Head of Avvance and Point-of-Sale Lending
U.S. Bank
As head of Merchant and Insights for U.S. Bank Avvance, Emily Hartye leads the end-to-end Merchant Experience for Avvance, driving activation, servicing, and retention to ensure a seamless, high-performing merchant journey. She also oversees the development of Avvance’s enterprise data lake, unifying data across 50+ systems to enable deeper analysis that guides data-driven product discovery and development.
Emily brings over 14 years of financial services experience, primarily in product management, with previous roles at Bank of America, a regional bank, a payments fintech, and a product consultancy serving financial institutions. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Duke University and an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
BNPL and embedded finance aren’t just new lending channels. They’re changing who owns the customer, who controls underwriting, and who captures the economics. As nonbanks and platforms insert themselves between banks and consumers, financial institutions face a high-stakes tradeoff: pursue scale through partnerships and risk becoming invisible, or maintain control and risk losing distribution. In this session, American Banker shares new research from U.S. banks and credit unions on how leaders are approaching BNPL and embedded finance right now, and what strategies are gaining momentum, where institutions are drawing hard lines, and which partnership models are proving viable. The research explores the regulatory and compliance friction points, the operational realities behind launching BNPL at bank-grade risk standards, and the competitive pressures forcing faster decisions. The discussion delivers a benchmark view of how banks and credit unions are navigating the tension between growth, control, and risk—and what that means for their role in the next generation of lending.