AI in Finance Summit 
2023 speakers

Director of Advanced Digital Solutions AI/ML

BNY Mellon

Professor of FinTech

University of Greenwich

Assistant Vice President

Morgan Stanley

Supreet is an AVP at Morgan Stanley. Prior to Morgan Stanley, she was a management consultant at ZS Associates where she automated different workflows and built data driven solutions for fortune 500 clients. She is extremely passionate about technology and AI and hence started her own community called DataBuzz where she engages the audience by sharing the latest AI and Tech trends and also mentors people who want to pivot in this field

Senior Vice President, Head of AI Acceleration

Truist

VP - Squad Lead/ Product Owner AI

Fidelity Investments

Upal is a Product Owner at Fidelity Investments responsible for creating AI driven recommendation solutions that identifies a customer’s financial needs and deliver relevant experiences to help them find products and solutions aligned to these needs. 

In his role as a Product Owner, Upal leads a cross-functional team of data scientists, data engineers and analysts who helps create, deploy and measure the impact of these AI solutions. 

Upal brings over 12 years of experience in solving complex business problems through analytics, technology and data solutions. He is passionate about delivering measurable customer value through scalable AI capabilities. 

Principal AI and Machine Learning Scientist / Research Affiliate

Vanguard / MIT CSAIL

Ramin Hasani is a Principal AI and Machine Learning Scientist at the Vanguard Group and a Research Affiliate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ramin’s research focuses on robust deep learning and decision-making in complex dynamical systems. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Associate at CSAIL MIT, leading research on modeling intelligence and sequential decision-making, with Prof. Daniela Rus. He received his Ph.D. degree with distinction in Computer Science at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria (May 2020). His Ph.D. dissertation and continued research on Liquid Neural Networks got recognized internationally with numerous nominations and awards such as TÜV Austria Dissertation Award nomination in 2020, and HPC Innovation Excellence Award in 2022. He has also been a frequent TEDx Speaker.

Lead Data Analytics Manager | AI/ML Lifecycle Management

TIAA

Lead Data Scientist

Finicity, a Mastercard Company

Natesh is a Lead Data Scientist at Finicity where he creates Machine Learning products leveraging open banking data. Prior to this, he was a core member of the Machine Learning CoE at JPMChase and specialized in lending, fraud and marketing models.

PhD Candidate

Cornell University

Director of Technology - AI/ML

Raymond James

John Chan is a Director of Technology at Raymond James Financial running the Carillon Labs - the innovation labs specialized in AI/ML.  His passion is to promote AI adoptions and implement machine learning solutions in Financial Sector.  He has 20+ years experience leading and implementing technology solutions from FinTech startups to top-tier banks and consulting firms.  Prior to Raymond James, John was an AI strategist and engineering lead at Gamma Lab of OneConnect Financial, Morgan Stanley data science team and KPMG Cognitive Technology Lab.  He is active in NLP research focusing on Generative AI, Conversational AI, Document Understanding and risk and compliance technology.

Director of Global Markets Risk Analytics

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Vice President

Cerberus Capital Management

Ercan Ucak is a Vice President within the Tech Strategy group of Cerberus Technology Solutions ("CTS"). Mr Ucak began his career as a Data Scientist in the Defense / Counter-intelligence and eventually Commercial space, where he leveraged his background in Statistics to develop ML / AI models to enable predictive analytics. He eventually joined CTS in Nov 2019, utilizing his deep technical expertise to deploy Data & Analytics tools to create Enterprise Value.

Co-founder

Snorkel AI

Henry is a co-founder at Snorkel AI. Before Snorkel AI, Henry was the tech lead for Facebook Applied AI’s representation learning team and spent his time in grad school building the Snorkel research library.

Enterprise Account Executive

Snorkel AI

As an early member of Snorkel AI’s go-to-market team, Karl has helped multiple Fortune 500 companies solve intractable problems using data-centric AI. Prior to Snorkel, he helped enterprises transform their businesses with disruptive technology in roles at AWS, MuleSoft, and Salesforce. Karl is based in New York and holds an AB in History from Dartmouth College. Before getting into tech, he lived in the Korean countryside for a year and taught English in a small garlic town named Uiseong. 

Vice President, AI/ML & Statistical Practice

Nationwide

Nan Li is the VP of AI/ML and Statistical Practice at Nationwide in Columbus, Ohio. Nationwide is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the United States.

Nan is a passionate, versatile, and human-centric data and analytics executive with over 20 years of experience in the insurance, financial services, and healthcare industries. A creative and pragmatic business problem solver, innovator, and communicator, Nan is skilled at setting up data & analytics strategy and roadmap, bringing business, analytics, and IT together to achieve business outcomes and operationalizing data & analytics solutions to deliver scalability and ROI.

Director, Product Management (Trusted AI)

RBC

Sr. Director, Technology Data Science & Data Governance

Liberty Mutual Insurance

Head of Applied ML Research

BlackRock

Dr. Mehta is the Head of Applied Machine Learning Research (Investment Management) at Blackrock Inc. and an Editorial Board Member at the Journal of Financial Data Science.

Previously he was a Senior Manager, Investment Strategist (Machine Learning – Asset Allocation) at Investment Strategy Group at The Vanguard Group. Before joining Vanguard, he was a Senior Research Scientist at United Technologies (UTX) Research Center. Prior to that, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics in conjunction with the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He was a Fields Institute Postdoc Fellow for the Thematic Program on Computer Algebra at Fields Institute, Toronto, in the Fall of 2015 and a Visiting Fellow at Simons Institute for Theory of Computing at Berkeley in the Fall of 2014.

Previously, he has held various research positions at the University of Cambridge (the UK), Imperial College London (the UK), the University of Adelaide (Australia), Syracuse University (USA) and the National University of Ireland Maynooth (Ireland).

Dr Mehta’s research areas are machine/deep learning; quantitative finance, computational mathematics, science and engineering. In particular, Dr Mehta works on optimization (convex and nonconvex), computational algebraic geometry, numerical analysis, network science and machine learning to solve various problems arising in financial services and wealth/asset management (and in the past, power systems and control theory; and theoretical and computational physics, jet-engines, HVAC and building systems, chemistry and biology).

VP, Data Science & Professional Services 

DataRobot

Specialty Software Engineering Sr. Manager (Director)

Wells Fargo

Director, Artificial Intelligence

Mastercard

Global Vice President of Business Transformation

Dataiku

Claire leads the Business Transformation practice at Dataiku, which helps customers accelerate their transformation thanks to AI. She is a seasoned leader who spent most of her career in management consulting, advising large organizations on their digital transformation, and at PayPal, where she was leading the peer-to-peer payments product line notably during the mobile revolution. Claire is passionate about how large organizations, but also each individual, embrace change and transform their way of working and making decisions thanks to technology and data. She has travelled the world and what she loves the most about her job is connecting the dots and sharing best practices across multiple geographies and industries.

Director, Strategic Analytics and Data Science

RBC

Olga is a passionate AI/ML leader. She has been recognized as top 25 women in AI in Canada and top 100 women globally advancing AI in 2023 by Re:Work. She has spent the last 15 years in various senior roles in technology, specifically in data science, big data, data engineering, analytics, and data warehousing. She is a Director of Advanced Analytics and Data Science at the Royal Bank of Canada. Olga brings data to life through machine learning, analytics, and visualization. Outside of her work at RBC, she has worked directly with global organizations such as the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, World Resources Institute, and prominent Canadian non-profits such as War Child Canada and Rainbow Railroad on various data science and analytics challenges.

Data Architect and Artificial Intelligence Co-chair

Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Harry Mendell is a computer scientist/inventor. He invented the first digital sampling synthesizer and collaborated with Stevie Wonder among others.

His university thesis was on computer vision and then joined the team at Bell Labs designing the first Unix and microprocessor-based workstation, developing the first memory management co-processor. He then joined the financial sector, creating algorithms for trading options and managing risk. Following that developed algorithms for trading with alternative data including social media that use machine learning and natural language processing. In 2017 Harry joined the Innovation Group at the New York Federal Reserve applying natural language processing and machine learning to bank supervision.

Currently, Harry is investigating the use of Large Language Models to advance the effectiveness of natural language processing and to meet the needs of the Federal Reserve. 

Chief Executive Officer & Founder

Synthesized

Nicolai Baldin is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Synthesized. Synthesized provides high-quality data for machine learning and application development. it solves the problem of replacing expensive sensitive production data from dev environments with right-sized synthetically generated data. Nicolai is responsible for the direction and global strategy of Synthesized. He holds a PhD in Statistics and Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge where he won the prestigious Smith-Knight award and is a Forbes Technology Council member.

Data Scientist

The Hartford

Data Scientist at The Hartford and Teaching Associate for Master's students at Columbia University.

Head of Digital Transformation Office

Societe Generale

Sateesh Kumar Challa is an accomplished leader with 18 years of experience in digital transformation. As the Head of the Digital Transformation Office at Societe Generale, Sateesh is responsible for leading the company's efforts to drive innovation and digital change across the Risk & Compliance organization.
Throughout his career, Sateesh has successfully led cross-functional teams, developed and executed digital transformation strategies, and delivered successful projects that have transformed organizations.

Sateesh has extensive experience in digital transformation, with expertise in emerging technologies, Digital strategy, model development life cycle, software development life cycle, data modeling, governance, and operational efficiency.

Before joining Societe Generale, Sateesh held leadership positions in several organizations where they contributed significantly to their digital transformation initiatives. Sateesh is a well-known thought leader in the industry, focused on practical insights and actionable advice. He has spoken at numerous industry events and conferences on digital transformation, AI/ML, Data, emerging technologies, and innovation topics.

Sateesh volunteers to support various causes on economic empowerment and the environment. He holds an Executive MBA, a Master of Computer Applications degree, and a Project Management Certification.

Senior Data Scientist, Manager - Core Operations

Fitch Ratings

Jayeeta is a Senior Data Scientist with several years of industry experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Statistical Modeling, Product Analytics and implementing ML solutions for specialized use cases. Currently, Jayeeta works at Fitch Ratings, New York, a global leader in financial information services. She is an avid NLP researcher and gets to explore a lot of state-of-the-art open-source models to build impactful products and firmly believes that data, of all forms, is the best storyteller.

Jayeeta also led multiple NLP workshops in association with Women Who Code, and GitNation among others. Jayeeta has also been invited to speak at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022), ODSC East, MLConf EU, WomenTech Global Conference, Data Science Salon, and Data Summit Connect, to name a few. She is also an ambassador for Women in Data Science, at Stanford University, and a Data Science Mentor at Girl Up, United Nations Foundation, and WomenTech Network where she aims to inspire more women to take up STEM.

Jayeeta has been nominated for the WomenTech Global Awards 2020 and has been spotlighted in the List of Top 100 Women Who Break the Bias 2022. She received her MS in Quantitative Methods and Modeling and a BS in Economics and Statistics and is now based in New York City.

VP & Group Product Manager

KeyBank

As Vice President and Group Product Manager over Conversational AI at KeyBank, Robbi is responsible for leading a cross-functional team of product managers, engineers, designers, data scientists and analyst to develop Conversational AI capabilities across the organization.   Robbi and her team are transforming the client experience through the introduction of an omni-channel platform across voice and chat.  She has over 20 years’ experience leading technology initiatives in the financial sector with a proven track record of driving customer value and business growth.   Robbi is passionate about exceeding client expectations by augmenting human interaction with the right technology. 

CEO

Mystic AI

Paul Hetherington is the CEO of Mystic. He is an engineer, software developer and entrepreneur, with a passion for making the transformative power of AI a reality for enterprises of all sizes. Paul is the architect of the Mystic platform (Pipeline.ai), an end-to-end toolset and infrastructure that empowers data scientists to fast-track their machine learning deployments. This automation of ML operations is key to enabling financial institutions to harness the latest advancements in deep learning and AI.