Our Executive Team

Robert Kaufman

Founder & CEO

Prior to founding ConnexPay, Bob was the General Manager of the Virtual Pay division of U.S. Bank overseeing product, marketing, and supplier enablement for all virtual payment solutions, as well as a virtual pay focused sales team.

In total, Bob spent 18 years at U.S. Bank, as well as five years as CFO of a technology company in Minnesota. His tenure at U.S. Bank included the position of CFO for the Payment Services division as well as Senior Vice President, leading innovation projects that spanned across the bank’s Payments division.

In his free time, Bob and his family enjoy spending weekends at a local NASCAR-affiliated Speedway that he co-owns, or at a hockey and training center that he owns in Stillwater, Minnesota. Bob is a CPA and CMA, received his bachelor’s in accounting from the University of Minnesota and master’s degree in finance and strategic management from the University of Chicago GSB.

Kunal Patel

Chief Technology Officer

Kunal has spent his career working to build high performance teams for startups and large organizations with a focus on delivery and execution. His experience in providing IT services and expertise started over 20 years ago while working with up and coming startups in Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center. His propensity for growing small businesses continued later in his career where he provided scalable solutions to large institutions in the higher education and financial services industries.

Kunal has spent the last decade on both sides of the financial services coin. He has worked to build and manage acquiring platforms focused on merchant on-boarding and underwriting for a leading electronic payments company. Kunal’s most recent projects include the ground up design and implementation of an award winning issuing platform for corporate payments, leveraging cutting edge big data processing, orchestration and automation services.

Kunal and his wife spend their free time in Woodstock, GA chasing golf balls, tennis balls, soccer balls and their two young boys around the backyard. They are big fans of the championship winning Atlanta United FC.

Beth Blaisdell

Head of Business Planning

Beth brings more than 30 years of payments industry experience in a wide variety of areas, including global product and marketing roles for both issuing and merchant acquiring. Before ConnexPay, Beth was the Chief Marketing Officer for TSYS Merchant Solutions where she was responsible for developing a results-driven marketing and corporate communications strategy that drove further usage of TSYS’ payments solutions.
Prior to TSYS, Beth spent 12 years at U.S. Bank in various roles across the Payment Services division and has also spent time at industry leaders such as Visa and Citibank.

Beth received her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with a double major in finance and accounting. Beth lives in Atlanta and enjoys spending time on the lake, golfing and loves to travel.

Judson Preuss

Head of Operations

Prior to joining the ConnexPay team, Judson was the Director of Product Management at Priority Technology Holdings where he led a lean-and-mean but high-output product team and oversaw the development and management of various proprietary payment software products.

Judson started in the Payments industry in 2009 in a Sales role. Since then has worked in various roles in Finance, ISO and Agent Sales Training, Interchange Optimization, Operations Management, Project Management and Product Management. At Priority, he oversaw the build out, launch and management of CRMs to optimize and automate new merchant on-boarding, managed credit and transaction risk, and calculated and managed commissions. Judson also oversaw Virtual Terminal solutions, Mobile Payment Apps, an Authorization Platform and other Agent and Merchant payment software. He is a firm believer that leveraging modern technology to build highly functional, automated and extremely desirable electronic payment software solutions is the key to taking Fintech companies to the next level.

In his free time Judson enjoys being with his wife and daughter – especially going to the lake, hiking, camping and visiting Montana where he wants to live one day. Judson is an Eagle Scout and he received his bachelor’s in finance from the University of West Georgia.

Julie Heffelfinger

Head of Finance

Julie Heffelfinger has over 20 years of success in operations, management, strategic relationships, inception of and directing programs, and process improvement. Julie’s passion is evident throughout her career which spanned from a lobbyist and business owner to a healthcare administrator before joining the payments industry early 2017.

Julie has already proven herself to be an asset in the payments industry working for a highly successful corporate payments company as SVP of Strategic Operations, and ACI Worldwide as Director of Operations. With her years of progressive leadership, Julie provides the experience and knowledge to continually inspire ConnexPay teams.

When Julie isn’t working, she loves spending time outdoors exploring nature and spending time with wildlife above and below the water through hiking, kayaking and scuba diving. Julie earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Ohio Dominican University. She also holds two master’s degrees, an MBA with a healthcare concentration from Southern New Hampshire University, and a master’s degree in positive organization development and change from Case Western Reserve University.

Tammy Clemons

Head of Sales

Tammy brings more than 22 years of payments industry experience to ConnexPay. Her career, both in banking and financial technologies, has included roles where she has built successful commercial payments sales teams in multiple emerging markets with focus on virtual card payables. In her start, Tammy was instrumental to gaining early virtual card adopters in her time at Commerce Bank and went on to lead sales at AOC Solutions (now WEX), a top fintech in the commercial payments space, while also being the GM over the building of their issuing processor and their direct-to-market launch. In 2017, Tammy joined U.S. Bank where she was the Head of Large Market and Specialized Industry Verticals, Partnership Sales and Supplier Enablement. During her time at U.S. Bank, she notably brought alignment to the sales team, met goal in her first full year ($1.65B), grew revenue over 65%, expanded the team and territory to include the US as well as global expansion into the EU, and built a network of new partnerships to spur more opportunities.

Tammy received her Bachelor’s degree from Baker University, Baldwin City, KS, and her MBA from Webster University. When Tammy isn’t traveling for work or leisure, she resides in San Clemente, CA where she enjoys spending time with family, friends and their puppy, Charlie.