Current Speakers

Meghan Walls is an Enterprise Sales Executive at IXOPAY, empowering category-leading global enterprises across North and South America to modernize and scale their digital payment infrastructure.

Over her decade-long career in fintech—spanning leadership roles at Versapay and Verifone.  Meghan has guided CFOs, merchants, and digital commerce leaders through complex digital transformations. Backed by extensive expertise in order-to-cash systems, payment routing, and enterprise sales strategy, she offers a sharp, practical perspective on reducing transaction friction and transforming payments into a strategic driver of growth.

Pati Partelow is a forward-thinking strategist, continuously analyzing emerging trends in human behavior, disruptive technologies, and industry events. With a focus on driving transformation and growth, she partners with companies of all sizes, specializing in enhancing financial services’ innovation, accessibility, and security. Pati’s expertise includes business strategy and transformation, P&L management, business development, product innovation, and talent development. She leverages a global perspective to drive success in local markets, excelling in consulting sales and delivery, digital commerce, customer experience, and digital payments. With a comprehensive skill set spanning disruptive technologies and industry expertise, Pati is a dynamic leader poised to navigate the evolving landscape of modern business. 

Aniruddh Vijaivargiya is a product and technology leader specializing in AI/ML-driven retail, big-data analytics and computer-vision, supply chain, logistics marketplace pricing, fraud prevention, and real-time risk decisioning systems. At Walmart, he leads product initiatives focused on scaling last-mile and first-mile delivery, improving operational intelligence and execution via agentic systems, and building technology that strengthens commerce infrastructure across a large retail and delivery network. His decade long experience also spans companies like Kraft Heinz, EXL analytics where he built specialization in developing automated systems to enhance retail growth and pricing, and spearheaded supply chain and logistics transformation through advanced analytics, product innovation, and technology strategy. His work sits at the intersection of agentic AI/ML, pricing, fraud/risk prevention, and scalable delivery platforms for commerce infrastructure. He holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi and an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

I’m currently CGO (Sales & Marketing) at Queen of the Thrones, running full P&L across DTC, four marketplaces (Amazon, Target 3P, Walmart 3P, TikTok Shop), wholesale, and four countries with more coming. Before that I was Global CMO at Jockey (apparel, DTC + wholesale + retail partners + international), Sprouts (grocery, ~$7B, heavy in-store with growing digital), and led marketing and eCommerce at A88 (CPG snacks). The “money flow” problem looks structurally similar across all of them but breaks in completely different places depending on the channel mix and scale.

Courtney Bloomer is a Senior Manager of Payment Strategy at Lowe’s, where she leads enterprise payments strategy across omni-channel platforms with a focus on optimizing customer experience, conversion, and payment performance. She oversees strategic initiatives across digital wallets, consumer credit, co-brand programs, and emerging payment solutions while driving cross-functional alignment between Technology, Finance, Operations, and external partners to deliver scalable, customer-centric experiences.

In her current role, Courtney focuses on modernizing payment infrastructure, improving payment orchestration, and enhancing checkout performance across web, mobile, and in-store channels. Her work centers on balancing seamless user experiences with backend reliability, operational efficiency, and measurable business outcomes.

With deep experience spanning payments, customer financing, enterprise transformation, and retail operations, Courtney brings a practical perspective on how retailers can create unified checkout experiences that reduce friction, improve reliability, and drive conversion across every customer touchpoint.

Sara Hibbard leads Payments Customer Experience and Strategy at Amazon, where she oversees service operations across eight markets supporting over three million customer contacts per year. With 17 years in customer service and operations, Sara has built her career from frontline agent to directing global payment support strategy. Her work spans payment product launches, fraud and dispute operations, AI-driven service transformation, and regulatory compliance across EBT, FSA/HSA, and international payment methods. She is a vocal advocate for building customer tools that serve the most constrained users first, including government assistance recipients and underbanked populations. Sara is an autism advocate and passionate about equitable access to education and care. She holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a B.F.A. in Fine Arts from Marshall University.

Derek Nicolich is a results-driven ecommerce and digital marketing executive with over 18 years of experience scaling growth across DTC, Amazon, and omnichannel businesses. As Vice President of Ecommerce & Digital Marketing at Kate Farms (Danone), he leads digital strategy across acquisition, retention, and marketplace channels, driving efficient, data-led growth. Derek has held leadership roles across several high-growth CPG and apparel brands and previously founded a consulting agency supporting emerging and established ecommerce brands.

Sneha Chitte is a Senior Product Manager with expertise in translating ambiguous customer and business problems into technically complex, scalable product solutions across various domains. Her work has spanned embedded software, data science products, event streaming, persistence, discovery, and observability platforms. She now focuses on product and content recommendations, integrating machine learning, personalization strategy, customer discovery, merchandising, and platform thinking to create more relevant and effective shopping experiences.

Scott Benson is a cybersecurity executive with deep experience securing retail and payments environments. As Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure at Mud Bay, Scott oversees security operations, incident response, cloud and endpoint protection, and PCI compliance, supporting a complex ecosystem of stores, e-commerce systems, and payment technologies.  He is a frequent industry speaker, having presented at SecureWorld and RH-ISAC events, and was recognized as a 2025 Pacific Northwest ORBIE Awards finalist in the CISO category. Scott is passionate about practical security, collaboration, and helping retailers navigate the evolving payments and threat landscape.

With over 26 years of experience in Retail Information Technology, I bring deep expertise in systems, integrations, and technology solutions that support modern retail environments. I hold a master’s degree in Management Information Systems and currently serve as a Senior Engineer specializing in payment integrations. Throughout my career, I have collaborated with and learned from many talented professionals, contributing to the successful implementation and advancement of payment technologies within the retail industry.