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How fast is the payments industry changing? More in the past five years than during the past five decades, according to Visa’s Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, adding that means sifting through the buzz to find the best way to apply all of the new technology.
“Instead of focusing on hype, we should prioritize meaningful innovations that genuinely enhance financial health for consumers,” said Pierce-Gilmore, senior vice president and global head of issuing solutions for Visa. “The industry should concentrate on improving accessibility, security, and user experience in digital payments.”
Pierce-Gilmore is one of the Most Influential Women in Payments, American Banker’s annual list of the leaders who are shaping the industry’s next chapter. There’s both light and storms ahead, as geopolitical churn, security and economic threats coincide with revolutionary innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assets, real-time processing and mobile commerce. “Rather than investing heavily in new technologies without clear client demand, I believe that we should start by using these tools internally first, enabling us to enhance our own operational capabilities and data flow, which, in the long term, will allow us to deliver greater value to clients,” said Dorothy Conroy Rule, a managing director at MUFG. The executives on this year’s list have demonstrated the mix of creativity, resilience and mentorship required for leadership in this new age.
A confluence of factors from high interest rates to volatile credit markets are driving up the cost of payments and making liquidity management even more challenging, said Yaminah Satterian, senior vice president and group lead for KeyBank Institutional Payments. “Automating payments processes to speed processing, reduce failed payments and prevent fraud will remain a top focus for businesses looking to reduce costs in 2025,” Satterian said.
Many of this year’s honorees will attend or speak at Payments Forum, held in San Francisco on March 4-6.
Read more to see what this year’s honorees have to say about the important questions reshaping the payments industry. Honorees are presented alphabetically. —John Adams, Mary Ellen Egan and Joey Pizzolato