TechCrunch was proud to host Visa at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco. Here’s an overview of their Partner session on the Fintech Stage.
This year, the Visa Everywhere Initiative invited a diverse and innovative group of startup founders from North America, Latin America, Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, Europe and Asia Pacific to showcase their payments innovations. Over the course of the year, startups and fintechs from around the world have presented their innovative solutions, and one finalist was selected to represent each region at the global finals hosted at TechCrunch Disrupt on Sept 19 in San Francisco, California.
“This year, the Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) has significantly expanded its reach to unique fintech startups around the globe,” said Marie-Elise Droga, SVP and Head of Global and North America Fintech Partnerships, Visa. “At Visa, innovation is at the heart of our operations, and by supporting the next generation of payments technology providers in their early stages through VEI, we are fulfilling our mission of uplifting everyone, everywhere.”
The 2023 VEI finalists are:
- Jonas Overgaard: Founder and CEO at Anyday
- Saksham Shubham: Business Head, APAC at Decentro
- Chibuzo Opara: Co-Founder and CEO at DrugStoc
- Jeff Catalano: Co-Founder and CEO at Payment Porte
- Carolina Nucamendi: Co-Founder and CEO at Waivr
The 2023 VEI Global Winner was announced by Visa’s Marie-Elise Droga. The awards include:
Overall Global Winner: $50,000 — Drugstoc
Audience Favorite: $10,000 — Drugstoc
Visa Direct: $10,000 — Anyday
The competition was hosted and emceed by Delores Terry, senior business development manager, Inclusive Client Partnerships, Visa. Judges evaluated each finalist based on the quality of their solution and presentation, the opportunities it offers to partner with Visa and clients, and the desirability, uniqueness and feasibility of their product or solution.
Additionally, Marie-Elise Droga hosted a fireside chat with Wade Arnold, co-founder and CEO, Moov Financial. Moov was the global winner of the 2021 Visa Everywhere Initiative. Since the win, Moov has fast-tracked onboarding to Visa’s global network and leveraged Visa’s security and fraud protection technologies to expand to new markets. In 2023, Moov raised $45 million in their Series B round of funding.
You can watch the entire session, including all five pitches, in the video below.
Speakers
Marie-Elise Droga, SVP, Fintech Partnerships, Global and North America, Visa
Based in San Francisco, Marie-Elise Droga is Head of Fintech Partnerships, Global and North America at Visa and a member of the company’s North America Leadership Team. Her responsibilities include partnering with innovative fintechs on relevant solutions that factor in the evolving payments landscape, and leading growth programs with this critical and fast-growing segment of clients. Marie-Elise also spearheads collaboration between Visa’s Venture team and regional fintech heads to identify emerging trends and identify best practices to grow and scale Visa’s fintech portfolio. As a lifelong creative and strategic global business builder, Marie-Elise has deep roots in sales and partnerships. In her prior roles at Western Union, she was at the forefront of strategic efforts to accelerate digital growth and reinvent the company’s approach to distribution. As a leading expert in cross-border payments, she expanded relationships with some of the world’s leading retail and digital brands like Amazon, Airbnb, Google and Walmart. A native of France who has lived and worked on four continents, Marie-Elise earned an MBA from Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management in Belgium, and a Business Management degree from ESCP Business School in Paris, studying for six months at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India.
Wade Arnold, Co-Founder and CEO, Moov Financial
Serial entrepreneur Wade Arnold is the co-founder and CEO of Moov Financial, responsible for rebuilding banking infrastructure for modern, cloud-native applications without dependence on legacy technology. As a visionary leader, Wade is instrumental in establishing Moov’s renowned open source libraries and creating Moov’s rapidly expanding developer community. Throughout his career, he’s served in various high-profile roles at banking and fintech organizations, most notably as the founder and CEO of Banno, a white-label digital banking platform that was acquired by Jack Henry. Previously, Wade served as executive vice president of Technology at BillGO, an all-in-one platform for managing and paying bills. Wade has also served as a member of several boards, including the president of the Association for Financial Technology (AFT), and is a mentor at Techstars. Wade holds a computer science degree from the University of Northern Iowa and an MBA from the University of Iowa, and he completed the ABA Stonier Graduate School of Banking.
Moderator
Delores Terry, Sr. Business Development Manager, NA and Global Fintech, Visa
Delores Terry leads business development for Visa’s Inclusive Client Partnerships on the North American Digital partnerships team. In this capacity she is responsible for securing partnerships with minority led/founded financial technology platforms. She and her team are dedicated to identifying and developing partnerships with mission-driven fintech platforms that are dedicated to making a more equitable financial system. The team works to remove barriers in the payments ecosystem that minority founders often face such as funding and access to community. Prior to this position, Delores has held various roles within Visa, including issuer sales, product, and business strategy and planning. Delores is a proud alumna of Howard University and now resides in the nation’s capital of Washington, DC.
Judges
Ayo Arikawe, Co-Founder, ThriveAgric
Ayo Arikawe is the co-founder and CTO of ThriveAgric, a fast-growing agricultural technology company that is passionate about ensuring food security and productivity in Africa by empowering smallholder farmers through its flagship proprietary product, Agricultural Operating System (AOS). To date, ThriveAgric has partnered with several organizations to unlock over $150 million financing for farmers; worked with over 500,000 smallholder farmers; produced and traded over 800,000 metric tons of grain; impacted over 2,800 communities across 26 states in Nigeria and targeted 10,000,000 farmers in 2027. Thrive Agric also directly employs over 2,500 people with an average age of 27 and indirectly engages over 40,000 youths all over Africa. Ayo also leads the market access thematic group of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), a notable platform for public-private dialogue in Nigeria, and he serves on the advisory board of Ukhanyo Farmer Development (a nonprofit organization that helps South African farmers unlock finance). He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Covenant University and is an alumnus of Y Combinator, Google Launchpad, and World Food Programme Accelerator. Recently he emerged winner of the 2022 Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) for Central Europe, Middle East Africa. In 2019, he also emerged Top 10 Jack Ma Foundation Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative (ANPI) and is a 2019 YTech 100 recipient from the Future Awards Africa. His noteworthy achievements all started as a result of his flair for solving big problems and real-life issues on a large scale.
Akshay Chopra, Vice President, Head of Innovation and Design for CEMEA, Visa
Akshay Chopra is a serial tech investor, inventor and board member. Akshay serves as head of Innovation and Design for Visa for 90+ countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), and on the Board of the MENA FinTech Association. He has built over eight major innovation labs and hubs for tech firms and governments across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He leads teams of product experts, designers, engineers, and digital commerce specialists based in Visa’s Innovation Centre in Dubai, and Visa’s Innovation Studios in Moscow, Nairobi and Saudi Arabia. His team co-creates new commerce use cases with products with banks, internet companies, fintechs and merchants across the region. Since 2021, Akshay has also been overseeing Visa’s cryptocurrency products in CEMEA. Akshay holds eight global patents in the fintech and payments, and has served in various digital leadership capacities in Asia-Pacific and EMEA. He has played a key the role in the development of numerous commercially successful products in e-commerce and digital banking. A veteran digital and product development expert, Akshay and his teams have run over 200 co-creation sprints with diverse partners. Akshay is an active venture investor, with several deals and exits in fintech, payments, e-commerce, AI and beyond. Prior to his current role, Akshay was a founding member of Visa’s Asia-Pacific Innovation Centre in Singapore, where he served as senior director and led partner co-creations. Prior to Visa, Akshay co-founded and led the Deloitte Greenhouse in Southeast Asia, a award-winning joint initiative between the Singapore government and Deloitte, focused on analytics-driven innovation. Before Deloitte, Akshay served as director, Emerging Markets at Gartner, and started his career at Standard & Poor’s. Akshay holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business and BA (Honors) in Economics from the University of Delhi.
Rodrigo De Paula, Head of Fintechs, Digital Partners and Visa Ventures, LAC, Visa
Rodrigo Barros de Paula is the regional Head of Fintech, Digital Partners and Visa Ventures for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean. De Paula is a leader with over 25 years of experience in the financial services and digital payments industry. As the fintech alliance leader for LAC, he is responsible for identifying and managing strategic partnerships, alliances and commercial agreements with fintechs players throughout the region, as well as with payment enablers, large technology companies and Visa Ventures. His focus on the past few years has been on finding new, innovative and effective ways to provide digital payments solutions to fintechs, processors, enablers, issuers and acquirers in Latin America. He began his career in Brazil in Itau, where he served in several roles, including legal, core products, loyalty services and co-branded cards. He holds a law degree with a master’s in corporate and economic law from Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, and a MBA from Insper in Brazil.
Ralph Koker, Global Head of Market Expansion Visa Direct, Visa
Ralph Koker is vice president and head of Market Expansion Globally for Visa Direct. Ralph leads all go to market and solutioning efforts to scale the Visa Money Movement business throughout the world, based in Miami, Florida.
Emily Man, Partner, Primary Venture Partners
Emily is a partner at Primary, leading early-stage investments in fintech and enterprise software companies. She loves going deep into unsexy industries and partnering with determined founders who are challenging the status quo. Before Primary, Emily was at Redpoint Ventures investing across early- and growth-stage companies. She started her career as a hedge fund analyst at Point72 before helping build Point72 Ventures, the early-stage venture practice. Emily earned her BA from Columbia University where she graduated summa cum laude.
Dan Roesbery, VP, Fintech Business Development, Visa
Dan Roesbery is vice president, Fintech Business Development, leading new strategic and commercial partnerships with North America and global fintech, e-commerce, social, and crypto companies. Dan’s team helps emerging and growing platforms across these important segments navigate business opportunities with Visa in order to launch new payments solutions. Dan brings 15 years’ experience in payments and fintech, where he has held sales, partnerships, operations, product, and strategy leadership positions with Blackhawk Network, Kash, and Visa for the last five years. He brings a pedigree of problem-solving and unlocking growth areas to help fintech and digital commerce players continue to push boundaries and innovate within Visa’s ecosystem. Dan holds a bachelor’s from Boston College and an executive MBA from Quantic Business School, and he serves as Growth Advisor to the Financial Club.
