Ellen Richey, who first joined Visa in 2007, serves as vice chairman of risk and public policy.Richey leads risk management at Visa, including enterprise risk, settlement risk, and risks to the integrity of the broader payments ecosystem. She coordinates the company’s strategic policy initiatives and works with legislators, regulators and clients globally regarding payment system security and other issues of strategic importance to Visa. Richey also leads crisis management at the executive level and is a member of Visa’s Executive Committee.Before assuming her current role, Richey concurrently served as chief legal officer and chief enterprise risk officer. In those positions, she led the legal and compliance functions in addition to her risk management responsibilities.Richey received The Most Influential Women Award from the San Francisco Business Times, the Distinguished Payments Professional Award from Women in Payments and was named one of the Most Influential Women in Payments by PaymentsSource. In 2012, the California Diversity Council named her one of the “Most Powerful and Influential Women of California.”Prior to joining Visa, Richey worked at Washington Mutual Inc. as senior vice president of enterprise risk management and executive vice president of card services. Prior to that, she served as vice chairman of Providian Financial Corporation, where she had responsibility for the enterprise risk management, legal, corporate governance, government relations, corporate relations, compliance and audit functions. Earlier in her career, Richey was a partner in the San Francisco law firm Farella, Braun & Martel, where she specialized in corporate, real estate and financial institution matters.Richey received a B.A. in Linguistics and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and served as a law clerk for Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Girl Scouts of Northern California.