Anand founded Optimized Payments in 2007. Under his leadership, Optimized Payments has helped Fortune 100 to mid-sized companies save over $450 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.

Alan brings 24 years of experience developing, leading, and executing strategic initiatives at prominent companies.

His primary responsibilities will be enhancing and strengthening the debit routing expertise, analytics, and visualizations for retail, e-commerce, and recurring merchants. He will also help guide product strategy as Optimized Payments looks to create more innovative products that simplify, automate, and solve their clients’ payments’ challenges.

Sharon is a payment consultant and account management professional providing clients with payment advisory services focusing on optimal authorization, KPI and fee analysis, with guidance on partner vendors, regulatory compliance, and market landscape.

Taige brings over 11 years of experience working at a large payment processor. He will be focused on helping clients find insights within their data, optimizing costs for clients, and enhancing our dashboards better help clients with financial modeling/planning/forecasting.

Previously Taige worked at ACI where he helped the company optimize interchange costs for its e-commerce and bill pay processing platform.

Tom brings years of banking experience and has a background in Finance, Business and Information Systems.  Tom is a natural problem solver who earned his Bachelor’s degree from Drake University and has held diverse leadership roles.

Sandhya’s focus is to grow the company’s payment analytics and services platforms with optimized data processing, building out new products, catching issues and identifying client insights.

Sandhya earned her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and has a Master of Science in Data Analytics.

John’s brings deep experience with payments operations and analytics. He will work closely with clients to understand, analyze, and improve their recurring payments operations to reduce involuntary churn and maximize lifetime value.

His professional experience includes roles at Outside, Inc., Hearst/Pubworx, ProCIRC, and Walt Disney Company, where he demonstrated his expertise in strategy, development, project management, and operations.

Paul founded PLC in 2004 to be the premier solution provider in the subscription economy. Since then, he and his team have facilitated payments optimization for more than 600 recurring-billing companies.

Prior to launching and growing PLC, Paul held influential positions at Synapse Group, Inc., one of the world’s largest magazine subscription companies. Paul is also a past Chair of both the Direct Response Forum (now PaymentsEd) and the Payment Processors Association and presents regularly at conferences such as The Subscription Show.

With more than 20 years’ experience in the credit card industry, John brings a strong expertise in a wide range of topics, particularly in data-driven, long-term strategic planning.

John previously led the corporate Financial Planning & Analysis Division at The Synapse Group, a marketing division of Time Inc., the nation’s largest agency seller of continuous service subscription magazines.

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.

Troy has over 20+ years’ experience as a developer and database administrator. Troy manages the Optimized Payments analytics solution and creates ETL processes to consume and normalize daily data from numerous sources; including, merchant acquirers, American Express, Discover, PayPal, private label cards, and delivers them to centralized cloud databases.

Amit has over a decade of IT experience in software development, database administration, and production support.

He will support the Optimized Payments analytics team by operationalizing the integration and consolidation of data files from global clients– all while ensuring top-notch performance, security, scalability, and data integrity.

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.

Komal is a part of the data science team and her role will focus on data analysis and machine learning to deliver more insights and value to clients.

Komal holds a master’s degree in Information Systems from Georgia State University and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India.

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.

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.