Vanessa Colella

Vanessa Colella is Visa's Head of Innovation and Digital Partnerships, leading the development and commercialization of Visa products and solutions for big tech, fintech and platform partnerships, as well as leading Visa's global network of Innovation Centers. She spearheads projects like the integration of Visa’s international transactions system into the Amazon Web Services marketplace -- a project that is streamlining complex international transactions for cloud-based businesses. Her portfolio also includes a Visa initiative to engage nearly 15,000 fintech startups in 100 countries.

Before joining Visa, Colella was Citi's Chief Innovation Officer, Head of Citi Ventures and Head of Productivity, and previously ran marketing for Citi's North American Consumer Bank. She joined Citibank in 2010 from U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), where she was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to USVP, Colella was Head of North America Marketing and then Senior Vice President of Insights at Yahoo, where she was responsible for developing and executing the company’s consumer data strategy. She was previously a Partner at McKinsey & Company.

Colella was a 2024 Forbes 50 Over 50 honoree and was recognized on the Global Corporate Venturing Power List in 2017 and 2018 as well as being named to Institutional Investor’s Fintech Finance list from 2015- 2018. Her work conceiving and launching CitiBike led Citi to win Advertising Age’s 2013 Creativity Award and the Gold Pencil in 2014.

Colella received her masters’ degrees from Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as well as a PhD from MIT’s Media Lab. A charter member of Teach for America, she is a published author and lecturer, taught courses at the Santa Fe Institute, and previously served as a research fellow at Rockefeller University. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in molecular biology from MIT and serves as a member of the Corporation’s Visiting Committee for the Media Lab.