Leadership Team
Meet Our Team

Carey O'Connor Kolaja
Chief Executive Officer

Carey O'Connor Kolaja
Chief Executive Officer
As CEO, Carey O’Connor Kolaja is responsible for the day-to-day operations and strategic direction of Versapay. Throughout her career, Carey has been known as an innovator, disrupter, and operator who can drive from start-up to scale-up. She brings over 25 years of executive leadership experience in the financial services and payments industry. Prior to her role as CEO at Versapay, she was the chief executive officer of AU10TIX, the global leader in automated identity intelligence and cyber fraud prevention. She has also held positions at Citi Fintech as the global chief product officer and PayPal as the vice president of global consumer products. Carey holds a B.S. from Indiana University and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Nancy Sansom
Chief Commercial Officer

Nancy Sansom
Chief Commercial Officer
Nancy Sansom is the Chief Commercial Officer for Versapay, the leader in Collaborative AR. In this role, she leads marketing, partnerships, demand generation, product marketing, events, brand, and communications. She has more than 20 years of experience running successful product, partner, and marketing organizations in high-growth software companies focused on HCM and financial technology.
Prior to joining Versapay, Nancy served on the senior leadership teams at PlanSource, Benefitfocus and PeopleMatter. As Chief Commercial Officer at PlanSource, she led marketing, commercialization strategy, partner development and other aspects of the PlanSource go-to-market strategy. During her 10-year career at Benefitfocus, Nancy led product strategy and management, marketing and product design. She has also worked in manufacturing and software consulting.
Nancy earned her MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and has been a member of the Kellogg School of Management’s Executive Education program. Nancy is married with three children and lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Orit Kendal
Chief People Officer

Orit Kendal
Chief People Officer
Orit has spent the past 20 years working as a People Leader with high-growth companies focused in Technology, Software, and Management Consulting. Orit's expertise is in Human Resource strategy that supports the company's overall business and culture objectives. Her focus has been in architecting and implementing HR initiatives across global organizations. Orit is a hands-on leader who has built out and led all aspects of the People Operations function which encompasses the hiring, training, and development of employees worldwide, while creating and implementing an environment and programs that help to develop and engage our people. As a HR leader, Orit supports operational excellence and is a strong supporter and implementer of diversity principles.
Orit holds a BA in English from Rutgers College, Rutgers University and a BA in Communications from the School of Communication, Information and Library Science at Rutgers University.

Chris Wassenaar
Chief Risk Officer

Craig Walker
Chief Product Officer

Craig Walker
Chief Product Officer
Craig was co-founder and founding CTO of online accounting and small business platform, Xero. Started in New Zealand in 2006, Xero is one of the world’s leading software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies with over 4,000 employees, three million customers and $1 billion in revenue. Having spent the first half of his time at Xero building Xero’s founding product team, leading Xero’s technology strategy and building out Xero's core accounting platform, Craig moved onto running the company’s next generation FinTech and financial services products based around accounts receivable and accounts payables workflows, owning everything from strategy to execution. Prior to Xero, he co-founded SAAS provider Viatx and worked for leading Microsoft consulting firm Glazier Systems. Born in New Zealand, Craig has been in the US for the last 11 years, and is currently living in the greater Washington DC area with his wife and two young boys.

Philip Pettinato
Chief Technology Officer

Philip Pettinato
Chief Technology Officer
Phil joined Versapay in 2020. Previously, he held the position of Chief Executive Officer of ION Treasury.

Russell Lester
Chief Financial Officer

Russell Lester
Chief Financial Officer
Russell joined Versapay in 2022. He has over 20 years of experience leading finance teams at high-growth SaaS companies. Prior to joining Versapay, Russell was the CFO at Calendly and Keap. His experiences span leadership roles in finance, analytics and operations across companies at all growth stages. As a finance leader, Russell is focused on delivering proactive insights that drive growth and creating a collaborative and performance-driven team environment. Russell holds a BBA and MBA from Kennesaw State University.

Steven Arthur
EVP, Payments

Steven Arthur
EVP, Payments
Steven joined Versapay in 2022. He has over two decades of FinTech and SaaS global experience as a multi-functional business and technology leader with deep domain expertise in the payments industry with prior VP and GM tenures at Fortune 500 companies and startups within large enterprises including Expedia, NCR, Heartland (Global), First Data (Fiserv) and Western Union.
Steven’s general management and payments commercialization leadership experiences consist of product and business development, strategic partnerships, sales and solution consulting and service operations across merchant acquiring and issuer processing solutions. Under his leadership, Steven’s responsibilities have included development and implementation of global strategy, product roadmap and market delivery for electronic payments and cyber security solutions.
Steven started his career back in the 90’s as a systems engineer with data and telecom market leaders with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Christian Brothers University. Steven is an inventor with 20+ patents spanning eCommerce solutions.