Svenia is an experienced and enthusiastic manager of merchant projects in the payment world. In recent years, she has developed her broad expertise from the point-of-sale payment business into the e-commerce and cloud-based till system sector. Always with the goal of supporting retailers in Germany and Europe, growing together with them and making the best possible use of the opportunities offered by digitalization.

 

After initial professional experience in global sales and project management, Svenia began her career in the payment world in 2017. She focused three years on the dynamic environment of point-of-sale payment while working at a big fintech company. Afterwards, she joined Unzer, a German payment service provider, as Senior Technical Key Account Manager in 2020. Arising from various individual companies, mergers and acquisitions have shaped Unzer into a German payment service provider, that can offer all payment services from a single source: from PSP, Acquiring and BuyNow-PayLater services in E-Commerce, over cashless payment and cloud-based till systems at the Point-of-Sale up to debt collection management. This allows Svenia to provide comprehensive advice and support to merchants across all channels and facilitate payments.

 

Despite a fulfilling full-time job, Svenia is quickly inspired by new challenges. She recently completed her part-time Master’s degree in Business Consulting & Digital Management, which she had started during pandemic times. She completed this with intensive research for her master’s thesis in the field of conversational commerce and payment. Whether professionally in customer projects or in her personal life, Svenia’s mission is to connect people to grow, learn, and achieve visions together.

Laura is a finance and payments industry professional/ powerhouse, with
over 14 years of experience spanning the Australian, European, and UK
markets. Her career has had a strong focus on partnerships and account
management, where she has played a pivotal role in driving multiple
strategic growth initiatives. Today, as a Director of Partner Management
at Thunes, her expertise is instrumental in propelling global growth for
payment companies.

Alongside her professional journey, Laura is deeply passionate about
advocating for diversity and inclusion while championing change across
the industry. She invests her time and energy into educating,
celebrating the wins, and embodying the principles of gender equality.
She actively supports various initiatives, both personally and
professionally, to advance these causes, underscoring her commitment to
creating a more equitable world.

On a personal note, Laura embraces an active lifestyle, from marathons
to cycling events, and is also well known for her enthusiastic and
positive zest for life.

Asta comes from a recognized European Fintech hub with more than a decade of experience in the finance industry. She has been working with the payments infrastructure at the Central Bank of Lithuania where her focus was on Fintech and development of SEPA retail payments system CENTROlink. Apart from the institutional experience, she has also seen the market from commercial bank, global information technology infrastructure company as well as a few payment service providers by consulting and assisting them with licensing and business management issues. Hence, her miscellaneous experience in the financial sector working for different sides -Regulator and Fintech – allows her to see the full picture of the European fintech market.

Asta currently is a Chairwoman of the Board at Fintech Hub LT association uniting around 90 FinTech industry participants in Lithuania and helping to create favorable conditions for their activities. The biggest priority of the association is to implement a self-regulation framework and promote the best industry standards among the members. In addition, association represents industry’s interests by participating in regulatory and governmental initiatives of changing regulatory requirements in order to achieve an effective prudential regulation and supervision maintaining healthy and strong financial sector.

By active participation in different groups, networks, and organizations Asta recognizes the importance of creating a platform that would give not only equal and accessible but also continuous opportunities to reach results deleting any predetermined limits or attitude.

Jelena Djurovic is Partnership Manager Serbia & SEE at Payoneer. She is a specialist in the field of banking and finance with over 15 years of experience in the traditional banking industry and almost three years in fintech payments. Jelena’s focus is on small business banking and emerging customer segments in the global digital economy.

Her goal in the digital space is to demonstrate that finance is not just about cash and numbers, but also about innovation, and collaboration, with customers, startups, and other stakeholders to become change-makers and positive forces in our societies.

Katarzyna is legal & compliance expert at Przelewy24 – a payment institution which provide modern and secure payment solutions. She has more than 8 years of experience in financial and regulatory sector. Since joining P24 in 2017 she’s highly passionate about innovation in payments and the role of compliance and best practices in it.

In her activity, she would like to highlight the importance of women in the financial technology and payments sector.

Currently, Katarzyna is based in Poznań, Poland.

Özgül is an experienced business developer and marketeer with a demonstrated history of working in payment services, cards, and financial technology industries. Currently, she is leading and developing business partnerships in the financial services (Banking) and payments ecosystem in Token Financial Technologies company. Prior to Token, she was managing a card program in a bank which is one of the top 3 major players in market share with 5 million customers in Turkey.

Özgül has more than 15 years of experience in strategic account management, product management and customer engagement. She has been in different commercial areas in the fields of B2B and B2C business development and marketing.

She is a passionate lifelong learner, energetic and enthusiastic team player. She is keen to connect the dots and discover uniqueness in life. She believes in embracing & respecting diversity and create value to make peoples’ lives grow and progress in a positive way. She thinks that payments and financial services are very related to the culture, economy, structure of society, and geographical conditions. She struggles to bring ecosystem partners together to build value with the aim of touching people’s lives.

Filomena during her 19 years of work experience (and counting) has been leading core teams in essential processes of key importance in her company and her own country. Her expertise in the field of payments and card industry is wide, from EMV migration projects, Acquiring, ATM/POS processing, e-commerce, to digital and innovative payments.

Keen of everlasting and constant education, Filomena is considered to be the top-learner and innovator in her own field: BSc in Electrical Engineering, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Master’s Degree at the Faculty of Economics, alumni of the Schulich School of Business, York University Toronto CA and a fellow of the Kellog School of Management, USA.

She is a member of the National Council for Payment Systems at the National Bank and the committee for encouraging cashless payments, actively and boldly participating and supporting the initiatives for improving the use of electronic payment channels.

In the moments between taking the North Macedonian digital ecosystem towards the future and constantly learning new perspectives, Filomena is a passionate cooking aficionado, tech-savvy explorer of new innovative gadgets and an active fan of fitness and yoga routines.

Marianne Bernou is legal & regulatory expert in Banking Circle in Luxembourg, a financial infrastructure provider to payments businesses and banks that recently received a banking license from the Luxembourg supervisory authority. She has more than 10 years of experience in regulatory and prudential matter both in Luxembourg but also at European level having worked in a law firm and then transitioned to in house counsel 9 years ago.

Recently Marianne supported the launch of the Emerging Payments Association EU A.S.B.L (EPA EU), a non-profit association of payments industry influencers based in Luxembourg.

Marianne is also an active board member of LILLA – Ladies in law Luxembourg Association, a non-profit organisation supporting women in the legal sector in Luxembourg.

Heba Attieh is Managing Partner of Frontiers Global.

Heba is a business passionate; riding the roller coaster of startups with the aim to provide holistic education and upskilling for MENA region professionals in the Payment industry, Cybersecurity and Digital transformation.
Bringing global expertise to local businesses and individuals in these niche industries through consultancy services, professional hands on training and technical events.

Heba has 10 years of experience, recently in the payment industry; focused on project management, Agile businesses and managerial support.

Hobbies and interests; learning and self-development, people empowerment; swimming, kickboxing, reading and of course is a coffee Junkie.

Anette is a global business executive with many years of experience from Finance and Payments. Her most recent role is as Regional Managing Director Nordics for Western Union. Prior to that, she has developed customer engagement strategies and programs as well as leading marketing and digital transformation around the globe.

Anette considers herself a global citizen and has lived abroad for most of her life and is fluent in Swedish, English and French. She is now back in her home country Sweden, living in Stockholm. She loves discovering the world and has visited 59 countries. She is passionate about sustainability and convinced about the importance of education in making this world a better place.