Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Join Women @ Amazon AWS Industries FSI and NYC Fintech Women for a summer evening dedicated to the Women Shaping the Future of Finance. Explore the forces reshaping Financial Services today: how digital assets are earning institutional trust, what open finance means for the next generation of Financial Services, and how Generative AI is moving into the heart of investment strategy and client engagement.Â
Panelists include senior women leaders sharing first-hand perspectives on regulation, infrastructure, and the organizational choices that separate ambition from impact. The evening closes with a networking reception, creating space to connect with peers and leaders driving the next chapter of finance.Â
While the conversation centers on Financial Services, the event welcomes technology leaders, practitioners, and enthusiasts from across industries and is open to all.Â
Attendance is in-person only. Space is limited! Register now to join the waitlist.Â
Managing Director, Head of Artificial Intelligence, BlackRock Global Markets and Index Investments (BGM)
Ms. Venkatesan is responsible for BGM's AI strategy, execution and adoption. She was previously Head of Data Strategy and Analytics for Trading, responsible for building analytical products to help manage and improve trading performance and integrating data driven decision making into trading workflows. She was one of the initial architects of Fixed Income transaction cost metrics for the firm. Prior to joining BlackRock, Ms. Venkatesan was at Susquehanna International Group in Pennsylvania where she worked with the Electronic Options Trading team. Ms. Venkatesan received a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Cornell University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Madras University.
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Angie Ruan serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Nasdaq’s Capital Access Platforms division. She leads the division’s technology strategy and engineering, including Listings, Index, Data, Analytics, Investor Relations, and Governance Solutions. Angie is responsible for advancing innovation, platform modernization, and the adoption of AI-driven capabilities to power scalable, mission-critical solutions at Nasdaq.
Elle is currently at Stripe where she leads global teams selling Link (Stripe's Consumer Wallet) and Financial Connections (Stripe's Open Banking Platform). Prior to Stripe, Elle spent over a decade building fintech startups, including founding a data infrastructure company (investment from Bain Capital Ventures). She remains active in the early-stage ecosystem as a venture scout and advisor to entrepreneurs.
Zelazny is one of the architects of the privacy-preserving biometrics movement, having spent her career bridging identity innovation, consumer protection, and enterprise commercialization. As co-founder and CEO of Anonybit, she pioneered decentralized biometric infrastructure by sharding biometric data across distributed environments to eliminate the central honeypots that make traditional biometric storage a liability. Zelazny has worked closely with government agencies and multilateral organizations to help shape public policy around the responsible use of biometrics, and has been recognized on the Women in Fintech Power List 100, named one of the 25 Most Influential Women Leaders in Biometric Digital Identity of 2025, and received the SIA Women in Security Forum Power 100 distinction, among other honors.
Kristen is Head of Strategic Partnerships and Enterprise Sales at Paxos. Previously, she spent 14 years at J.P. Morgan in Equity Derivatives and Sales leadership roles, and holds an MBA from Wharton. With expertise in financial markets and strategic partnerships, she helps shape Paxos’ infrastructure for the open financial system.
View Kristen's LinkedIn profile
Natalie is global payments and financial services executive with 15+ years of experience across various customer types from small business to enterprise customers. She started her career at American Express where she spent 10+ years across various commercial roles. When she signed American Express's first fintech network partnership (Square Credit Card powered by American Express), she decided it was time to officially make the move to fintech and joined Stripe to incubate embedded financial products for platforms. She is currently at Adyen where she looks after business strategy with an emphasis on analytical decisioning.
Nicole is responsible for driving AI strategy, adoption and enablement plans for Anthropic's most strategic partners;Â helping global banks deploy Claude to solve high-stakes problems in trading, risk, compliance, and client experience; and shaping multi-year AI adoption roadmaps that drive measurable business impact and industry differentiation.
Talia Klein is Head of Wealth & Investment Solutions at DTCC, where she leads a client-centric organization that delivers services spanning the funds, insurance, retirement, and private markets verticals. In this role, Talia drives the development of durable, scalable infrastructure that unleashes growth for partners across the market. She embeds automation, standardization, and modernization into the firm’s Wealth & Investment Solutions business, enabling clients to bypass complexity, unlock efficiency, and accelerate their evolution in a rapidly changing financial landscape.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality.
NYC FinTech Women is an organization with 15,000+ members across startups, traditional finance and VCs. Our mission is to connect, promote and empower women to advance their careers in FinTech. We host monthly events in collaboration with FinTechs such as Adyen, Stash, and Plaid as well as institutional enterprises such as Google, Nasdaq and NYSE.
Prove is trusted by 19 of the 20 top banks and 2,000+ leading companies, enabling businesses to improve consumer experience, mitigate fraud, and rapidly grow with the world's most frictionless and accurate identity verification and authentication solutions. Prove transforms identity from a one-time verification event into a persistent foundation of trust, built to verify every person, business, and AI agent, at every interaction.
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