'About Winnie Mulli
About
Winnie Mulli
Senior Design Director
Absa Personal and Private Banking
Winnie is a digital innovation leader with passion for using technology to solve meaningful problems at scale. She is a Senior Design Director at Absa, where she focuses on shaping the future of banking.
Winnie’s work has earned recognition across the technology and financial services industries. She has been featured on Elle Magazine, is a recipient of the Nedbank Achiever Award, the Standard Bank & Siemens Women in Tech Accelerator Award, and the Hello Ambassador Award. She was also selected to be on TED’s global platform, joining a small group of South Africans whose Tedx ideas have been shared with a global audience.
She also built Pappr, a payments intelligence API for non-profits that uses tokenised donor data instead of storing sensitive personal or payment information. By transforming recurring payment activity into actionable insights, Pappr helps organisations improve donor retention, reduce failed payments, and build stronger relationships with their supporters.
With a career spanning product design, digital transformation, and financial technology, Winnie is driven by a belief that innovation should create measurable value for both organisations and society. Her work bridges strategy, technology, and human-centred design to build products that simply improve lives.
She is currently pursuing an MBA in Global Strategy, deepening her expertise in innovation, leadership, and sustainable business growth.
Talk topic
The Payments Trust Paradox - building a world where personalisation feels magical and not like Surveillance
Winnie Mulli will be speaking about the future of AI-powered financial experiences and the growing responsibility banks have as personalisation becomes more sophisticated. As financial services gain the ability to understand customers through increasingly rich contextual signals, the challenge is no longer how much can be known, but how that knowledge should be used.
In this session, Winnie will explore personalisation, trust, and customer value through the lens of the Trust Matrix: the dynamic set of personal, cultural, and contextual boundaries that shape whether an experience feels helpful, reassuring, uncomfortable, or invasive. Using practical payment and wallet examples, she will examine which signals create genuine customer value, where the threshold between assistance and surveillance exists, and how transparency and explainability influence trust. She will also argue that banks have a responsibility to do more than deliver highly personalised experiences. They must actively help customers navigate their own trust matrix safely, ensuring that AI supports informed decision-making without encouraging people to cross personal boundaries that may leave them vulnerable to manipulation or exploitation later.
The session will leave audiences with a practical framework for designing responsible AI-enabled financial experiences that balance contextual intelligence with trust, safety, and customer agency
The Payments Trust Paradox - building a world where personalisation feels magical and not like Surveillance
Winnie Mulli will be speaking about the future of AI-powered financial experiences and the growing responsibility banks have as personalisation becomes more sophisticated. As financial services gain the ability to understand customers through increasingly rich contextual signals, the challenge is no longer how much can be known, but how that knowledge should be used.
In this session, Winnie will explore personalisation, trust, and customer value through the lens of the Trust Matrix: the dynamic set of personal, cultural, and contextual boundaries that shape whether an experience feels helpful, reassuring, uncomfortable, or invasive. Using practical payment and wallet examples, she will examine which signals create genuine customer value, where the threshold between assistance and surveillance exists, and how transparency and explainability influence trust. She will also argue that banks have a responsibility to do more than deliver highly personalised experiences. They must actively help customers navigate their own trust matrix safely, ensuring that AI supports informed decision-making without encouraging people to cross personal boundaries that may leave them vulnerable to manipulation or exploitation later.
The session will leave audiences with a practical framework for designing responsible AI-enabled financial experiences that balance contextual intelligence with trust, safety, and customer agency
