Menekse

Menekse Gencer is a Fortune 100 Senior Executive, Advisor, and former Silicon Valley Tech entrepreneur who detects trends, opportunities, and risks early and drives action to achieve financial results and mitigate risk. She has over 30 years of expertise as a senior executive and advisor to Financial Services, Payments, and Tech firms including Wells Fargo Corp, PayPal, Citigroup, Bank of America, CapitalOne, The Federal Reserve Bank, PwC, AMD, and Intel. Her functional expertise includes digital transformation, go-to-market strategy, and product strategy, risk mitigation, and crisis management in North America and emerging markets. Menekse earned her A.B. from Harvard University in Economics and her M.B.A. at The Wharton School. With a strong interest in DE&I and social impact, she currently serves as a Board Member with FINRA Foundation and as an Advisor to an AgTech Mobile SaaS platform firm in Kenya. She was named as “One of 31 Women Strengthening the Connection between Finance & Technology,” by Silicon Republic. As the first Head of Mobile Business Development at PayPal, she led the Mobile Checkout pilot which became the flagship product behind revenue growth from $0 to $27 Bn rev within 6 years. As an early pioneer in mobile payments, she later advised over 30 clients on go-to-market and product strategy around mobile financial services worldwide including 4 of the 5 top US banks, Central Banks, and multi-national corporations. In addition, she collaborated with the CEO to develop the startup business plan for Bangladesh’s bKash, named “1 of 50 Companies Changing the World,” by Fortune Magazine, with $310M USD rev/year. During this time, she was invited to attend The World Economic Forum on Food Security as one of two mobile finance experts. She later applied her FinTech expertise at Wells Fargo as SVP of Digital Sales where she led the digital transformation program that resulted in 1 million customer-directed account opens annually, mitigating risk, growing revenues, and lowering cost in response to regulatory action. In early February 2020, after raising early concern about potential risks of COVID to the Executive Management Committee, she was asked to lead crisis management for Wells Fargo’s largest contact center, launching and leading the rapid deployment of 12,000 contact center employees across 20 sites to work remotely without disruption to customer service levels. Her ability to synthesize trends and inspire others makes her a sought-after global expert and powerful communicator, speaking at venues including Money 2020, The United Nations, and The State Department. She has published reports with The World Economic Forum, MIT Innovation Journal, American Banker, and guest lectured at Columbia University, Insead, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard and Wharton Alumni Clubs.