Lunch on Park Lane. Serious agenda.
On 20 October, Sends CEO Alona Shevtsova took the moderator’s seat at the Women in Business Lunch, part of the Payments Leaders’ Summit UK that ran in London across 20–21 October. The table drew female leaders from financial services, technology and the wider business world. And the conversation kept circling back to one question: what does real progress for women in fintech look like from here?
Sends, for anyone who hasn’t come across it, is a UK-based fintech offering payment solutions to individuals and businesses.
The lunch was held at the InterContinental London Park Lane. Shevtsova was joined by two speakers — Maggie Bazemore, Systems Director at Mr & Mrs Smith, and Beatrice Andreea Sava, Senior Strategy Consultant at Edgar, Dunn & Company.
It got personal, fast. The panel talked through the experiences (professional and otherwise) that shaped their own routes into leadership. Mentorship came up. So did professional networks, plus the openings available to women building careers in industries that men have traditionally dominated.
Here’s the thing: representation for women in fintech and finance more broadly has moved forward in recent years. Nobody on the panel disputed that. But the gaps that remain are stubborn — especially in senior leadership and technical roles — and a good chunk of the session went on what would have to change for career opportunities to become genuinely inclusive.
Picture a junior engineer at a payments firm, the only woman in her team’s stand-up every morning. She’s good at the job. What she’s missing is someone a few rungs up who has already walked that path. That’s exactly the gap mentorship and networks are supposed to close.
Shevtsova put it this way:
“Leadership is not simply about reaching a certain position. It is about taking responsibility, creating opportunities for others and building an environment where people can grow. Discussions like this are important because they allow us to share real experiences, learn from one another and encourage more women to take an active role in shaping the future of financial services,” said Alona Shevtsova, CEO of Sends.
Hard to argue with.
Next stop? Dubai. Sends plans to keep working with the Payments Leaders’ Summit organisers at their upcoming event there in February 2027, and the company sees the Middle East as an important market for building industry relationships and exploring new openings for international cooperation.
It’s been a busy month. In October 2026, Sends announced cooperation with UnionPay International to develop both card issuing and acquiring capabilities. The aim: wider international payment options for Sends customers, and a bigger global audience for merchants — particularly across markets connected to Asia.
Closer to home, the focus hasn’t shifted. Sends still wants financial services to be easier to reach for UK small and medium-sized businesses, and it recently introduced a special autumn offer: eligible businesses opening a GBP Business Payment Account can add a EUR or USD account without paying an extra account-opening fee. Small perk. Useful one, too.
A firm pushing into Asia and the Gulf at once, while still making time to put women in fintech on the table in London… that says something about how Sends wants to be seen. February in Dubai will show whether the conversation travels.
