Below are the speakers for the 2023 Illinois Credit Union Connect show.
Brett Walker
VP Emerging Markets
Access Softek
Energetic, high-producing and performance-driven Enterprise Sales Executive with 25+ years in the financial services and fintech space specializing in digital banking. Brett’s unique skill set includes Digital Banking Platform & Payments Software, e-Commerce, SaaS, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Prospecting & Pipeline Management.
Mark Sherman
Account Executive
Creatio
Jason Ritzenthaler
Co-Chief Investment Officer; Director of Investments & Institutional Business
Members Trust Company
Jason graduated from Florida State University with dual degrees in Finance and Management Information Systems. With 20+ years experience in the financial services industry, Jason has collaborated with global portfolio managers and industry experts at the CFA European conference and Harvard University. Since joining MTC in 2005, Jason has provided analytical research and investment strategy for our model portfolios. Jason is a member of the CFA Institute, CFA Society of Chicago, CFA Society of Madison and Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Ryan Ohendalski
SVP, Sales
Kasasa
Ryan Ohendalski is the SVP of Sales at Kasasa, a leader and advocate for community credit union innovation. With expertise in retail and consumer growth, Ryan has worked with hundreds of credit unions for over 15 years. He has specifically advised them on the latest consumer trends, market innovations, and most importantly, how to compete in this ever-evolving industry. Ryan currently works for Kasasa, where he helps deploy retail solutions that help grow younger, engaged members for credit unions. When he’s not at work, Ryan enjoys spending time with his wife and three kids. They live outside of Austin, Texas, where they enjoy the outdoors and traveling as a family.
Roman Nazarewyc
Account Executive
Zest AI
Roman focuses on building long-term strategic relationships which deliver value to credit unions and their members. He brings over two decades of experience in the financial services industry, with a primary focus on credit unions and an emphasis on strategic growth and client development.
Prior to joining Zest AI, he held a leadership position at Qunite Financial Technologies. Roman’s professional background includes positions with several respected organizations including Fiserv, CheckAlt and PSCU.
Mike Mares
Account Executive
Eltropy
Mike lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and has experience both working for and serving Financial Institutions for over 30 years. Mike has worked with more than 800 Financial Institutions worldwide, leveraging his wealth of experience in branch operations, lending, and digital services. Today, his primary focus is helping community financial institutions to become more efficient, increase service levels and empower these institutions to be superstars as they access and implement new solutions for their members.
Michael D. Levitt
Top 20 Global Thought Leader on workplace culture and burnout
Michael Levitt is the founder & Chief Burnout Officer of The Breakfast Leadership Network, a San Diego and Toronto-based burnout consulting firm. He is a Keynote speaker, host of the Breakfast Leadership show, a Certified NLP and CBT Therapist, a Fortune 500 consultant, and author of the new book BURNOUT PROOF.
Michael’s A Top 20 Global Thought Leader on HR & Culture with Thinkers360 and a former Healthcare executive, overseeing $ 2 Billion budgets. He has spoken to thousands of people around the world. In this talk he will teach you some of the most important things he’s learned about burnout prevention.
Michael is a leading authority on burnout recovery and prevention in the workplace. From his humble beginnings as a grocery store clerk to today, Michael has become the leading force on burnout and workplace culture for Fortune 500 and SMB organizations. What started as a C-Suite executive career in Healthcare has turned into a mission to eradicate burnout in the workplace.
Michael’s passion is preventing burnout in the workplace. After suffering his own burnout journey and 369 days of worst-case scenarios (heart attack, job loss during the Great Recession, car repossession and home foreclosure, all in a year!) He took those horrible experiences and turned them into an opportunity to speak to audiences around the world on how to prevent burnout.
Jami Jennings
VP Product Marketing Strategy
VisiFi
Jami Jennings is the Director of Digital Channels at VisiFI, an industry-leading software solutions and services provider. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Jami completed many study abroad programs in England and Costa Rica before moving back to the States, where subsequently she obtained degrees in business and marketing from Samford University. Upon graduation, she began her career as an adjunct professor before moving into the financial services industry as an advisor for Wells Fargo Financial. In 2009, she joined EPL as a Business Analyst and focused her expertise on building credit and debit card solutions for EPL’s core system, i-POWER®. From there, she moved into a management role, assembling, and leading a team who developed and implemented EPL’s business intelligence (BI) application within EPL’s core and later led a team to design and develop their award-winning Digital Banking application. She is a keynote speaker and a regular contributor to credit union industry publications for digital banking, including Credit Union Times, CUToday.info and Banking.com.
Tamanna Kottwani
Head of Product
WithClutch
Tamanna Kottwani heads the product management and design team at WithClutch, a platform that helps credit unions with loan origination and recapture on auto pilot. Clutch works with credit unions from 250M to 10B+ and has 300K loans funded so far. Every minute there is an American submitting a loan application via Clutch on an average.
Tamanna is a seasoned product leader with a successful track record of launching and scaling innovative products used by tens of millions of users while at Microsoft, Yammer and Instacart. She loves solving large, complex, impactful problems at mission driven companies.
Her expertise is driving digital transformation by building consumer grade products with cutting edge technologies. Her experience ranges from reinvigorating Yammer’s mobile product line to incubating and scaling a $1B vertical at Instacart amongst other things.
Tamanna holds an engineering degree and an MBA from Wharton. She lives in San Francisco. In her free time she enjoys experimental cooking, finding new urban hike trails and mentoring high growth startups.
Matt Dobosh
Chief Revenue Officer
Engageware
Matt leads the sales and customer success teams for the organization. He has successfully developed both early and late-stage software and services organizations to accelerate growth and client success. Before joining Engageware, Matt has held several executive-level sales, and go to market roles at Repsly, Ellucian, It’s Learning, BMC Software, and PTC. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Management at Indiana University of PA.
Lisa Coffey
Chief Innovation Officer
Corporate America Credit Union
With nearly 35 years’ experience in payment services operations and product development for corporate credit unions, Lisa Coffey is a true expert and advocate for the credit union industry. She was president of her own LLC Consulting Company, offering payment operation consulting services on best practices, strategic planning, product development & implementations, policy and procedure development and consultative solution selling.
Lisa has served at the executive level for over 25 years as VP, Payment Operations, Chief Operations Officer and is currently the Chief Innovation Officer at Corporate America Credit Union. In her most recent role she oversees payment operations, product development and business development. Lisa serves on The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments Advisory Committee as well as FRB’s FedNow Pilot Program. Additionally, Lisa is currently serving on NACHA’s Board of Directors and Payments Institute 2023 Board of Regents.
Will Bowen
Founder
The Complaint Free Movement
Will Bowen is founder of the Complaint Free movement with over 15 million followers worldwide. Will’s been featured on Oprah, NBC’s Today Show, People, Forbes, Newsweek, The Wall StreetJournal, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. Will Bowen is a humorous motivational speaker, a #1 International best-selling author, and the World Authority on Complaining — why people complain, what’s wrong with complaining, and how to get ourselves and others to stop complaining
Milind Borkar
Founder and CEO
Illuma
Dr. Milind Borkar is the Founder and CEO of Illuma, a CUSO specializing in real-time voice authentication and fraud prevention solutions for credit unions. Author of 14 technical publications and inventor on 21 patents, Dr. Borkar launched over 50 hi-tech products during his career with Texas Instruments prior to becoming a FinTech founder. The company’s flagship Illuma ShieldTM platform replaces traditional knowledge-based authentication with an effortless and secure voice biometric solution, delivering an elevated member experience, enhanced security, and improved operational efficiency. Illuma ShieldTM is frequently showcased at Finovate events and has recently won awards from VentureTech, CreditUnions.com, and NACUSO.
Dailey Betz
Banking Research Consultant
Rivel
Dailey consults with bank and credit union leadership, drawing from Customer and Prospect Benchmark report data to help bank executives assess, tailor and track their marketing, customer retention and branch expansion strategies.
Prior to joining Rivel, Dailey spent multiple years working at Gartner in technology consulting as an account executive partnering with C-Level executives to help drive their top business initiatives such as digital transformation, IT strategy and data security. She also worked as an account executive in the software industry with a focus on 1:1 customer engagement, customer service, and intelligent automation.
Marcus Bales
Senior Sales Engineer
Access Softek
Marcus Bales is an award-winning FinTech Speaker, Author, amateur rapper and Senior Sales Engineer at Access Softek. Marcus is passionate about helping all Financial institutions grow and thrive in the changing fintech landscape. His unique to-the-point approach packs each presentation with actionable value for any finical institution.