Co-founder
John Collison is President at Stripe, the payments technology company he co-founded in 2010 with his brother Patrick Collison. As president, Collison oversees operations, strategy, and business development, working alongside Patrick, who serves as chief executive officer. Stripe provides financial infrastructure and payments technology, and as of February 2026 carried a valuation of $159 billion.
Collison was born in August 1990 in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland. Before Stripe, he co-founded Auctomatic with his brother Patrick — a software company building tools for high-volume sellers on platforms such as eBay, which was acquired in March 2008 for approximately $5 million when Collison was seventeen. The brothers had participated in Y Combinator through their work on Auctomatic. In November 2016, following a funding round that valued Stripe at $9.2 billion, Collison became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, with a net worth estimated at $9.3 billion as of 2026 according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Stripe received early backing from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Sequoia Capital. Collison enrolled at Harvard University in September 2009 and dropped out the following year to build Stripe. He holds a Federal Aviation Administration Aircraft Flight Instructor certification and is also a pianist.
Crypto & Stablecoins
Ria Bhutoria is a digital finance expert and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, with a background in fintech equity research at Credit Suisse and experience accelerating stablecoin adoption at Stripe. She holds a degree from NYU Stern School of Business.
Crypto Partnerships
Sarah Clansky is Crypto Partnerships at Stripe, a role she has held since July 2025. Prior to this, she spent over three years at Stripe in Strategic Partnerships from April 2022 to July 2025, based in New York.
Before joining Stripe, Clansky served as Director of Channel Partnerships at Afterpay from October 2020 to April 2022, based in New York. Prior to that, she spent nearly three years at Square from November 2017 to October 2020, holding roles across Partner Manager and Product Partnerships. Earlier in her career, she held multiple roles at DoubleDutch between May 2014 and November 2017, progressing from Customer Success Manager through to Senior Account Manager and Channel Program Manager. She holds a degree from the University of San Francisco.
Meet other people
EMEA Head of Fintech Coverage, HSBC
Jenni Himberg-Wild is a Managing Director at HSBC covering the fintech sector across EMEA. With around two decades of experience in corporate and transaction banking, she previously served as Managing Director, Head of Financial Institutions & Fintech Europe at Barclays. She is a regular speaker at industry events such as Money20/20 Europe and PAY360.
Head of Digital Assets and Currencies, Global Macro, HSBC
Bugra Celik leads HSBC's digital assets and currencies work within Global Macro in Hong Kong, after previously serving as Director of Digital Assets in Global Private Banking & Wealth. A digital product professional with 16+ years across telecoms, e-commerce and financial services (Turkcell, Mox Bank, Liv. by Emirates NBD, OSL), he works on tokenization, stablecoin and CBDC initiatives, including HSBC's tokenized gold products in Hong Kong.
Global Head of Digital Money, HSBC
Lewis Sun is HSBC's Global Head of Digital Money and Global Head of Domestic & Emerging Payments within Global Payments Solutions, based in Hong Kong. He joined HSBC in 2002 as a Product Manager in mainland China and has held senior payments roles including Head of GPS for HSBC China and Regional Head of Product Management for Asia Pacific. He is a frequent speaker on digital money, CBDCs and tokenized deposits at Sibos and the Singapore FinTech Festival.
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