Dave Wilkes

Founder and CEO

Dave Wilkes serves as founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Salt Lake City-based Fuze Network, a payment provider that enables cardholders to push cash to any card – prepaid, credit or debit. He is responsible for the overall company strategy and vision of Fuze Network.

Wilkes founded Fuze Network in 2010, following several decades of leadership in the payment industry. Prior to starting Fuze Network, he served as co-founder of Global Finance, acquired by Galileo Processing, Inc. At Galileo, he served as the chief marketing officer where he was responsible for sales management, product development and initiating sales and marketing strategies.

In addition, Wilkes served as senior vice president of strategic alliances for ProPay USA, where he was responsible for managing business development and creating broader alliance strategies for related product offerings.

He is a member of the Network Branded Prepaid Card association and currently resides in Salt Lake City

Khalid El-Awady

Chief Product Officer

Khalid El-Awady serves as chief product officer for Salt Lake City-based Fuze Network, a payment provider that enables cardholders to push cash to any card. El-Awady leads Fuze’s efforts in creating and designing payments products. He oversees development activities while maintaining business partnerships with clients and vendors.

El-Awady has more than 8 years of experience in the payments industry. Prior to joining Fuze, he was a manager in Visa's Prepaid and Emerging Products group. While at Visa, El-Awady managed nationwide retail partnerships and managed a number of prepaid card product categories.

El-Awady graduated from Stanford University with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics. El-Awady also has an MBA from University of California – Berkley.

Kelly Lent

Chief Technical Officer

Kelly Lent serves as chief technology officer for Salt Lake City-based Fuze Network, a payment network that enables cardholders to push cash to any card. He is responsible for software creation and maintaining company hardware. In addition, Lent monitors data security, builds system architecture and plays an integral part in the sales and operations department.

Lent has more than 25 years of experience in the payments industry. Prior to joining Fuze, he served as a senior software developer for both Solera Networks and Biap, companies that specialize in creating software for TV and the Internet. At Biap, Lent was responsible for overseeing software development and database architecture. He worked on software that was mainly used for networking activities and created forensic analyses when networking sites were hacked.

Lent graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.S. in Mathematics, B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Computer Science. Lent also has a Master of Science in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

Bryan Hollingshead

Vice President of Product Development

Bryan Hollingshead has spent virtually his entire 10 year career working for software start ups in the payments industry. Prior to joining Fuze he spent 7 years at Galileo Processing where he held a variety of positions in the areas of Customer Service, Internet Marketing, Account Management, Operations & Product Management. His main focus at Fuze is overseeing the development of the FuzeFlow platform in accordance with principles of open and flexible architecture such that developers and non-developers alike can connect to and interact with FuzeFlow platform as simply and quickly as possible.

Dennis Mullin

Vice President of Network Operations

Dennis Mullen serves as vice president of Network Operations for Salt Lake City-based Fuze Network, a payment provider that enables cardholders to push cash to any card. He is responsible for overseeing the operations division and client services department, while implementing effective business strategies.

Mullen has more than 15 years of experience in the payments industry, previously serving as product manager of Implementations for the remote payment and presentment services division for O’Fallon, Mo.-based MasterCard International. At MasterCard, Mullen managed resource allocation and new member implementations. He provided crucial data on new member needs to the sales and business staff for technical assessments in order to integrate them with available products. He also presented new technology initiatives to both the project management and development teams by supplying them with timely information regarding customer perspectives, interactions and feedback to create suitable products.

Mullen served as senior service specialist for New Castle, Del.-based Citigroup, where he was responsible for managing the electronic payment services department. He monitored, evaluated and improved the daily production cycle of home banking transactions using various transmission platforms. While working with Citigroup, he managed the operations of resource training, development and allocation aspects and settlement and technology initiatives.