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Dennis Cail, Co-Founder & CEO at Zirtue is a Navy Veteran, seasoned award winning entrepreneur, board member, Forbes Next 1000 Honoree, and EY Entrepreneur of the Year-Southwest Winner. Dennis has spent over 20 years launching successful startups while actively mentoring up and coming entrepreneurs.

Dennis founded Zirtue with a mission to drive financial inclusion by simplifying loans between friends & family with direct bill payments to creditors across Zirtue’s growing list of enterprise partners to capture at risk payments.  Zirtue has strong mission aligned capital partners and investors, including Morgan Stanley, Northwestern Mutual, CMFG Ventures, Capital Factory and Mercury Fund. With Dennis’s servant leadership, Zirtue’s has experienced rapid growth that has also garnered national media attention from Fintech Futures, Forbes, Fortune, Inc Magazine, Business Insider, Dallas Morning News, WFAA and Fox Business News. 

As an SMU-Cox Alum and with a passion for financial equity and closing the wealth gap, Dennis is an active community and board member, including Goodwill (Finance Committee), YMCA (Technology Committee), YMCA Foundation Board of Directors (Finance Committee), and Texas Security Bank Board of Directors

Shay Phillips is a nationally recognized marketing and tech executive who has extensive experience working in start-up environments within large corporations where she creates new organizational structures and business models. 

While Shay has held many positions from operations to marketing to strategy, she’s consistently focused on three key themes: driving operational efficiencies, increasing revenue and creating best in class customer experiences.  She’s been able to do this by leveraging technology and her ability to bring purpose and structure to undefined situations. Shay considers herself a chaos coordinator.

Shay has been nationally recognized for her career achievements, receiving awards like The Black Engineer of the Year Award for Outstanding Technical Contribution – Industry and Women of Color Technology All-Star.  She was also named to CRN’s Channel Chiefs and Women of the Channel lists for her work in the award-winning AT&T Partner Exchange division as the head of Operations and Technology.