Featured Speaker at Summit, Richie Serna!

The Latinos on Fast Track (LOFT) Coder Summit at Stanford University brought out tech leaders from across the country to Silicon Valley to unite and share ideas on everything technology.

Former Youth Awardee, Richie Serna, CEO & Co-Founder of Finix Payments was our very own featured speaker at the Summit. Richie was once honored as a Youth Award recipient, and HHF was proud to have Richie back to speak in a room full of Latino leaders!

Prior to Finix, Richie worked as an engineer at Balanced Payments, was the Finance Director/ Co-Campaign Manager for the Emanuel Pleitez Mayoral Campaign, and graduated with honors from Harvard University. Richie has always been passionate about payments, web development, and learning new technologies.

From being honored as HHF’s Youth Awardee, to featured speaker at the Stanford LOFT Coder Summit, the cycle of leadership is quite beautiful at HHF. Not to mention that Cynthia Pleitez, Marketing and Communications Strategist at HHF, and Alberto Avalos, Innovation and Technology Manager at HHF, also worked with Richie on Emanuel’s campaign.

Richie grew up in Santa Ana, California and now lives in San Francisco where he spearheads Finix Payments. Finix payments provides enterprise-level payments processing software and infrastructure, and offers the first B2B processing platform enabling banks, acquirers and large merchants to send money anywhere in the world directly to a debit or credit card. The skills Richie gained from handling the finances on the Emaunel Pleitez campaign really helped build the fundamentals to the business outreach he currently does day to day.

“The Hispanic Heritage Foundation is very near and dear to me. There are not a lot of people who look like me with the disparities in Silicon Valley and I just want to show that there is top talent,” said Richie.

Other speakers that joined Richie at the Summit included Vandana Sikka, Chairperson of The Infosys Foundation, Cynthia Maxwell, Director of Engineering, Gracie Arenas, Senior Technical Artist at Electronic Arts (EA), and Abdul Razack, Executive Vice-President and Head of Platform at Infosys. If you missed out on our Summit get the full recap here!

HHF honors Latino high school seniors who excel in the classroom and community. Our application for the 2017 Youth Awards has opened, and any Latino student graduating in the Spring of 2018 is welcome to apply. To apply and learn more go here!