Name: Susanne Sandler
Company: Senior Vice President and General Manager of Fintech
Position: Mews
Website: https://www.mews.com/en
About Susanne Sandler
Susanne Sandler leads fintech strategy at Mews, a hospitality cloud platform and unicorn embedded fintech company serving over 5,500 properties across 85+ countries. With over 20 years of experience spanning financial services, technology, and travel, she has built a career at the intersection of payments innovation, operational scalability, and customer experience transformation.
Before joining Mews, Susanne held senior roles at Booking Holdings (owner of Booking.com, KAYAK, Priceline, Agoda, and OpenTable), where she led strategic initiatives across the travel tech ecosystem. She also ran a $100M+ revenue business at technology conglomerate IAC and held investor roles at Corsair Capital and Merrill Lynch. She currently serves on the boards and audit committees of Real Brokerage and HomeToGo, both publicly traded companies, bringing governance expertise to high-growth technology businesses.
At Mews, Susanne oversees embedded fintech operations for thousands of hospitality properties worldwide, enabling seamless payment processing, pre-arrival communications, and financial infrastructure that powers guest experiences while reducing operational friction for hotels. Her work sits at the convergence of fintech innovation and practical deployment in a traditionally low-margin, high-volume industry where payment failures or compliance gaps directly impact revenue and guest trust.
One of the biggest challenges Susanne has navigated is scaling fintech infrastructure across fragmented global markets with divergent regulatory requirements, payment preferences, and compliance frameworks. Hospitality operates across 85+ countries, each with different data sovereignty rules, payment rails, and consumer protection standards. Building fintech solutions that work seamlessly across these diverse environments requires balancing localization with platform consistency, a challenge that demands both technical rigor and deep operational understanding.
Susanne has also worked to shift industry perception around what fintech means in hospitality. Many hoteliers view payments as a commodity feature rather than a strategic advantage. Her work demonstrates how embedded fintech (automating pre-arrival payments, reducing chargebacks, optimizing currency conversion, enabling flexible payment options) directly impacts guest satisfaction, operational efficiency, and profitability. Properties leveraging fintech strategically see measurable gains in revenue, reduced front desk workload, and higher guest satisfaction.
Her impact on the industry extends beyond Mews. As a board member at two publicly traded companies and a recognized voice in fintech and travel tech, Susanne champions the importance of women in senior finance and technology leadership roles. She actively mentors emerging leaders and advocates for creating sustainable pathways for women to reach decision-making positions in industries where female representation remains disproportionately low.
Susanne holds degrees in finance and accounting and is a recognized expert in fintech, embedded payments, and the convergence of technology and travel. Her work proves that fintech innovation in hospitality is not just about transaction processing. It is about building infrastructure that scales trust, reduces friction, and enables better experiences for both guests and operators worldwide.
