Heather Tuason

Heather Tuason brings more than 30 years of financial services experience spanning small business banking, investment banking, corporate treasury, and fintech. She founded Arena in 2019 to solve the financial management gap she saw across small businesses — offering fractional CFO and accounting services while partnering directly with bank and credit union bankers and underwriting teams. Heather identified early on that roughly 90% of small businesses don't have a financial forecast, often because the competency to build one is missing internally, even though banks expect one for credit applications; Arena was built to be the bridge — the financial guidance small business owners expect their banker to provide, but that banks generally don't. 

Arena was named to the 2025 Inc. 5000 list at #409 fastest growing companies in the United States.

Before Arena, Heather spent nearly five years at Capital One as Senior Vice President and Head of National Small Business, where she built and led the National Small Business organization launched the Spark Business and Spark Pay platforms, and owned the P&L, product strategy, and operations for small business checking, savings, lending, credit cards, merchant services, and payments. Spark Business Unlimited Checking was named "Best Business Checking for an Established Business" by MONEY Magazine three years running (2013–2015). Earlier at Capital One, she led corporate development (bank M&A) and served as Head Business Risk Officer for Corporate Treasury, building the bank's first counterparty credit risk team and ALCO governance during the 2008 financial crisis, and acting as the regulatory liaison for TARP and stress testing.

From 2017–2019, she was Chief Strategy, Product & Investment Officer at StreetShares, a fintech serving veteran-owned small businesses, where she built a turnkey small-business-lending SaaS platform for banks and credit unions and signed Navy Federal and USAA as first partners.

She holds a board seat at Lafayette Federal Credit Union (a $2B Mid-Atlantic institution), chairing its Credit Committee.

Education: Scaling Ventures MBA program, Harvard University; Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Stanford University; Executive Banking Certification, Louisiana State University; BA in Criminology, Accounting and Economics, George Mason University.