About Us

Anand founded Optimized Payments in 2007. Under his leadership, Optimized Payments has helped Fortune 100 to mid-sized companies save over $500 million in interchange and processing fees.

Anand has also led the effort to revolutionize payments analytics…creating a scalable hosted solution that centralizes, normalizes and analyzes billions of payments records and identifies actionable insights. Anand is a noted payments expert and has spoken at numerous conferences included MAG, AFP, New England AFP, NACHA, MRC, CNP Expo and Money 20/20.

Rachel has over 10 years of experience in accounting and finance.  She originally started her career as a litigation paralegal and then moved to accounting.

Her legal experience has helped her in her new role as Controller, where she manages and streamlines the accounting process, acts as a HR Administrator, and reviews contracts.

Joey is an interchange expert with over 13 years of experience in implementing cost management strategies for large merchants, particularly in the hospitality industry.

Previously, Joey worked for Elavon where he created and managed services that helped clients optimize their payment costs, through interchange and chargeback management solutions. His clients included the largest airlines, hotels and merchants processing billions in annual card sales.

Melanie Stout works with card-not-present, recurring revenue and card on file merchants to achieve continuous payments process improvements, reduce costs, reduce churn, and increase the lifetime value of their customers.

As a partner at Paul Larsen Consulting (PLC), Melanie worked with hundreds of merchants across multiple verticals to achieve optimal payments success. Melanie began her payments journey at Synapse Group, blazing the trail for continuous service magazine subscriptions. After Synapse Group, Melanie successfully built and launched the first direct-to-consumer recurring revenue stream as Director of Marketing at WebMD.com. Melanie combined her knowledge of the subscription economy with B2C, B2B and B2P marketing, and helped companies of all sizes optimize their payments and increase lifetime value of their consumers. This expertise will enable Melanie, as Head of Recurring Services, to continue providing strategies for subscription and card on file merchants to improve their bottom lines.

Oliver has extensive experience blending sales and leadership in the Payments industry.  Leaning into his strengths with strategy and communications, Oliver was the conducting driving force in launching and catapulting Elavon’s payment optimization products. His ability to motivate team players, energize customers, and create efficiencies cross functionally makes him the perfect strategic conduit between sales and marketing.

Scott brings a wealth of expertise as a seasoned founder and go-to-market strategist, with two successful exits to his credit. In his recent role, he led Business Development and Partnerships at Sift, following its acquisition of Chargeback, a company he co-founded and led development of the industry’s leading SaaS based enterprise chargeback platform.

With over a decade of innovation in payments, spanning disbursements, chargeback automation, fraud, and machine learning, Scott will be leading strategic product initiatives, spearhead team-building efforts, and drive market-focused innovations while collaborating seamlessly with sales and marketing functions.

Fei brings over 8 years of professional engineering experience.  Fei has a Master of Engineering degree from Beijing’s Tsinghua University and a Master of Science in Business Analytics degree from Emory University.

Fei’s experience with building successful machine learning and other algorithmic models will allow him to focus on improving and optimizing our analytics solutions to deliver timely and relevant insights that our clients need to develop informed strategies.

Shridhar brings nearly 20 years of big data architecture experience and he’ll help us grow our platform to meet clients’ needs.   He’ll be focusing on business and technology alignment, driving Cloud/Serverless compute transformation, multi-cluster data warehouses, auto-scaling, massive parallel processing, data security and governance.  This is all the critical behind the scenes work that makes our payments analytics actionable and invaluable to our clients.

Alexis holds an M.B.A. in Cyber Security from the University of Texas at Tyler. Over her years in the field, she has gained experience as a software engineer, providing value and improving platforms for global brands. Her proficiency in software engineering and leadership are valuable to our team, and her passion for developing efficient, scalable applications helps Optimized Payments stay on the cutting edge as we continue to expand our operations worldwide.

Jennifer’s skills in management and software engineering are some of her most valuable strengths in the world of IT. She holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Prairie View A&M University. Jennifer has developed her abilities with experience in technical project management at one of the largest global brands in the world. She brings that same skillset to Optimized Payments where she shines by organizing and carrying out many valuable projects and processes.

Sameer was the Senior Vice President at Visa, where he helped establish the firm’s strategy for integrated digital commerce products to support the adoption of electronic payments globally. He also headed the firm’s Middle East initiative and managed Visa’s South Asia office, where he was instrumental in establishing Visa’s leadership in the region. Prior to Visa, Sameer held positions at ANZ Bank, where he was the Head of Cards Business in India and General Manager of Consumer Finance in Australia.

Sameer holds a BS in Computer Science, MBA, and a DCI Fellow at Stanford University.

Mike is CEO of Posillipo Ventures and brings more than 30 years of experience leading and growing FinTech businesses. He served as the Vice Chairman at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the Chief Executive Officer of Chase Merchant Services. Prior to his time at JPMorgan, he was the Chief Executive Officer and President of the 7th largest payments processing firm in the world, Elavon, Inc.

In addition to serving as an advisor to Optimized Payments, Passilla also acts in an advisory capacity for Forte Ventures and multiple PE firms. Passilla earned his MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and has a BBA from the University of Notre Dame.