Success Beyond the Backyard

Evan Shelan is a fintech entrepreneur and payments innovator with a three-decade track record of building and scaling financial technology platforms for banks and credit unions across the United States. He is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Global FinTech Forum, LLC (GFF), which delivers advanced global payment solutions to banks and credit unions throughout the United States and P2P payment infrastructure, including AquaCheque.com, a B2B digital check platform built on the Federal Reserve’s Check 21 system that serves as a modern alternative to consumer tools like Venmo and Zelle.

Shelan built eZforex.com, one of the first online foreign currency exchange companies, pioneering the shift of a traditional analog currency business to a web-based model over twenty-five years ago. At its peak, eZforex served nearly 1,000 U.S. travel agencies. Following the collapse of the travel-agency market after 9/11, he pivoted the business to serve banks and credit unions, rebuilding it into a network of over 2,000 credit unions and banks before selling the company in 2019. Across travel agencies, banks, and credit unions, the business facilitated close to $1 billion in currency exchange over the lifetime of the company. During this period, he also developed Currency Price Protection (CPP), a risk-management tool that locks in the exchange rate until a customer returns from their overseas trip. The program tripled the average transaction size and totally reimagined the buy-back model for traditional financial institutions, saving clients hundreds of dollars on each exchange, and is now used across the United States.

In 2016, Shelan co-led one of the first blockchain-based international payments originating from the United States — a collaboration with StarOne Credit Union and Ripple Labs that delivered funds across four continents in under five seconds, a milestone that will go down in fintech history. He was previously recognized as Entrepreneur Success of the Year for the Dallas–Fort Worth, Waco, and East Texas region in 2014.

Shelan holds a BA in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin and is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He is the co-author of Success Beyond the Backyard: 7 Neighbors Who Dared to Dream Big and Won (© 2025), a #1 for recently published books on Amazon Bestseller published by Archway Publishing in October 2025. A Rotarian for 47 years, Shelan is now launching a SBB Rotary Mentorship Network across Northern California Rotary clubs, with a mission for clubs nationwide to adopt the model outlined in Success Beyond the Backyard. He lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife Debbie.