Advisory Board
Kristin Boggiano
Co-Founder and President, CrossTower
Kristin Boggiano, Co-Founder and President of CrossTower, was formerly the Chief Legal Officer of crypto exchange software provider AlphaPoint. Before that, she served as a structured products lawyer at Schulte Roth, where she handled cases related to CDOs, CLOs and credit derivatives. Kristin has also worked as a regulatory lawyer on Dodd-Frank policymaking and rulemaking, as well as cases involving hedge funds and other institutions invested in digital assets. Kristin is the founder of the Digital Asset Regulatory Legal Alliance (DARLA) for general counsels. For more see www.crosstower.com.
Chris Brummer
Co-Founder, Fintech Beat
Chris Brummer is a lecturer, author, and Faculty Director of the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown. He has earned an international reputation as a premier thought leader in financial services and the law, and is a tireless advocate of diversity and inclusion. For over a decade, Chris has offered insights to nonprofits and policymakers on how firms and governments can best understand and react to new developments and challenges in the financial system. He also serves as both a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Subcommittee on Virtual Currencies and the Consultative Working Group for the European Securities and Markets Authority’s Financial Innovation Standing Committee. Chris is the founder of Washington DC’s Fintech Week and host of the Fintech Beat podcast.
Ritesh Jain
(Former) COO, Global Head of Digital Technology Delivery, HSBC
Ritesh is an Entrepreneurial Technology Leader and Board Advisor with two decades of global experience in Digital Technology, Business Transformation, and Operations with Fortune 500 companies such as HSBC, VISA, and Maersk, to name a few. Most recently he was building an enabling function to build the bank of the future at HSBC. Ritesh is a visiting lecturer, regular speaker, author, Diversity and Inclusion Advocate, member of the G20 initiative for financial inclusion, and mentor to the UK Parliament Digital Service and various start-ups. He is also an Advisor to Harvard Business Review (HBR), payment regulators, and government bodies for women empowerment and child rights protection, and is working on initiatives in social and financial inclusion along with Open Banking in the EU and Africa.
Toni Collis
CEO, Collis-Holmes Innovations
Dr. Toni Collis is the CEO of Collis-Holmes Innovations, a strategic innovation leader, trainer, consultant and leadership coach. Toni’s career has focused on facilitating the use of technology, with a particular emphasis on parallel computing and supercomputers, for the advancement of research and innovation in both academia and industry. Early on in her career, Toni realized that knowledge was not the only barrier to the uptake of parallel computing in research, but that culture limits the participation of women and minorities. As Founder of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC), Toni developed and led innovations aiming to diversify the HPC workforce, providing HPC tutorials for women academics and students around the world, training and consultancy on building inclusive workforces, and research into how to improve the representation of women. In early 2019, Toni focused on her passion for broadening diversity and inclusion in the technology industry and now offers strategy, coaching, training and consultancy for women leaders and their allies, with a personal goal of assisting 2,000 women into leadership in tech in the next five years.
Shaunt M. Sarkissian
Chief Innovation Officer, Global Head of Payments, IP, and Corporate Development, TBOL
Shaunt Sarkissian is a highly accomplished payments executive and entrepreneur who is also the Founder and Executive Chairman at RNOX, a tech accelerator in Nevada. Shaunt holds multiple US and International patents in Payments, Authentication, and Commerce. Prior to his current stint at The Bank of London (TBOL), Shaunt was the founder of ID-TX (sold to TBOL) and was EVP, Head of Payments Division at Uphold, Inc. He was also the founder, CEO, and a director on the Board of Directors of Cortex MCP, a provider of a next-generation mobile wallet payment platform, and prior to that was VP of Strategic Business Development at ROAM Data, Inc., an early mover in the mobile POS solutions market. At ROAM, Shaunt led the company’s client acquisition strategy and spearheaded relationships with key clients, including PayPal, Groupon, Google, and others.
Ayesha Kiani
VP of Business Development, LedgerPrime
Don Burr
Consulting Partner – AWS
Tata Consultancy Services
Don Burr is an accomplished, resourceful, dynamic, and hands-on technology executive with 15 years of experience in the management of information technology. Don is adept at clarifying business requirements and then translating them into effective real-world solutions that are tightly aligned with business goals that increase productivity, reduce costs, and strengthen competitive advantage. Don has expertise in strategic planning, enterprise software development, vendor management, negotiation, the selection, purchase, and implementation of new technologies, building and motivating teams, working collaboratively in a cross-functional organization, directing successful IT departments, administering technology budgets, and a consistent track record of delivering high-quality solutions on time and on budget.
Phyllis Lampell
Executive Director, Wall Street Technology Association
Phyllis has successfully managed and grown the Wall Street Technology Association to be one of the premier Educational and Networking Technology Associations for the Financial Services Industry. Her team at PML Consulting is responsible for all aspects of managing the WSTA, including business development, membership recruitment (over 2500 members), administrative, and financial/budgetary functions. The WSTA’s core focus is on creating programs to help connect and educate financial technology and business professionals with technology vendors and service providers through seminars, panels, and networking events addressing specific technology areas including Cybersecurity, Machine learning, AI, RPA, Digital Transformation, Customer Experience, Cloud, and Emerging Technologies.
Harvey Stein
Head of Quantitative Risk Analytics Group, Bloomberg
Harvey J. Stein is the head of the Quantitative Risk Analytics Group, Bloomberg LP. Harvey does research on credit risk modeling, market risk analysis, and portfolio optimization. Their current project is ‘Risk-Neutral Risk Measures.’ Harvey’s experience and expertise include Numerical Analysis, Risk Management, Stochastic Processes, High-Performance Computing, Asset Pricing, Quantitative Finance, Parallel Programming, Numerical Methods, and Stochastic Analysis.
Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Object Management Group
Dr. Richard Soley is Chairman and CEO of Object Management Group (OMG), Executive Director of the Cloud Standards Council, and Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium.
As Chairman and CEO of OMG, Dr. Soley is responsible for the vision and direction of the world’s largest consortium of its type. Dr. Soley joined the nascent OMG as Technical Director in 1989, leading the development of OMG’s world-leading standardization process and the original COBRA specification. In 1996, he led the effort to move into vertical market standards (starting with healthcare, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing) and modeling, leading first to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and later the Model Driven Architecture (MDA).
Previously, Dr. Soley was the cofounder and former Chairman/CEO of A. I. Architects, Inc., maker of the 386 HimmingBoard and other PC and workstation hardware and software. Prior to that, he consulted for various technology companies and venture firms on matters pertaining to software investment opportunities. Dr. Soley has also consulted for IBM, Motorola, PictureTel, Texas Instruments, Gold Hill Computer, and others.
Dr. Soley also serves on numerous industrial, technical, and academic conference program committees, and speaks all over the world on issues relevant to standards, the adoption of new technology and creating successful companies. He is an active angel investor and was involved in the creation of both the Eclipse Foundation and Open Health Tools.
Lori Wasserman
Managing Director, Tellson Securities Inc
Lori Wasserman joined Tellson Securities in 2017, as Executive Vice President of Institutional Sales. Prior to joining Tellson, Ms. Wasserman served as Chief Operating Officer and a Partner of TC Partners, a long/short equity hedge fund.
Prior to joining TC Partners, Ms. Wasserman was a Financial Services Industry Consultant and Executive Director at Nomura Securities in the Institutional Equity Research Sales Department. She joined Nomura in 2010 from JPMorgan where she had also been an Executive Director in Equity Research Sales. From 2003 to 2008, Ms. Wasserman was a Managing Director at Bear Stearns responsible for Equity Research Sales coverage of the Mid-Atlantic and large New York based accounts. She joined Bear Stearns from Lehman Brothers where she had been a research salesperson from 1998 through 2003. Ms. Wasserman began her career at Lehman Brothers in Investment Banking. Ms. Wasserman has a BA in Classics and Religious Studies from Brown University and an MBA from Columbia University.
Dino Vitale
Director of Cloud Big Data Engineering, TD Securities
HPC professional with expertise in building shared services environments for multiple application architecture models (Grid computing, private Cloud – PAAS, SOA, high speed messaging, Hadoop/data warehouse) and operational support models. Managing an engineering team focusing on HPC/BI/Big data products on public cloud platforms.
Experienced with line-of-business Application Development teams leveraging micro-services, streaming architectures, creating next generation self-service Data Platforms for Data Scientists/Analysts for machine learning. Leading efforts on public multi-cloud for Data Archiving and HPC bursting.
Specialties include: parallel computing, building large scale grids, GPUs/CUDA, MPI, OpenMP, Processor architectures, Linux optimization, scale out storage, workload schedulers, server scavenging, infrastructure performance tuning, sizing of Hadoop environment, data caching over grid, operational automation for large-scale clusters (provisioning, elasticity, utility billing, monitoring…)
Sagar Gaikwad
Senior Manager – Cloud, Big Data & Data Science Strategy, Capital One
A passionate leader with a track record of building high performing engineering teams. Sagar demonstrates daily that hard work can be fun. Believes talent can win you games, but a cohesive team can win you championships
At Capital One, Sagar has led teams to build real-time cybersecurity platform processing petabytes of data, several big data initiatives, built infrastructure as a service to modernize data science for the cloud, AI-based recruitment sourcing tool.
Sagar is now scaling the cloud engineering team to handle the rapid adoption & growth of the data science infra-as-service platform. Before Capital One, Sagar spent 7 years building data engineering products at Micron Technology
Sagar earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mumbai and earned his Masters from George Mason University where he studied Information Systems and Software Engineering.
Occasional speaker at technology and leadership conferences. Startup advisor. Creating chaos with computers & growing leaders for the last 2 decades.
Ankit Manoj Vasa
Data Specialist, Privacy Lead GDPR – Cyber Threat Management, Nasdaq
Ankit Manoj Vasa leads global initiatives to improve processes and infrastructure by aligning to the research and mission of his organization by collaborating with multiple teams and management to improve performance and scalability for existing applications by leveraging new technologies. Ankit Vasa’s interest in technology along with a penchant for management skills have enabled him to visualize complex real-world problems into smaller modules and thus develop and expand his analytical skills. Ankit Vasa’s hybrid background of technology and management have centered his belief in the power of technology to drive transformation in business.
Tassos Sarbanes
College Professor, Mathematics, and Data Science/Analytics/
Engineering at Major Investment Bank
Tassos Sarbanes is a mathematician turned computer scientist and an experienced IT professional with a wealth of capabilities and knowledge acquired specifically in information systems, data management, data (big, fast, and small) analysis and data science in international roles.
Tassos is driven by his ambition to become an established data scientist through gaining new experience in the data analytics field and improving his skills in areas such as handling big data and new technologies. Tassos has a real love for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and effectively combines his technical expertise with commercial acumen. He particularly enjoys researching, exploring, and understanding specific areas of the financial industry, often preparing presentations, papers, and books of certain areas such as algorithmic development for mathematical and statistical problems and optimization in numerical computing.
Tassos enjoys a collaborative approach to tasks, working alongside like-minded individuals from diverse backgrounds to align on a common goal or theme through healthy debate.
Jason Mills
(Former) Executive Director, JPMC
I am a focused and creative business leader with 20 years of experience delivering innovative technology solutions within Fortune 100 companies.
“At the heart of what I deliver is a passion to transform the end users digital experience.”
I am an experienced technology executive whose business acumen, leadership and interpersonal skills have successfully executed technology strategies in Fortune 100 companies. My role is to create and deliver technology strategies designed to achieve the corporations’ business vision and goals. I do this by specializing in leading change within Technology teams. This is usually by me transforming technology divisions into profitable business units or developing new business strategies that will create continued measurable results delivered within tight timeframes.
I am interested in applying my executive management experiences and technology skills to entrepreneurial environments. I offer value to start-up companies because of my previous executive leadership positions in Mobile Tech, Big Data, Business Analytics as well as Business Strategy and Innovation. I have developed a significant skill set which includes leadership, communication, and strategic vision as well as an intimate knowledge of financial processes, operating results and profitability management. Together these promote organizational stability and ensure that any company I am involved with has an excellent chance of achieving growth.
Scott Kaplan
Chairman and CEO, JNK Securities
Scott Kaplan is the Chairman and CEO of JNK Securities Corporation, an NYC based broker-dealer established in 1993 which offers Equity Research Coverage across 10 sectors, Corporate Access and Industry Events, Government Policy Tracking and Agency-only trading with direct market access to their institutional money manager clients.
Darshak Gosalia
Technology Management
Mr. Darshak Gosalia is a graduate from PACE University with a degree in Information Systems. He is certified from the PMI Institute and has over 2 decades of experience in the Information Technology field. Over the course of his career, he has consulted several Fortune 500 companies.
His expertise in managing onshore and offshore resources and leading the implementation of strategic deployment and quality assurance of business financial applications has contributed in improving and streamlining the business process, achieved key business goals, and increased corporate bottom-line profitability.
Steve Yatko
Chairman and CEO, Oktay Technology
Steve Yatko has over 20+ years of experience in advanced enterprise IT systems and technology as a result of leading his own boutique consulting firm, Oktay Technology, as well as his software development firm, Renascence Development, and Credit Suisse. Over the past eight years, he’s lead Oktay Technology into multi-year strategic technology advisory partnerships with some of the most innovative and successful firms on Wall Street, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Liquidnet and Bridgewater Associates. Over the past year, he’s also lead Renascence Development into strategic partnerships with the development of modern informatics, AI and Machine Learning systems for firms on Wall Street and Health Care, including Legg Mason and Care Finders Total Care. Steve is an industry advisor to Starr Investment Holdings (SIH), and also a co-founder of DynamicOps, a Credit Suisse spinout acquired by VMware.
Previously, Steve was a Managing Director and Global Head of the IT Research & Development at Credit Suisse including over fourteen years of driving innovative technology into solutions that differentiated Credit Suisse’s Trading and Analytics technology platform. In this role, Steve was responsible for setting the direction of the Firm’s next-generation computing environment across all of its IT divisions. During his tenure at Credit Suisse, Steve also served as Head of Global Core Technologies and CTO of Mission Critical Systems, including the Firm’s World Class Global Equity Trading and Analytic system. Throughout his career, Steve has worked closely with serial Entrepreneurs, top Venture Capital firms around the world, and some of the world’s largest technology providers including being a selected member of several CTO Advisory boards such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, EMC, HP, IBM Research, Veritas, and Cisco.
Ryan Quick
Principal, Providentia Worldwide
Ryan Quick received degrees in English and Philosophy from Vanderbilt University and went on to study American Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. His Lifelong hobby of working with computers provided a means to support himself through college and he has been a part of the Internet and Linux communities since the early 1990s. He has focused on distributed systems for the last 25 years, with special attention placed on the interaction between applications, operating systems, and the hardware and networks underlying them. He started his professional career consulting for high-throughput transactional platforms, security, and systems integration for health care, banking, and large campus computing environments.
Ryan holds patents for messaging middleware systems and is a pioneer in bridging High-Performance Computing technologies with enterprise best-practice infrastructure. His most recent work in leveraging HPC concepts for real-time analytics with his colleague Arno Kolster have garnered provisional patents, IDC HPC Innovation awards (SC12, SC14) and HPCWire Reader’s Choice awards.
Ryan is an expert at scale-out systems, UNIX kernel design, and profiling, and has been recognized for innovation in hardware and application design, as well as in messaging ontology and distributed event-driven systems. His current efforts bring machine learning, real-time streaming, set-selection, and digital signal processing technologies to bear on predictive analytics to provide self-healing for command and control systems. Always a systems integrator at heart, he is always looking for “cross-discipline” solutions to bring novel technical solutions to some of the toughest problems in the world today.
Arno Kolster
Principal & Co-Founder, Providentia Worldwide
Arno was born in The Netherlands and grew up in Canada where he received a degree in Computer Science from the University of Calgary after a stint as a professional musician. His main career focus over the past 30 years has been database architecture, database administration, and operations architecture for a number of different industries including oil and gas, emergency services, finance, and e-commerce.
His extensive knowledge of relational databases has expanded to include the prolific influx of new database technologies such as NoSQL and graph databases. An interest in HPC and technical computing came about as a result of finding solutions to solving real-time data analytics across distributed systems at web scale. Arno and his colleague, Ryan Quick, received an IDC Innovation Excellence Award at both Supercomputing 2012 and 2014 and he’s been invited to speak both domestically and internationally on HPC and its role in the enterprise. He also received the Alan El Faye HPC Inspiration award in 2016. He’s a member of the prestigious Royal Philatelic Society of London and the American Philatelic Society.