SAN FRANCISCO – Payments executives gathered at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco to celebrate the 21 Most Influential Women in Payments and 14 rising women leaders under 40 on Tuesday.
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The programs are designed to build camaraderie between women but also champion achievements and help foster advancement in the swiftly changing payments industry.
"I grew up in financial services, but when I moved to the payment side of the business, there's not a lot of women there, and I think mainly because it's tied to technology, and technology as a whole doesn't really have women there," Janitra Taylor, head of product at MoCaFi and one of this year's honorees, told American Banker.
"I like that we have these programs because it brings people together," she said. "It lets me network, meet other women that are also in payments — especially as our industry continues to expand more from a digital transformation standpoint. It helps bring more awareness for other women to hopefully join, as I'm trying to get more and more to join the industry."
Women are still underrepresented in business, despite advances. In 2025, women held 10.4% of CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies, flat over the prior year. Women lead 8.2% of S&P 500 companies at year-end 2024, and their average tenure as CEO was 5.2 years, compared with 8.1 years for men.
Moreover, women make up less than 20% of executives in fintech.
The afternoon kicked off with a panel discussion about turning career aspirations into leadership advancement, featuring two of this year's WIP honorees: Yaminah Sattarian, senior vice president and group lead of institutional payments at KeyBank; and Sara Walsh, managing director and head of vendor, third party, network relationship management at Bank of America.
Mentorship was a key pillar of the discussion.
"Associate yourself with the type of people who will speak up for you when you're not in the room, and vice versa, be the type of person that speaks up for others who are not in the room with you," Walsh said. "I think that's the best example of advocacy and how you can establish true relationships with some of your peers."
Sattarian agreed, but pointed out there were benefits to having a mentor that is younger than the mentee. "There's so much change in the world, and some of these young college students have a different perspective," she said.
"You want to make sure you're getting feedback from everyone else around you in all different spectrums," Sattarian said.
Technology advancements and staying ahead of the curve were also top of mind. "There's so much content out there that there's really no excuse to not be on top of it," said Jacqueline Sousa, director of CashPro Payments, product team lead at Bank of America. "I think now the challenge is more of knowing which [trends] are going to take off."
Skip level meetings are also a great way to stay on top of new technology trends, said Kim Fitzsimmons, CEO of Talus Pay. "I personally love to do a lot of skip-level type meetings and sit down with small groups of younger people to have them tell me what am I not thinking of? What are we as a company not thinking of? What are we missing?"
The penultimate session focused on best practices for taking on new leadership assignments.
Ankita D'Mello, principal product manager at Wise, said that taking on new tough assignments boiled down to proving to yourself — and others — that it's possible.
"I really didn't feel like I could do it," she said, referencing her move to the North American payments industry. "I don't know what it was, but something at the bottom of my heart said maybe just do it and maybe prove to yourself that you could do it and prove to everyone else that you can do it."
Being comfortable with ambiguity is also a great way to be successful in new, challenging leadership assignments, Dorothy Conroy Rule, managing director at MUFG said. "Look at things that might not be a natural move."
The evening was capped with an awards ceremony honoring the 35 women. Honorees hailed from banks, fintechs, credit unions and payments companies.
