Keith Vander Leest

Keith Vander Leest is US General Manager at BVNK, a global payments infrastructure company bridging traditional and digital finance, a role he has held since January 2025. Based in New York, he leads strategy, sales, and customer success across the U.S. market. His work at BVNK centres on stablecoin-powered solutions for cross-border payments, and he is scheduled to speak at Fintech Meetup 2026 on issuing and settlement in a stablecoin context, covering operational, compliance, and strategic considerations for moving and settling funds across on-chain and legacy financial infrastructure.

Prior to BVNK, Vander Leest spent nearly five years at Cross River Bank, ultimately as Head of Payments, where he led business development, implementation, and partnership management across acquiring, ACH, RTP, FedNow, and push-to-card rails. During that tenure he grew payment revenue to $51M with a compound annual growth rate of 70%, launched RTP and FedNow growing transaction volume to rank Cross River as the second-largest U.S. financial institution sender at over three million RTP transactions, and scaled the acquiring programme to $110B annually, placing the bank in the top ten acquiring sponsor banks and top twenty issuing sponsor banks. Before Cross River, he spent seven years at American Express across roles in strategy, product, and business development on both acquiring and issuing businesses. Earlier in his career he held positions at First Data and Western Union. He holds an MBA and a BS in Engineering, both from Purdue University's Krannert School of Management.