Webinar Overview

Worldpay from FIS welcomed our guests, Forrester Research, BJ's Wholesale Club and Circle for an informative webinar exploring consumer shopping trends critical for merchants in today’s highly competitive market. This powerful session shared insights from Worldpay from FIS’ Global Payments Report, unique Forrester research, and applied practices from our special guests.

From the below incredible panel learn about:

  • The recovery of POS and expansion of eCommerce
  • Digital and mobile wallet growth
  • The ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency

Meet the Speakers

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Sam Callen

VP Strategic Innovation, FIS

Samuel Callen is the Vice President of Merchant Strategy & Platform Go-to-market for Worldpay. In this role, his team serves as the personal strategy arm of the head of the Worldpay business. The team has a specific mandate to drive the 3-5 year strategic direction of the business, with a specific emphasis on M&A, strategic alliances, and internal strategy consulting projects. Before taking on this role, Samuel spent nearly 2 years at Worldpay in an internal strategy role focusing on Worldpay’s integrated payments business for SMBs. Prior to joining Worldpay, Samuel worked as a consultant for Bain and Company. Samuel holds a Bachelor’s degree from Ferris State University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School
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Lily Varon

Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Lily Varón is a senior analyst serving digital business strategy professionals. Her research focuses on the evolving role of payments and billing technologies in winning, serving, and retaining customers in the age of digital business. She helps B2C merchants understand the merchant payments processing landscape, evolving consumer payments behaviors, and how their payments acceptance strategies must adapt to serve their customers. In her research on billing technology, she focuses on the how the future of buying — in both B2C and B2B models — will pressure every business to modernize its billing relationships and the technology that underpins them.
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Laura Felice

Executive Vice President, CFO, BJ's Wholesale Club

Laura Felice is Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer at BJ’s Wholesale Club, Inc. She is responsible for the company’s finance, audit, and investor relations teams. Laura joined BJ’s in 2016 as Senior Vice President, Finance, Controller and was named Chief Financial Officer in 2021. She has over 18 years of experience in the retail and consumer goods space.

Laura is a CPA in the state of Massachusetts and CGMA. She holds both a Master of Accounting and Bachelor of Finance and Accounting from Boston College. She serves on the Board as the Vice-Chair for the Massachusetts Society of CPAs as well as serving as Chair of the Finance Committee.
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Geetha Panchapakesan

VP Payments Partnerships, Circle

Geetha calls herself a payments nomad having spent much of her career in the payments/fintech ecosystem across consumer and commercial payments, remittances, disbursements, and now crypto payments. She has built her payments expertise at financial services giants including MasterCard, MoneyGram, PayPal, Fiserv and Visa where she was responsible for driving innovation, top-line growth and strategic direction. Firmly believing that blockchain and stablecoins are the future of global, efficient payments over the internet, Geetha currently runs Payments Partnerships at Circle driving the expansion of Circle’s stablecoins into traditional payments through partnerships with financial institutions and payments service providers. Geetha has a Masters in Computer Science and an MBA from Insead and lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two sons.