David S. Evans

David S. Evans has been a business advisor to many payment companies around the world. He is the author of Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing which is the definitive source on the payments industry.  His more recent work is “Innovation and Payments” which describes the how the combination of data-driven marketing, cloud-based computing, and mobile telephony will transform the payments industry.

David is an economist, business advisor and a recognized global authority on the design and implementation of complex business strategies and business models. He has more than 25 years of experience helping companies worldwide design business strategies in multi-sided markets to overcome the “chicken and egg” problem of getting multiple customer groups on board the same platform at the same time. He is the author of Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies and Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries, which won the award for best business book of 2006 from the Association of American Publishers as well as more than 100 articles.

David is the founder of Market Platform Dynamics, a boutique consulting firm that helps businesses leverage economics and quantitative methods for growth and profit. David teaches part time at the University of Chicago where he is a Lecturer and at the University College London where he is a Visiting Professor and Executive Director of The Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics. He has a Ph.D. and undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Chicago. He also serves on the boards of several high-technology companies and is a longtime advisor to some of the largest platform-based companies in the world.

Karen Webster

Karen is the CEO of MPD and has worked extensively with some of the leading players in the payments, B2B and technology sectors to architect, ignite, and commercialize innovation. She also serves as a member of the board for several emerging companies in the payments, mobile, and technology sectors, including PaySimple. Her work is focused on helping these innovators develop and implement sustainable business strategies.

Karen is a frequent speaker and author of numerous articles on the sources of innovation, strategy, loyalty, product design/bundling, and pricing and platform strategies. She is a frequent keynote speaker on these topics and, for example, has moderated or spoken at CTIA for many years. Karen also served as an adjunct faculty member at her alma mater, John Hopkins University.

Tom Brown

Tom Brown is a partner in O’Melveny & Myers’ San Francisco office and a member of the Financial Services Practice. Tom’s practice focuses on competition law and legal issues affecting the financial services industry.

Tom has been litigating cases, including class actions, in the financial services industry for more than a decade. He was a member of the trial team that handled the defense of the then largest civil antitrust class action in U.S. history for Visa U.S.A. Inc., In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation. He has helped numerous other financial services companies, including Capital One and PayPal, defend against class actions, including an ongoing case challenging the use of PayPal in the eBay marketplace.

Marianne Crowe and Richard Oliver

Marianne Crowe is a vice president in the Treasury and Financial Services department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She serves as the Mobile Payments Project manager and payments liaison to the Consumer Payments Research Center. Her previous roles at the Boston Fed include vice president/project manager in the Consumer Payments Research Center, assistant vice president of business development, the National Image Archive service, and the Boston check operations. Prior to joining the Fed in 2000, Crowe worked at BankBoston in project and operations management positions. Crowe has been a member of the FSTC mobile payments workgroup and the NACHA Internet Council

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Richard R. Oliver is an executive vice president with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and has been with the Bank since 1973. Since 1998, he has served as retail payments product manager for the Federal Reserve System. In this capacity, he has responsibility for managing the Fed’s check and ACH businesses nationwide. Earlier in his career, Mr. Oliver served as planning analyst, administrator of the Automated Clearinghouse, chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Electronic Payments Implementation Task Force, manager and officer in charge of software development, vice president in charge of automation services, the Federal Reserve System’s product manager for electronic payments services, officer in charge of business development and check software, and staff director for the Federal Reserve System’s Policy Committee for Financial Services. He also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Management Committee. Mr. Oliver received a bachelor’s degree in math from the University of Nevada, a master’s degree in information and computer sciences from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA in management from Georgia State University. He has also completed executive development programs at Harvard University and the University of Tennessee.

Espelencia Baptiste, Heather Horst and Erin Taylor

Dr. Espelencia Baptiste (pictured, lower left) is associate professor at Kalamazoo College. Born and raised in Haiti, she has conducted research on education, ethnicity and nationalism and state formation in Mauritius and Saint Lucia. She is currently working on the movement of money within Haiti and between Haiti and the Haitian diaspora.

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Dr. Heather A. Horst (pictured, lower right ) is a senior researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She studies the relationship between place, space and new media in the Caribbean and North America. She is the co-author of The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, 2006), and Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Ito, et. al. 2009).

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Dr. Erin B. Taylor (pictured, top) is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Sydney, Australia. She conducts research on material culture and poverty in a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo. Dr. Taylor is investigating the material and economic bases of cultural difference between Haiti and the ominican
Republic.

Cynthia Merritt

Cynthia Merritt is the assistant director of the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where she is responsible for managing research initiatives focused on emerging risks in legacy and alternative retail payment systems. Cynthia helped launch the Retail Payments Risk Forum as a new department and special initiative at the Atlanta Fed in 2008 in response to the recognized growth in electronic payment adoption and new innovative payment schemes. She is responsible for managing staff research initiatives on a variety of payments topics, with a strong focus on mobile banking and payments. Cynthia is also editor for the Retail Payments Risk Forum’s Portals and Rails blog, as well as a major article contributor.

Prior to assuming this role, she worked as a senior bank policy analyst in the Policy and Supervisory Studies Group in the Atlanta Fed’s Supervision and Regulation Division, where she was responsible for research and analysis of trends affecting the banking industry. Prior to joining the Federal Reserve in 2004, Cindy worked in various capacities for the Comptroller of the Currency as an analyst and a senior national bank examiner. Her career with the OCC spanned 14 years and included extensive work with problem and complex national bank organizations, with a specialized focus on commercial credit, wealth management, and capital market activities. She received a BS degree in finance with a banking concentration from the University of South Carolina. She also completed the ABA’s National Graduate Trust School at Northwestern University.

Sarah Starcevich

Sarah Starcevich is an associate in O'Melveny's San Francisco office and a member of the Litigation Department. Sarah has represented a leading semiconductor manufacturer in complex civil antitrust litigation, including state law actions brought by a high-profile intellectual property firm designing computer memory interface technology and by a semiconductor packaging technology firm. She has also been involved in the representation of an individual under investigation for criminal price-fixing.

Clara Veniard

Clara Veniard is an Associate Program Officer in the Financial Services for the Poor initiative at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Clara works with financial institutions to deliver saving services at scale to underserved populations and new initiatives to engage with commercial banks and large microfinance banks to deliver more savings services to the poor. Prior to joining the foundation, Clara worked as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group in South America where she primarily advised retail and commercial banks across the region. She also worked on an economic growth strategy for the Chilean government, leading an in-depth analysis of the IT and business services outsourcing and offshoring industries. Clara began her career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua where she advised and launched consortia for small and micro entrepreneurs in conjunction with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Clara holds a BA in East Asian History from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. She speaks Spanish and French and is conversant in Mandarin and Portuguese.

Salah Goss

Salah Goss is an Associate Program Officer in the Financial Services for the Poor initiative at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Salah works on mobile money projects, savings-led community managed microfinance, and financial sector deepening in Africa, South East Asia and the Caribbean. Prior to joining the foundation, she worked on several financial service projects for Development Alternatives, Inc. As a Financial Analyst at Sanabel Microfinance Network of Arab Countries, in Cairo, Egypt, she supported microfinance institutions from twelve Middle Eastern and North African countries and contributed to The MIX Benchmarking Arab Microfinance 2006. Currently, in her role at the foundation, she draws on her past experience as Grants Administrator for the West Africa Regional Office of the Soros Foundation to use innovative grantmaking tools such as challenge funds and prizes. She is a graduate of The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and is proficient in French and speaks beginning Arabic.

Margaret Morgan Weichert

Margaret Weichert is a Managing Director at Market Platform Dynamics. Margaret is an experienced payments industry executive with a proven track record of commercializing new technologies in small start-ups, and large multi-national corporations. An acknowledged leader and innovator in payments and financial technology, Margaret has received seven US patents and is an inventor on many additional pending patents. An entrepreneur who has started two of her own companies and sold one to First Data, Margaret has also proven experience commercializing game-changing technologies, including a range of mobile banking and eCommerce capabilities, unique commercial cash management solutions, Internet Check and Checks by Phone solutions, fraud and risk management solutions, new point of sale technologies and many other payments, risk management and financial services solutions.

Prior to joining Market Platform Dynamics, Margaret was the SVP, Global Product Marketing at First Data, responsible for marketing all Retail and Alliance Services products, including merchant credit and debit card acceptance, terminals, eCommerce solutions, prepaid, TeleCheck, mobile and a range of other services. In this role Margaret was also responsible for channel strategy, innovation and sales operations. Margaret also served as the Payments Strategy and Innovation Executive at Bank of America, where she led the enterprise in developing and implementing breakthrough, global innovations that leveraged the Bank’s payment assets. Specific innovations included mobile banking, cash management, credit card, debit card and Check 21 solutions. In addition, while at Bank of America, Margaret led the global strategy, innovation, and business development activities for eCommerce, ATM and Mobile, including market-defining partnerships with Apple, RIM, Checkfree, Yodlee, and others. Margaret’s professional career also includes leadership positions at Accenture, and The MorganWeichert Group.

Throughout her career, Margaret has played a key role in defining and implementing new product development processes, and has used these processes to successfully develop and commercialize game-changing innovations that have driven hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental shareholder value. Margaret’s experience as an industry executive and as a consultant has given her exposure to a wide range of companies, business models and geographic regions, that give her a truly unique, and global perspective on payments innovation.

Margaret holds a B.S, Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where she focused on International Politics and Economics. Margaret received a Postgraduate Diploma in Economics (with Distinction) from the University of Sussex in England, and a M.B.A. in Finance from the University of California at Berkeley. Margaret is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Gamma Sigma Academic Honor Societies. In addition, Margaret is proficient in Spanish and has a working knowledge of French and German.

David S. Evans

David S. Evans has been a business advisor to many payment companies around the world. He is the author of Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing which is the definitive source on the payments industry.  His more recent work is “Innovation and Payments” which describes the how the combination of data-driven marketing, cloud-based computing, and mobile telephony will transform the payments industry.

David is an economist, business advisor and a recognized global authority on the design and implementation of complex business strategies and business models. He has more than 25 years of experience helping companies worldwide design business strategies in multi-sided markets to overcome the “chicken and egg” problem of getting multiple customer groups on board the same platform at the same time. He is the author of Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies and Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries, which won the award for best business book of 2006 from the Association of American Publishers as well as more than 100 articles.

David is the founder of Market Platform Dynamics, a boutique consulting firm that helps businesses leverage economics and quantitative methods for growth and profit. David teaches part time at the University of Chicago where he is a Lecturer and at the University College London where he is a Visiting Professor and Executive Director of The Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics. He has a Ph.D. and undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Chicago. He also serves on the boards of several high-technology companies and is a longtime advisor to some of the largest platform-based companies in the world.

Scott Schuh

Scott Schuh is the director of the Consumer Payments Research Center and an economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He has served as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, and as a research associate at the U.S. Census Bureau. Schuh has taught at Johns Hopkins University and Boston College.

Schuh's research focuses on the implications of microeconomic heterogeneity for macroeconomic behavior in a wide variety of applications. Much of this work has involved developing and analyzing data on employment changes at U.S. manufacturing plants and studying the role of gross job flows in aggegate fluctuations, as documented in two co-authored books: the award-winning and critically acclaimed Job Creation and Destruction (1996), and Job Creation, Job Destruction, and International Competition (2003). His other important research focuses on the roles of investment (especially inventories), technology, and monetary policy in business cycles, and on the role of productivity in growth. His latest research involves developing new data to study consumer payment choice and its implications for monetary theory. His research is published in scholarly journals, including the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and the Journal of International Economics.

Schuh earned a B.A. from California State University, Sacramento in 1985, and a Ph.D. and M.A. (economics) from Johns Hopkins University in 1992.

Patrick Gauthier

Patrick Gauthier is the Head of Market Intelligence at PayPal, the leading online payment solution provider. In this capacity he can leverage 20 years of experience in product innovation across several industry (semiconductors, payments and digital media) and multiple geographies to deliver strategic insights to PayPal's executive management.

Prior to joining PayPal Patrick advised a number of m-commerce and e-commerce startups, and held the position of SVP Product Marketing and Strategy / Chief Privacy Officer for ZillionTV, an early stage start-up building an ad-supported on demand entertainment service for the connected televisions.

Patrick is also an alum of Visa Inc, where for ten years he successively managed Emerging Products, Innovation and the Corporate Ventures and Strategic Alliance group. During that time he introduced in the US market a number of breakthrough products in payments (e.g. contactless) and loyalty (Target Smart Rewards), and redefined Visa's global direction in mobile and e-commerce.

Patrick has held positions on the board of directors of, mFormation, a leader in over-the-air device management systems; Arcot a top provider of authentication solutions; mTLD the exclusive licensor for the .mobi domain; Upek, a pioneer in fingerprint sensors; Humetrix.net, an early stage start-up building internet navigation products. He also held the position of Treasurer and Chairman of the board of trustee of the International School of the Peninsula, a language immersion school in Palo Alto, California.

Patrick holds a Master's degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Institut Supérieur des Télécommunications in France.

Patrick is reachable on LinkedIn and Twitter (PRGauthier)

Ignacio Mas

Ignacio Mas is Deputy Director in the Financial Services for the Poor program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ignacio has been a Senior Adviser in the Technology Program at CGAP (a resource center for microfinance housed at the World Bank), VP of Marketing and Account Management at interTouch, Director of Global Business Strategy at Vodafone Group, and Senior Manager responsible for telecoms investments in Europe at Intel Capital (Intel Corp’s venture capital arm). Ignacio has been a Visiting Professor of International Business at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and economics from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Ellen Richey

Ellen Richey joined Visa Inc. as chief enterprise risk officer in September 2007. Prior to joining Visa, she most recently worked at Washington Mutual Inc. as senior vice president of enterprise risk management and executive vice president of card services. Prior to that, she served as vice chairman of Providian Financial Corporation, where she had responsibility for the enterprise risk management, legal, corporate governance, corporate relations, compliance and audit functions.

Earlier in her career, Richey was a partner in the San Francisco law firm Farella, Braun & Martel, where she specialized in corporate, real estate, and financial institution matters. Richey received a B.A. in Linguistics and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and served as a law clerk for Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court.

Karen Webster

Karen is the CEO of MPD and has worked extensively with some of the leading players in the payments, B2B and technology sectors to architect, ignite, and commercialize innovation. She also serves as a member of the board for several emerging companies in the payments, mobile, and technology sectors, including PaySimple. Her work is focused on helping these innovators develop and implement sustainable business strategies.

Karen is a frequent speaker and author of numerous articles on the sources of innovation, strategy, loyalty, product design/bundling, and pricing and platform strategies. She is a frequent keynote speaker on these topics and, for example, has moderated or spoken at CTIA for many years. Karen also served as an adjunct faculty member at her alma mater, John Hopkins University.

Tom Brown

Tom Brown is a partner in O’Melveny & Myers’ San Francisco office and a member of the Financial Services Practice. Tom’s practice focuses on competition law and legal issues affecting the financial services industry.

Tom has been litigating cases, including class actions, in the financial services industry for more than a decade. He was a member of the trial team that handled the defense of the then largest civil antitrust class action in U.S. history for Visa U.S.A. Inc., In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation. He has helped numerous other financial services companies, including Capital One and PayPal, defend against class actions, including an ongoing case challenging the use of PayPal in the eBay marketplace.