and Risk Management.

As an influential voice in the treasury community, Cathy has held several leadership positions, including President and Board Officer positions with Treasury Management Association of Chicago, Regional Officer for the Association of Financial Professionals as well as leading healthcare treasury roundtables. With her passion for payments, she continues to drive innovation and operational excellence.

Stephanie Meyers brings over seven years of expertise in healthcare payments to her role as System Manager for CommonSpirit Health's Treasury Payment Card Team. In her current position, she oversees the day-to-day processing of both patient and non-patient payments, ensuring operational excellence across the organization's vast healthcare ministry. Her responsibilities also include managing critical vendor relationships and spearheading payment-related projects that drive innovation and efficiency.

An active leader in the payments industry, Stephanie serves as a Special Interest Group (SIG) leader with the Merchant Advisory Group, where she contributes to advancing best practices and fostering collaboration. She is also recognized as a leader within the Women in Payments network, reflecting her commitment to mentorship and industry engagement. Stephanie is eager to bring her expertise to her new role on the Merchant Board, collaborating with PaymentsEd sage leadership to further the association's mission of advancing payments innovation and education.

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I currently work at Save the Children US headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. I oversee private fundraising finance and payments strategy. Prior to this, I worked at the Synapse Group in Stamford Connecticut for about 12 years. I was responsible for finance and payment operations there as well, which covered SOX compliance, analytics, vendor management etc. et al. I live in Fairfield, Connecticut with my wife, two girls and a menagerie of pets. Fun fact: I have triplet siblings *and* triplet 1^st cousins.

Brian is a Strategist on the Sony PlayStation Payments team. He specializes in anticipating and quantifying ROI opportunities within the ever-changing Payments and Risk landscape and leveraging these into competitive advantages.

He has worked in Payments and Fraud for 15+ years and uses this experience to forecast unseen areas of improvement as well as unintended consequences.

Julie Ransom is a Senior Payment Operations Manager at Ancestry.com in Lehi, Utah. Her team focuses on optimizing authorization rates, lowering fees, and mitigating Ancestry’s risk while collaborating with external third parties to ensure a best-in-class payment experience.

Pete has a wealth of knowledge in the global subscription and payments space. Over the past 10 years, he has worked to help brands build their global presence by strengthening their ecommerce and payment capabilities.

As Sr. Product Manager at Warner Brothers Discovery (HBO Max), Pete is charged with providing payment capabilities that align with WBD’s growth strategy.

Kristian Hansen is the Director of Product at Asurion and leads their Payments Experience team. Previously he ran the payments at Crunchyroll (the world’s largest Anime SVOD company) and Levi-Strauss. When he’s not tracking authorization rates, you can find him trail running in Montana’s backcountry.

Bobby is a seasoned payments professional with over 15 years’ experience in the FinTech space. Having served roles on both the processing/acquiring side, as well as the merchant side, he brings a unique perspective into the world of merchant services.  As the Director of eCommerce Payments at Zillow, he is responsible for providing strategic direction and operational oversight across all Zillow lines of business. Prior to joining Zillow, he led an enterprise implementations team at FIS/WorldPay, which allows him to provide strategic insight across a wide range of merchants (enterprise, government, utility, insurance, and FIs) and their common challenges.

Jennifer is currently a Vice President of Innovation and Digital Partnerships at Visa. Jennifer has 10 years in the Payments Industry, previously leading the Consumer Payments organization at Cash App and as the Head of Third Party Partnerships and Global Payments Operations at Amazon.

Josh is a value-driven executive leader with experience working at early-stage startups and has demonstrated the ability to shift gears and take high-speed turns with pinpoint accuracy. Josh has more than 15 years of digital subscription service expertise and has led teams in billing and payments, customer service, sales, retention, operations, partner onboarding, product management, compliance, and accounting. His wide breadth of knowledge enables him to see beyond the obvious and deliver a holistic perspective with a customer-first mentality

Kevin Salerno has more than 20 years of software development experience and is currently the Billing And Payments Architect at NewFold Digital. Over the past 15 years, he has worked as a development lead in designing and implementing enterprise business systems and applications. A key focus of his has been designing and building a billing and payments solution that could scale to support an evolving product catalog and maturing business models. Kevin plays a vital role in ensuring the payments solution minimizes organizational costs and customer friction while maximizing revenue and customer retention.

An executive leader skilled in analyzing existing operations, building and implementing new strategies, processes, and technologies that improve productivity, customer satisfaction and efficiency. A payments professional leader who has volunteered countless hours to shaping PaymentsEd focused on educating payment professionals.

Jay Matthews has worked in the area of billing and payments for 20+ years. His areas of responsibility include payments and fraud mitigation strategy and billing process management. During his time in the industry, Jay has had the opportunity to view payments from three different functional areas, Finance, Operations, and Marketing, which has given him a unique perspective on strategy development. Jay holds a B.S. in Economics from Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Scott Adams, CEO/Founder of FraudDeflect.com / CNPMentors.com is a veteran payments professional with 20+ years of experience in online business, the card-not-present financial community, and the affiliate marketing community. Scott founded CNPMentors to help merchants get out of chargeback monitoring programs, or better yet, reduce chargebacks and fraud before they happen with education and training plus consulting services. More recently, Scott co-founded FraudDeflect to provide chargeback management and VIsa Compelling Evidence 3.0 in an easy to use and transparent manner. Scott is a past VP of Friendly Fraud at Kount, Director of Fraud and Risk for Riot Games, a trained keynote speaker, a fixed-wing and rotor-wing pilot, and a purple belt and instructor in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Founding chairman of the Payments Education Forum, Polly’s credit card expertise spans 45 years. She is past President and CEO of The Home Shopping Network Credit Corporation and best selling author of the award winning book The Plastic Effect. Her passion and commitment to helping merchants and consumers stay credit savvy, credit smart and payments profitable fuels her keynote speeches and drives her consulting business.

Kaylee Chester is an accomplished Association Director with over five years of expertise in association management and more than a decade of proficiency in coordinating meetings and special events. She has demonstrated strategic thinking and implementation skills, excelling in navigating intricate issues and leveraging her talent for team building to overcome challenges while collaborating effectively with diverse constituencies. Her background includes substantial experience in designing and overseeing educational programs, certification initiatives, event planning, and administrative services.

Kaylee holds a bachelor’s degree in Interpersonal/Organizational Communication from the University of Central Florida and is a Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) recognized by the Events Industry Council.