Speakers

Aarti Samani is an accomplished business and technology professional with a 20+ year career, spanning multiple sectors including investment banking, consumer tech and health-tech.

She is a specialist in global expansion in both mature and emerging markets. Aarti offers a proven track record in successfully accelerating distribution, revenue and penetration in markets like India & USA. She is experienced in crafting and executing successful growth strategies harnessing cross functional teams, commercial tools and the integrated product portfolio

Prior to working at Lloyds, Angela worked At Deutsche Bank in the Cloud, Anti-Financial Crime Analytics, Data Quality and Finance Risk and Regulatory Reporting change and transformation teams. 

Before joining Deutsche Bank, Angela worked as a Senior Manager at EY across Asia Pacific and EMEIA within the Financial Services Organisation focusing on Corporate Banking and Capital Markets transformation and advisory programmes. Angela started her career at IBM in Australia working as a developer, tester, designer and then business analyst and project manager.

Angela has an honours degree in Mechanical Engineering (Mechatronics / Robotics) and Computer Science from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Anna brings twenty years of experience (including C-Level and NED roles) in driving and fostering banking and payments innovation in Europe, with a focus on CEE (Citigroup, T-Mobile, mBank, PwC).

Anna is building cooperation models between banks and Fintech startups, particularly with regard to Open Banking, Payments as well as AI projects. She is a Senior Advisor at Truffle Capital; Senator, Member of the Global Startup Committee at the WBAF – World Business Angels Investment Forum; and a Jury Member and Expert at the EU/EC European Innovation Council (EICAccelerator) aimed at financing innovative SMEs across the EU.

She is driving innovation in the European payments ecosystem. Introduced one of the first online payment gateways in the CEMEA region as well as the first digital wallet and the first mobile payment platform. Managed the implementation of the first local mobile banking app and the first mobile payments initiative. Anna was also a CEO of a local acquirer and payment institution. She combines hands-on experience with a global strategic approach across the sectors (Payments, FinTech, Consulting).

Featured in the TOP10 Women in FinTech (FinTech Magazine, Aug 2020); 100 Women in FinTech (100WFinTech) ; “TOP 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology of 2019”.

Senior Lecturer CFTE – Centre for Finance, Technology & Entrepreneurship (Open Banking and Platforms in Finance, Conversational AI in Banking). Co-Author of The PAYTECH Book and The AI Book.

Aron Elston is the Vice President – Technology Compliance at LPL Financial. Based in North Carolina, Aron’s specialises in utilising technology and analytics to bring new innovative capabilities to people and organisations.

Ben Howarth is the ABI’s DG Business Manager, supporting the Director General with policy and market analysis. He has led the ABI’s recent work on Open Finance, including its response to the recent FCA Call For Input. He took up this role in January 2019.

Previously, he had been the ABI’s Brexit Manager on a secondment basis between March and September 2018. He joined the ABI in 2015 and was previously Senior Policy Adviser for Motor and Liability – where he was responsible for the ABI’s work on automated driving, the ECJ Vnuk judgement, CMC regulation and road safety. Before joining the ABI, he was Research Manager at a regulatory affairs consultancy, having previously worked for a political monitoring agency and in an MP’s office.

Bharat is a Technical Director at Trend Micro, responsible for leading the tech team and advising Trend Micro’s largest UK and Ireland customers on security transformation. Bharat has 20 years of experience as an information security professional and has worked for Alcatel Lucent/Nokia, KCOM, Siemens and before Trend Micro he held the position of Security Technologist in the CTO Office for HP Enterprise Security Services. Bharat works with CISOs to understand risks, develop security strategies and enable business objectives.

Brian Stephens is Co-Founder & CPO at Pegasus Enterprise Solutions in the UK. He is a veteran transformative technologist with extensive experience within the market data, middleware and market access domains in capital markets.

He is former Head of Market Access, Market Data and Middleware Technology at NatWest Markets and has driven innovative solutions that have created significant operational efficiencies. Brian created and delivered a next generation suite of APIs and market gateway solutions that provide agility and material cost reduction through abstraction of platforms, data and symbology.

Prior to this role, Brian held senior engineering roles with other UK based banks and began his career at Reuters where he was lead specialist supporting enterprise solutions.

Chris is a Product Manager at Kennedys Law LLP (Kennedys), and previously held the position of head of investigation services. Chris is also the former winner of the firm’s renowned Ideas Lab, which will spearhead the next stage of the businesses’ IQ Platform.

Chris works closely with Kennedys IQ product and innovation director Karim Derrick on IQ’s flagship innovation project, SmartClaims which has behind it a consortia of lawyers, product, data and claims specialists assembled to explore the application of the latest data and text processing technologies to facilitate optimal liability decisions and to reduce client costs and indemnity spend.

Prior to moving to Kennedys IQ, Chris spent nine years working for Kennedys where he supported the counter fraud team in designing the Fraud Detector software, which is now part of the IQ platform, and in building an industry leading investigation services team.

Colette Talbot FCCA is Head of Group Finance Transformation with Bank of Ireland. Prior to joining Bank of Ireland in 2016 she has lived and worked  in a number of countries and has 25+ years of wide ranging experience gained in diverse industries including technology, construction and telecom. She is motivated by solving problems, creating value and finding better ways of working.

Conni Gibson is an experienced Compliance and Legal professional with a demonstrated history of success in the financial services industry, including international experience. Conni is skilled in Corporate Finance, Acquisitions, Securities, Derivatives, and Regulatory. Highly skilled at sourcing and developing talent. Strong oriented professional graduated from The University of Calgary.

Daniel is the Head of Payment APIs at Wells Fargo. His teams deliver market-leading payment solutions for Fortune 500 customers. Daniel has more than a decade of experience spearheading digital and mobile payment initiatives, and specializes in blending his background in technology with a focus on product-market fit and customer experiences.

Daniel Seal joined the FD and Kx group in 2015. He had spent the previous twelve years developing and running kdb, market data and analytics systems for Tier 1 banks, including Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch. Now at Kx, he’s bringing that experience to market as Chief Product Officer and the head of Kx’ Streaming Analytics strategy.

David Llewellyn is a full mix marketer with significant experience scaling high growth mobile technology businesses. Former roles with Shazam, Amazon, Skyscanner, FreeNow and Mobile Interactive Group, and now David leads marketing in EMEA for AppsFlyer.

David Masters is a Director at Société Générale, working as the Chief Data Officer for SG International Limited (UK) and Prime Business (Global). He has over 23 years’ experience in data management, regulatory and asset management operations.

David’s current role focuses on building a data framework, in order to lead regulatory projects related to data management; ensuring that data quality is compliant with regulators’ requirements stated in BCBS 239; as well as ensuring that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is implemented in order for SGIL to be compliant. The focus is also to increase reliability of the data used by the business and contribute to optimize SGIL / PRM Global scarce resources’ management; and finally to set a roadmap concerning the monitoring and continuous improvement of data management.

His previous role as Referential Data Expert, involved as an SME in MiFIR and EMIR regulatory reporting and other non-financial regulatory reporting including Dodd-Frank, Canada, REMIT. There, David focused on various regulatory referential data initiatives such as counterparty and product referential data.

David also speaks regularly or else acts as chair / moderator at various industry forums and conferences.

David has been at Societe Generale Investment Bank London (formerly Newedge UK) for more than 7 years. He was previously at Goldman Sachs for over 16.5 years, working in Asset Management operations for 11 and more recently in Regulatory Operations for 5.5 years. David has a BSc Honours degree in Geology from Imperial College, London.

Douglas Greenwell is Duco’s Global Head of Sales. He has over 28 years’ sales & marketing experience working for brands such as Reuters, Dow Jones, IBM, American Express & G4S delivering data-driven & systematic growth programmes in a variety of product, marketing & sales roles.

Douglas graduated from the University of Surrey with a BSc in Physics & Computer Science.

Duncan is a regular keynote speaker, experienced entrepreneur and technology pioneer with over 30 years experience in the software industry. His latest venture is BTP, a leading enterprise blockchain company that brings the benefits of smart contracts and blockchain to business by providing a management platform, Sextant, that radically simplifies the deployment and ongoing management of distributed applications.

BTP has a strategic partnership with Digital Asset, creator of the open source smart contract language DAML, and its customers include the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Quantum Materials Corp. BTP is a founding member of the InterWork Alliance (IWA) and an active member of the Global Business Blockchain Council, Hyperledger, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and closer to home ScotlandIS and techUK.

Duncan is the chair of the IWA’s Analytics Framework technical working group and a member of its Sustainability business working group. Duncan holds an MSc in Computation from Oxford University where he was a graduate student at Balliol College.

Duncan Minty has been a Chartered Insurance Practitioner for 18 years, working as an independent ethics consultant. Duncan specialises in the insurance sector and has seen collaboration with insurers, brokers and professional bodies, helping organisations achieve greater certainty on ethical issues.

Gordon Malcolm is Director of Financial Services, EMEA at TigerGraph. Gordon focuses on supporting digital transformation efforts as organisations become increasingly data-driven. He has over 20 years’ experience in the database, business intelligence and analytics space spanning the relational, object-oriented and column-based world. He is now firmly entrenched in the Graph Database and Analytics space and works with companies to uncover otherwise hidden relationships across large volumes and disparate sources of data to drive quantifiable and strategic enterprise value.

Jamil is a Distinguished Engineer at Solace, a provider of Event Broker and Event Mesh Technology, and works with companies in their pursuit of digital transformation using event-driven and multi-cloud architecture. Prior to joining Solace, Jamil held engineering roles within front-office trading, in investment banks such as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Nomura International. Jamil is also an ‘Alibaba Cloud MVP’.

Jason Maude is a coder, coach, and public speaker. He has over a decade of experience working in the financial sector, primarily in creating and delivering software. He is passionate about explaining complex technical concepts to those who are convinced that they won’t be able to understand them. He currently works at Starling Bank as their Chief Technology Advocate and host of the Starling podcast.

Jon Cosson is the Head of IT & CISO, with more than 35 years’ experience in the IT Industry and has held numerous IT positions since starting his career in mainframe computer systems in the 1980s. Jon has extensive experience delivering transformative security solutions and has a passion for IT Security.

Jon holds numerous industry recognised cyber security certifications including CISSP, CISM, C|CISO, CEH, CHFI and MBCI. He returned to academia in 2016 obtaining a Master’s Degree (with Distinction) in Cyber Security and is currently working towards a PhD in a cyber-security related subject.

Kathy was appointed as CMO in March 2020. Kathy brings extensive marketing leadership experience in the global technology sector, including senior marketing roles at privately-held as well as publicly-traded companies.

Prior to joining FD, Kathy was global CMO at Sungard Availability Services. Before Sungard AS, Kathy was Senior Vice President, Product and Marketing for EMEA at Level 3 Communications. At Criteo, she held a global role on the executive leadership team as Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications. Schneider moved from consumer products to the technology sector in 1999 when she joined Dell Inc., now DellEMC. While at Dell, she led various marketing functions at a country, regional and global level. She has spent the last 16 years working and living in London with her family and will be based in FD’s New York office.

Ladina joined Swiss Re in 2016 in the digital and smart analytics team. With her focus in APAC, Ladina bridges data science and the business by raising the awareness and understanding of big data among the business teams and enabling them in applying these smart analytics solutions to grow the business.

Prior to Swiss Re, Ladina worked as a Management Consultant for the medical and financial services industries in Europe and Singapore. She defined new innovative strategies built on strong analytics and using data to value-add and digitally transform the business.

Ladina studied veterinary medicine at the University of Zurich (CH) and holds a doctorate degree in Immunology and Hematology from the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

Mark Akerman is a versatile technology, digital and business executive leader with experience across many product lines and companies particularly in the Financial services sector.

He’s forged a career around harnessing technology for maximum business impact and recently has driven great improvements through the combination of Cloud, DevOps and Scaled Agile working.

He has a genuine passion for the possibilities that are opened up by technology and on making customers lives simpler but with an eye on the ethics of using data and tech responsibly.

He’s taken on big challenges making a step change in capability, performance and operating expenses through systems rehosting, replatforming and outsourcing

Mark has mentored both individuals and start up/scale up companies to help them grow, focus and achieve their goals

Mark is the Chief Technology Officer of Crux Informatics, overseeing Platform Engineering, Data Engineering, Operations, and Information Technology initiatives. Mark started his career at Logica, a UK software house, and later worked at J.P. Morgan, where he built major systems across the firm as well as headed their distributed computing group globally. Joining Goldman Sachs in the mid 2000’s, Mark led their infrastructure group in EMEA prior to leading the Application Systems Infrastructure group that established virtualization within the firm and led to the development of the Goldman private cloud.

Leaving the firm in 2015 to help bring a trading spin-off to market, Mark joined Thomson Reuters through acquisition in 2017. Prior to joining Crux, he was the Global Head of Trading Technology at Refinitiv. Mark lives in New York with his wife Louise, has three children, and loves travel and skiing.

Martin Darling is General Manager, EMEA at TigerGraph. Martin focuses on building and running the regional operation to support organisations as they explore how to drive business value from graph analytics and connected data. He has over 20 years’ experience in the big data and analytics space building and running operations in Asia Pacific, Japan, and EMEA for companies such as MapR, Hitachi Data Systems, and EMC.

Matt Cullen joined Staysure Group as Head of Business Insight in January 2021.

He is an experienced facilitator, splitting his time between chairing and moderating events and being Chief of Staff at the Blockchain & Climate Institute. Previously, as Head of Strategy at the Association of British Insurers, he provided thought leadership on the big challenges and opportunities facing the insurance industry, and led on public policy topics including Open Finance and insurers’ use of data.

Earlier in his career, Matt led the development of the UK flood insurance scheme, Flood Re, building stakeholder support for the model, working on its negotiation, and leading the project team implementing the scheme. Matt began his career in the nuclear industry after reading Geography and Management at Cambridge University.

Matthew Welch is Senior Production Manager at Transform Finance and specialises in financial sector technology. Having joined the events industry in April 2017, Matt has over four years of experience producing events that covered an array of topics ranging from global commodities, renewable energy and future technology.

Michael Connolly is an experienced insurance executive who specialises in strategy and management. Mike has a vast wealth of expertise in litigation, fraud, supplier management, compliance and investigation with the ability to deliver complex projects and solve problems.

Nicola is the Chief Marketing Officer for VibePay, and has 20 years’ experience with UK start-ups. Nicola has a proven track record building start-ups including planning, management, commercial, business development and processes. Nicola is responsible for product launch, P&L and cross channel marketing and delivering against aggressive growth targets.

Peng Cheng is a research analyst and JPMorgan and  leads the Big Data and AI Strategies research effort. He is responsible for developing cross asset investment strategies leveraging alternative data and advanced statistical techniques. Previously, he covered Equity Derivatives Strategies in London. Prior to joining the bank in 2010, he was a Convertible and Volatility strategist at Lehman Brothers/Barclays in New York. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and is a CFA charterholder.

With over 30 years of experience in the financial markets Peter Moylan has implemented and grown successful sales teams across the globe selling solutions to the financial services industry.

Prior to his term at Kx, he held the role of Global Head of Sales at NYSE Technologies; leading the function with an annual revenue of 500m USD. Before this time, Peter was at Reuters and then Thomson Reuters between 1992 and 2010; starting in account management, then Solution sales and sales management including a secondment to TIBCO finance technology. Peter was the regional sales director for Reuters based in Asia for 4 years – focused on their solutions businesses; including Risk Management, Order Routing solutions, Market data and professional services consulting.

He has been a Global Business Director responsible for delivering solutions to both HSBC and Deutsche Bank, and holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Geology.

Philip is the Head of Research & Innovation for AIB. Philip finds it really interesting to see how mathematics can be used to find pragmatic solutions to problems in finance and technology. When it comes to the future he’s an optimist.

Rajan Bansi is President and CEO of RBC InvestEase, which is RBC’s recently launched robo-advisor where he also serves as Lead Portfolio Manager and UDP. Rajan is a CFA charterholder who obtained his MBA from Pepperdine University and an undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Toronto. An active member of the community, Rajan currently serves on the board of the Toronto Public Library Foundation and the organizing committee of the Writers Trust Gala.

Researcher, writer, filmmaker and presenter Rik Ferguson is the Vice President of Security Research at Trend Micro. Rik’s research into the murky world of cybercrime and the cloudy future of technology sees him advise law enforcement, governments and large enterprises alike. A session with Rik will leave you with a lot to rethink.

Ross is Head of Regulatory Developments at NatWest Group, where his responsibilities include assessing the regulatory landscape and identifying any implications for the bank’s strategy and operations. He has been with NatWest Group for 15 years, holding senior roles across Economics, Strategy and Communications. Prior to his current role, Ross was responsible for providing strategic communications advice to the Group CEO.  Ross is also a member of the CBI Financial Services Council and regularly represents the bank with trade associations and other key stakeholders.  

Teuta Mercado leads the Responsible AI program at Capital One which seeks to empower associates to ethically innovate machine learning. Prior to leading the Responsible AI program, Teuta spent almost a decade in Compliance, mostly within the financial services industry, providing guidance and oversight on various regulations, policies, and practices.

Tobias is the CEO & Co-founder of Laka, collective cover for cyclists, a UK- and Netherlands-based venture. Prior to this, he worked in Corporate Finance at KPMG & Barclays, focusing on the insurance and FinTech clients.

Tracey Smith has over 10 years experience working in the insurance sector with a focus on strategy and innovation. Tracey has expertise in the InsurTech and FinTech ecosystem in the UK and globally. She is experienced in leading people, developing products and propositions, developing strategies & business models, consulting and M&A including start-up investments. Tracey is a creative thinker, with cross sector experience, focused on enabling collaboration and decision making to drive the best results.

Valentina is an experienced director with AXA Partners and specialises in programs of change, digital & cultural transformation, finding solutions for business challenges, identifying efficiencies & their implementation. Valentina developed and implemented digital solutions for operations.

Veda is a Data Scientist in ABN AMRO Center of Expertise Data Science team. After finishing her bachelor studies in business management, she pursues a master’s in Data Science in Tilburg University with a passion and fascination for mathematics and statistics. She enjoys combining her studies to find solutions for the real needs of the business, currently focusing of various NLP tasks.

Waheeda Ali is a seasoned financial services executive with extensive experience in major blue chip corporations. She has over 20 years of broad international experience in cultures spanning four continents. Consistently identified opportunities to profitably grow the portfolio in diverse economic and competitive environments. Waheeda developed and implemented economic downturn and portfolio de-risking strategies for recession planning.