February is Black and African-American History Month. As the month draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to recognize and celebrate the Black and African-American executives, founders, and analysts who have shared their ideas, insights, and experiences with Finovate audiences in 2025.
From the keynote podium to the demo stage, these Black and African-American fintech, banking, and financial services professionals are a reflection of the growing diversity and inclusion that continues to shape and transform our industry today.
Erin Estell—SVP, Chief Marketing Officer—Valley Strong Credit Union
Estell participated in FinovateSpring 2025, sharing her insights as part of our Power Panel on the Customer Experience Revolution.
Estell brings more than 15 years of experience in strategic marketing and brand management, leveraging innovative data-driven strategies to drive growth, engagement, and retention. At Valley Strong Credit Union, Estell oversees digital marketing, consumer insights, communications, public relations, field marketing, and community outreach.
Based in Bakersfield, California, Valley Strong Credit Union offers checking and savings accounts, credit cards, personal and auto loans, mortgage and home loans, investing and retirement services, and more to 35,000+ members.
Nate Gibbons—Chief Experience Officer—QuickFi
Gibbons co-led the live demonstration of QuickFi’s self-service, embedded finance platform for business equipment financing at FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego. The demo showed how QuickFi can enable borrowers to quickly complete onboarding, authentication, credit underwriting, and document signing on a highly secure lending platform.
A regular conference speaker and strategist as well as Chief Experience Officer at QuickFi, Gibbons was previously an executive with First American Equipment Finance. He has an MBA from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester, and earned the Blue Ladder Award for extraordinary achievement from the City National Bank.
A Finovate alum since 2021, QuickFi has won Best of Show on three separate occasions, most recently at FinovateSpring 2024. The company offers an embedded finance platform for secured commercial equipment financing, enabling business borrowers to initiate and complete equipment financing in minutes.
Deola Habeeb—Head of Global Tech Operations—Vanguard
Habeeb joined Finovate at FinovateEurope 2025 to share her thoughts and experiences as part of our Women in Fintech panel.
Head of Global Tech Operations for Vanguard, Habeeb is a technology leader, entrepreneur, investor, and strategist with more than two decades of experience building enterprise operations and driving business growth. Habeeb combines technical acumen and business acuity across professional services, engineering, and business operations.
Vanguard is one of the largest investment management companies in the world. The firm offers investments, advice, and retirement services to tens of millions of individual investors directly, through workplace programs, and via financial intermediaries.
Christopher Hollins—Head of Global Product Sales and Delivery—SVB, a Division of First Citizens Bank
Hollins most recently spoke at FinovateSpring 2025 as part of our Power Panel on balancing the balance sheet and winning the battle for deposits.
Head of Global Product Sales and Delivery at SVB, a division of First Citizens Bank, Hollins is instrumental in transforming the platform’s solution delivery model to ensure that SVB’s Commercial Bank innovation economy clients can access the best partners and solutions to solve their business challenges.
Based in Santa Clara, California, SVB provides commercial and private banking services to founders, entrepreneurs, and companies in the technology, life science, private equity, venture capital, and related industries. The bank specializes in serving the unique needs of clients in dynamic, transformative businesses, providing deep sector expertise, insights, and connections.
Priscilla O-Iyari—Regional Marketing and Communications Outreach Officer—FACE Coalition
O-Iyari, in her recent capacity with FACE Coalition, joined FinovateSpring 2025 as part of our Executive Briefing on Financial Inclusion: “How can banks capture the huge growth opportunity offered by this new customer base?”
With more than 14 years of experience developing and executing strategies that have built successful brands in industries ranging from financial services to healthcare, O-Iyari came to Finovate via her role at FACE Coalition where she connected Black entrepreneurs with funding sources, human resources, and other support to help them scale their businesses and facilitate generational wealth creation.
O-Iyari is currently Associate Marketing Manager with TD where she is responsible for global brand management, education, and governance for the TD enterprise across countries and lines of business.
Mary Joseph—Senior Vice President, Strategic Investments, Treasury & Trade Solutions—Citi
Joseph participated in our Investor All Stars panel at FinovateFall 2025, discussing the current outlook for the market, valuations, and the future of financial services.
Focusing on opportunities that enhance Treasury and Trade Solutions and expand Citi’s technology ecosystem, Joseph leads the bank’s global investments in fintech and B2B SaaS startups. She brings expertise from her tenure in fintech and M&A advisory from within Citi’s Investment Banking group and as an investor at venture capital firm, GreenHouse Capital.
Citi provides financial services that enable growth and economic progress, safeguarding assets, lending money, making payments, and ensuring access to the capital markets. The institution does business in more than 180 countries and jurisdictions, serving corporations, governments, investors, institutions, and individuals.
Tobiloba Oyetoke—Chief Executive Officer—Bitpowr Technologies
Oyetoke introduced his company, Bitpowr Technologies, to Finovate audiences a year ago as part of FinovateEurope 2025 in London.
Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Delaware, Bitpowr Technologies helps businesses and developers manage digital asset operations and build financial products. The company provides modular, critical infrastructure to issue digital wallets and process global payments safely and securely, while meeting regulatory requirements.
At the conference, Oyetoke demonstrated Bitpowr’s latest solution, Powr Finance, which enables fintechs and companies to offer embedded stablecoin banking, payments, digital wallets, and card products in a safe and compliant way.
Photo by Monstera Production
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