Success in payments isn't just about closing deals. At this year's MWAA Forum, four industry leaders shared what actually drives long-term careers, from choosing the right partnerships to building expertise that competitors can't easily replicate.
The 2026 MWAA forum split its main stage into two panels. The second one, held in the afternoon, brought together four women in payments leadership. Three are founders or presidents of their own companies, and one now works inside a bank.
Moderator Angela Summa, who works with Bead XYZ, has been in payments about 15 years. She was joined by Debra LeJeune, CEO and founder of Integrity Payments Group, 17 years in payments after 20 in banking. Jenna Padilla of Goat Payments, 25 years in the industry. Jodi Durst, president of ChainIT Pay, in her 27th year. And Eva Powers of Old National Bank and Merchant Services.
The first question from the floor asked what advice to give a female business partner trying to break into a male-dominated industry. LeJeune pointed to mentorship first. "There are great women that I've come across in my career that have taught me to be very supportive of other women," she said. "Find someone who will really work you through those hard conversations."
Padilla saw it differently. "I've never looked at payments in terms of being the only female in the room," she said. "I think just numbers wise, there's just not a lot of us anyway in sales or in payments, so it kind of skews the numbers in the room a little bit. But I would say this, if you can make money for someone, you will be the most important person in the room. It doesn't matter if you're a male or a female. The way that I've come at payments is really about the money."
Durst put it more simply. "Let's be honest, there's lots of days I'm still the only female in the room," she said. "So just don't get hung up on it and keep walking through it."
Powers, who spent her early years fully on commission, said networking filled the gap a mentor might have. "I immediately, probably my first week, was looking for any networking groups I could get into to meet people in the community," she said. "I didn't know anybody, so that worked very well for me."
Summa closed the topic on the same note, pointing to Paytech Women, an organization she joined a few years back. "I wanted to just be around women that were experiencing the same thing as I was, so that I could get some help being in this environment," she said. "The networking that you get from going out and meeting these people, it pays for itself. It really does."
A recurring theme was timing, when someone selling merchant services should register their own ISO, and later, when to go wholesale.
Asked when it's time to make that leap, Durst said the answer has to come from within. "Only you know when you're ready," she said, "but I would also say take that chance on yourself and go for it." Her background spans credit card, ACH and stored value, work she said prepared her before she co-founded her own company. "It's a tough road, but it's definitely worth it," she said, adding elsewhere that she'd moved back into her parents' house during the hardest stretch. "Nobody talks about those middle years that are so hard."
Padilla took the question in a different direction, arguing reps should interrogate the decision itself before making it. "I think the question to ask is why do you want to register to be an ISO, and would that help you sell more?" she said. "Does your logo being on a statement mean anything to the merchant at the end of the day, or did they acquire a business and build that relationship with you and whatever your business name is? There's three major economies headed right for us. There's an experience economy, there's a wellness economy and there's a gig economy. The wellness economy, in the next 36 months, you're looking at $10 trillion of new business. Otherwise you're going to be stuck solving for kitchen printers in the next five years for possible businesses that won't even be up and running."
That same question of readiness kept coming back to paper, and what's actually in the contract. "The biggest problem I see right now is people send me AI redlines. They're the worst. They end up having to go into an attorney anyway," Padilla said. "So I would say even in your smallest agreement, that's a two-pager, a referral agreement, take it to somebody to look at that. Money will return itself to you down the road."
LeJeune said she learned that lesson the hard way. "One of the biggest mistakes I made in my early days was thinking I could read the contract and make sure that I was completely protected," she said. "I kind of got to the point where I said, I will not sign a contract until it's been reviewed by someone who can protect me better than I can protect myself."
That same caution shaped how she built her own company. "I got busier and then my residuals growing and growing, and I was just shocked. I can't keep up with my time or my money," she said, describing how her own ISO grew one relationship at a time. "My motivation starting out as a single person was to not have to work for someone that I didn't believe in their values, and that I didn't have to do things that I felt I was selling my soul to do."
On wholesale ISOs, LeJeune said her company deliberately stayed out. "We deal in hard to place, larger merchants, enterprise merchants or specific industries," she said. "We chose not to become a wholesale bin owner because we did not want to be constrained by one bank's credit policies."
Padilla warned against one phrase in particular. "You need to select partnerships that don't kill the conversation with these four words. What is my split?" she said. "You will kill your relationship. What you need to ask them is, how can you help me sign the next 10 deals?"
"Remember it's independent sales organization, not operational organization," Padilla said. "Even if you want to be an ISO, be so good at sales, don't be really great at operational. You're paying your processor for something they need to do, and that is to allow you the runway to sell and build residual."
Summa asked each of them what's kept them in the industry this long, and the answers all pointed back to specialization rather than raw sales volume. Powers traced her longevity to a prior career in healthcare. "I focused on my strengths," she said. "I came in late. I was in my 40s when I came to payments, and I had a whole career in healthcare before that. I understood the full revenue cycle. So I think if you came into payments and you did something prior to that, whether you knew marketing, whether you knew the schools, universities, if you're comfortable in the restaurant industry, go for it, because you can speak the language, you can talk the talk."
Durst credited a different habit, staying ahead of new technology instead of leaning on tenure. "I would say go out and embrace technology and really get prepared for what's coming," she said, "because it's going to change how we underwrite everything. When you've got an agent shopping for you, it's a whole different experience that we have never dealt with in our lifetime."
LeJeune's specialty has been compliance in verticals other reps avoid. "We became compliance experts," she said, describing her company's focus on underserved, highly regulated industries. "We've taken these verticals that have not gotten a lot of attention and said, we solve the problems rather than cure rate. I looked at an account the other day and they had a 37 to 1 authorization to settlement ratio. People who are just going and saying, I'm going to save you 10 basis points, they're not looking to solve those problems."
"I've made peace with doing the things I hate to do," Padilla said. "I've gotten really satisfied with saying yes to things I'm super uncomfortable with. I don't like asking for a promotion, I don't like asking for more money, I don't like making other people uncomfortable in the room, I don't like being confrontational, I don't like fighting for myself. But I do all those things because that's what keeps you in the lifestyle, the mindset, the growth, whatever it is that is important to you." Her advice for anyone feeling undervalued was simple. "If you don't like your situation, just leave, go do something else and do something else better for you that pays more."
That same energy carried into a lighter question, about what keeps a new rep motivated between cold calls. Padilla pointed to Layla Hormozi's content on presenting and business, along with her own podcast, Girls Just Have Funds. Powers described a routine built around preparation instead. "I used to pick a vertical for the day and I would prepare specifically for that vertical, so that I'd research all the hot topics, common concerns for that type of industry," she said, "and I would come up with some type of question that when I saw that decision maker in person, I could focus on certain things."
A question from the floor asked how to help merchants manage chargebacks, especially on online orders. Powers said prevention starts with the merchant, not the dispute itself. "It's important to understand what puts the merchants at risk for chargebacks and be very clear about all of the things that they can do to reduce their risk of that," she said.
Durst added a newer option to that list, identity verification technology built on immutable records. "It's pretty hard to have a chargeback when you put all the data in the blockchain, so you have an immutable record of it," she said. "Go look for those solutions because they are out there and could really help change your business."
The conversation shifted next to Square, and whether reps should be wary of reselling it. Padilla saw no downside. "I think that being a reseller for Square is one more tool that our community should embrace," she said. "There's a lot of SaaS companies that are out there who have iced out the third parties and have brought us right back in because we serve a value and a purpose, and they built residual for you. Are you going to turn down that mom and pop that wants to use Square? Sometimes you got to sell people what they ask for. If they want Square, now you can say yes."
The last question raised a thornier issue, merchants using deceptive dual pricing to undercut competitors. Padilla acknowledged there's little any individual rep can do about bad actors elsewhere in the market. "There's a lot of riffraff and there's not anything we can do about it," she said. "I'm not here to solve for the riffraff, but I will tell you, you should always stick to your legal solution based selling, because nobody can question you about that."
Across the panel's Q&A, the group kept circling back to the same idea from different angles, build real expertise in something specific, understand the merchant's actual business, and don't spend energy on problems outside your control. LeJeune put it simply, describing why her company goes after underserved, harder-to-place merchants instead of easy volume. "That's really what we do, is we go and find technology and resources to help make industries that are underserved better," she said.