Kara Parkey is a founding team member at Coast, an AI-powered platform changing how product and go-to-market teams demonstrate complex solutions, where she leads the company’s largest relationships with global payment networks and financial institutions. She is also co-host and NYC correspondent for The Payments Shed podcast.

Kara brings more than a decade of experience building at the forefront of payments and financial technology. After starting her career at PwC, she was one of the first employees at Built Technologies, and later served as Chief of Staff at MX, a leading open banking platform. She spent six years on the board of the Association for Financial Technology (AFT), including a term as President in 2022–2023.