Mastercard Start Path

David Daniel brings experience across public and private markets and corporate M&A advisory, having served on the Mid-Cap Investment Banking team at JPMorgan executing sponsor-backed middle market transactions. He previously worked in JPMorgan's Private Bank implementing multi-asset class investment strategies and supported deal teams at private equity firms.

Harit Talwar is Chairman of Better and serves as a board member at Mastercard, KPMG US, Apexon, and Inveniam.io. He was a partner at Goldman Sachs, where he founded and led Marcus, the firm's consumer banking business, before that serving as President of US Cards at Discover Financial Services. His career includes leadership roles at Morgan Stanley and Citibank, as well as board positions at the American India Foundation and Ashoka University.

Julius Genachowski is a Venture Partner at Overture with a background spanning public service and the private sector in technology, media, and telecommunications. He chaired the Federal Communications Commission from 2009 to 2013, where he oversaw the first U.S. National Broadband Plan and work on broadband access, digital media rules, and internet policy. Earlier he was a senior executive at IAC and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter; he holds degrees from Columbia College and Harvard Law School.

Kilian Thalhammer has spent over two decades in payments, fintech, e-commerce, and loyalty. After starting out at webmiles and spending more than a decade as Director Solutions at Swiss Post, he took product leadership roles at RatePay (Otto Group), PAYMILL (Rocket Internet), and iyzico before building global product management at Wirecard. Since 2020 he has been Managing Director and Head of Merchant Solutions at Deutsche Bank, overseeing the bank's global issuing, acceptance, embedded finance, and platform businesses. He is co-founder of the award-winning fintech blog and podcast Payment & Banking, sits on advisory and supervisory boards including Mastercard Europe and EURO Kartensysteme, and invests as a business angel and fund LP across fintech, loyalty, and SaaS startups.

Puja Gajera leads global digital commercialization efforts for blockchain and digital assets at Mastercard, focusing on stablecoin integration, tokenized settlement, and payments infrastructure. Her work addresses how major payment networks can operate within emerging cryptocurrency rails and support autonomous agent-driven transactions. She has experience in product innovation, corporate strategy, and scaling financial technology across cross-functional teams.