SVP, Strategy and Content, Live Media & Events
American Banker Live Media
Holly Sraeel is Arizent’s Senior Vice President of Strategy and Content, Live Media, leading content creation and innovation for the events portfolio and introducing new multimedia and invitation-only experiences for senior executives that drive critical conversations and action around corporate strategy, innovation and financial performance. She is part of the company’s operational leadership team and is focused on developing cross-platform programming that creates higher levels of engagement for subscribers, community participants and partners across the company’s brands, including American Banker, The Bond Buyer, Accounting Today, National Mortgage News, Digital Insurance, Financial Planning and Employee Benefits News.
Sraeel is an award-winning editorial director, media executive and content strategist with expertise in developing influential content, communities, and events for C-level executives in the banking and financial services, insurance, technology, and professional services industries. Prior to joining Arizent, she held several content leadership and strategist roles, including for B2B media consultancy New York Ventures, capital markets management consultancy Opimas, Oxford University-incubated startup Wise Responder, and as cofounder of Genesys Partners’ Agility First Forum.
This new role marks a return to the company for Sraeel. In her previous 12-year run, she was a member of the executive team and was pivotal in driving new cross-platform editorial, events and business innovation as SVP of Brand Management; Group Editorial Director of Banking and Technology magazines; and Founder, President and Editorial Director of The Most Powerful Women in Banking,™ the company’s first-ever, community-based media platform, now part of Arizent’s flagship American Banker.
Sraeel is an early honors graduate of Marist College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications and a concentration in journalism.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of global economies, yet they face unique challenges—limited access to capital, cumbersome digital experiences and cybersecurity risks. This session will showcase how industry leaders are innovating to broaden SMEs’ access to credit, while also exploring how together, cutting-edge payment solutions and strategic partnerships fuel growth, resilience, and economic prosperity for SMEs and those who serve them. When small business wins, we all win.
Among the things you’ll learn:
Agentic commerce is revolutionizing the digital shopping experience. Walmart, Shopify, Etsy and others are offering ChatGPT-enabled shopping via the instant checkout features on their platforms. Things are just getting started: AI-driven agents are rapidly moving from assisting transactions to autonomously initiating and managing them—ushering in the era of agentic payments. In this new model, intelligent software can negotiate prices, trigger payments, rebalance liquidity, and settle obligations across networks without human input. For banks and payment providers, this represents both a technological and strategic inflection point: How do you design infrastructure, compliance, and customer interfaces for a world where payments are executed by autonomous agents 24/7?
This session explores the convergence of AI, real-time settlement, and tokenized money—and what it means for banks, processors, and networks as they prepare for a future of machine-to-machine commerce and self-directed financial flows. Agentic commerce will push banks and payments providers to evolve security in a number of ways, too, including more authentication and fraud prevention practices and shifting a merchant-focused business model to a consumer-facing one. Our panel will discuss how payment players need to enable the right agents to transact for customers, the shift from subscription models and card-on-file payments from merchants to consumer agents, and rethinking how they acquire new customers while retaining top-of-wallet status among consumers who are increasingly evaluating products through an agent.