Susan French is a 25-year veteran of the financial services industry who has worked with financial institutions and enterprises – from large corporates to small FinTech startups – to develop their API strategies and effectively and efficiently add payment and digital commerce capabilities to their businesses.  She is currently Head of Product for BBVA Open Platform – BBVA’s Banking-as-a-Service platform whose APIs will enable innovators to build the next generation of financial services.

Before joining BBVA, Susan created and launched Visa Developer, Visa’s program to open up its network and its capabilities (via APIs and SDKs) to developers at financial institutions, merchants, strategic partners, and FinTech startups.  During her 12 years at Visa, she also served as Vice President of Research and Central Technology (CTO), Innovation Program Manager for Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, and Head of Enterprise Architecture.  In those roles, she has been responsible for Visa Labs, enterprise architecture, the enterprise UI/UX team, technology strategy and technology governance, and technology investment planning.

Earlier in her career, she spent many years with American Management Systems (a $1B business and IT consulting company acquired by CGI in 2004).  As Vice President of Retail Financial Services at AMS, her division developed credit operations platforms for banks and other financial services companies by combining proprietary consumer credit management software products with decision sciences and analytics for credit risk management.  After leaving AMS and before joining Visa, Susan was EVP and COO of a web site design and development startup in Silicon Valley.

Susan holds a BS in Quantitative Systems from Arizona State University and an MS in Operations Research and Operations Management from MIT.  She has served on the Board of Directors of Euphorion and the AMS Center for Advanced Technologies.