Connie Theien serves as the senior vice president of industry relations and leads efforts to engage payments stakeholders in advancing strategies for improving the U.S. payment system and in collaborating to encourage implementation and adoption of faster payments in the United States.

Theien leads stakeholder engagement by supporting various industry and Federal Reserve work groups and initiatives. She also leads the engagement strategy for the Fed Payments Improvement Community, a group that includes thousands of stakeholders from across the payments ecosystem, to improve the end-to-end speed, efficiency and security of payments in the country.

As part of the Federal Reserve’s payments improvement leadership team, she established and managed the Faster and Secure Payments Task Forces, a coalition of 500+ stakeholders that worked from 2015-2018 to lay important groundwork for advancing payments speed and security.