Joseph Heck
CEO, U.S. Zip
Joseph Heck is the US CEO of Zip Co, a digital financial services company offering innovative and people-centered products. As an accomplished business leader with over 20 years of experience in consumer lending, Joe has a track record of driving innovation and transformation within the lending industry.
Prior to Zip, he was CEO of US fintech Happy Money and prior to this he served as Happy Money’s Chief Operating Officer, overseeing sales, risk, data science, operations, and customer experience.
Before joining Happy Money, Joe spent 15 years at TruStage (formerly CUNA Mutual Group) in various leadership roles spanning sales and product innovation to help financial institutions on their digital transformation journey.
2026 Agenda Sessions
The future of credit: What happens when innovation outpaces infrastructure?
Buy Now, Pay Later has reshaped how consumers access credit—making it more flexible, transparent, and aligned with real-world spending behavior. But as BNPL adoption accelerates, the industry is confronting a familiar challenge: the banking and credit systems supporting it were built for a different era of consumer behavior and risk.
Behind today’s seamless BNPL experiences sit infrastructures built for fixed billing cycles, delayed reporting, and products that don’t reflect the transactional nature of modern consumer behavior. The result? Responsible users can appear riskier than they are, lenders make decisions without full context, and the industry faces unnecessary tradeoffs between access, protection, and growth.
This session brings together BNPL leaders to explore what comes next. The next phase isn’t just about product innovation—it’s about upgrading the rails beneath it. Providers need infrastructure that supports real-time visibility, smarter risk models, and shared context across the ecosystem. Panelists will share practical lessons from operating at scale, what’s already working, and how the industry can collectively build modern credit infrastructure that supports responsible growth for the next billion users.
Takeaways:
• What BNPL ready credit infrastructure looks like—and why banks and fintechs need it at scale
• How shared visibility and modern data frameworks can improve outcomes for consumers and lenders
• Why evolving the rails behind BNPL unlocks growth without sacrificing trust, compliance, or user experience
Sponsored by Socure
Tuesday 31 March 13:05 - 13:50 Banking
Behind today’s seamless BNPL experiences sit infrastructures built for fixed billing cycles, delayed reporting, and products that don’t reflect the transactional nature of modern consumer behavior. The result? Responsible users can appear riskier than they are, lenders make decisions without full context, and the industry faces unnecessary tradeoffs between access, protection, and growth.
This session brings together BNPL leaders to explore what comes next. The next phase isn’t just about product innovation—it’s about upgrading the rails beneath it. Providers need infrastructure that supports real-time visibility, smarter risk models, and shared context across the ecosystem. Panelists will share practical lessons from operating at scale, what’s already working, and how the industry can collectively build modern credit infrastructure that supports responsible growth for the next billion users.
Takeaways:
• What BNPL ready credit infrastructure looks like—and why banks and fintechs need it at scale
• How shared visibility and modern data frameworks can improve outcomes for consumers and lenders
• Why evolving the rails behind BNPL unlocks growth without sacrificing trust, compliance, or user experience
Sponsored by Socure Banking US/Pacific
