Plenary Panel: Future of Financial Services

Title:	Future of Financial Services
Date/Time:	Wednesday July 10, 11:30 - 12:45 Location: Aula Magna Ballroom, Universita' degli Studi di Milano
Summary:	The financial services (FSS) industry (including banking, insurance and financial markets) is facing mounting pressure to reduce costs, improve customer experience, compete with emerging players and comply with new regulations. At the same time, the industry is seeking and investing in innovations with the potential to transform financial services using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, quantum computing, Internet-of-Things (IoT), cybersecurity, and cloud. These advances are surfacing new capabilities in risk modeling, fraud detection, regulatory compliance, distributed and decentralized trust models, digital customer journeys and data privacy. Financial institutions will be required to embrace these advanced technologies now in order to set a viable course for future growth. This panel will focus on exchange of minds with several academia and industry FSS experts to better understand existing challenges in the industry and potential R&D advances that can bring transformative changes to the financial industry in coming years.
Moderator:	Kumar Bhaskaran, Program Director and Head of Financial Services Research, IBM Research Dr. Kumar Bhaskaran is a research scientist in industry solutions, systems and technologies and is currently the global leader for Finance Industry in IBM Research. His current areas of focus are in applying AI, Blockchain, IoT and Quantum Computing to the Financial Services Industry. He has 30+ years of experience in leading R&D teams world-wide. More recently he was the Lab Director in Singapore and the Chief Strategist for IBM Research in the Growth Markets. He has a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. More details on Kumar can be seen here https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbhaskaran
Panelist:	Natalie Gil, MIT Sloan Fellow in Innovation & Global Leadership Natalie Gil is a global innovation and technology growth-minded strategic leader skilled at leveraging global experience to lead high-impact initiatives within large organizations. She serves as the CTO of The Blockchain Challenge and a Partner for rational7 leading some of its 7 cutting edge practices. She led initiatives to strengthen the Blockchain ecosystem starting with her engagement with the MIT Media Lab’s DCI and the Interamerican Development Bank to implement strong blockchain use cases for Latin America. Formerly at Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, she led global transformational initiatives, based on both technology and culture, encourage diversity of thought to exploit innovative ideas. Former Head of IT Standards, Director of Service Support, and other roles covering the technology lifecycle at financial institutions. Member of the Leadership of Latinas in Computing, Lifetime Member of the Society of Hispanic Engineers, New York Chapter, Sloan Fellow from MIT, and startup advisor. Degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and several management, industry, and technology certifications.
Panelist:	Rong N. Chang, General Co-chair, IEEE 2019 Symposia; Research Scientist, IBM Research; IBM Academy of Technology Dr. Rong N. Chang is Member of IBM Academy of Technology at the IBM Research in New York. He is leading an in-market R&D effort in creating a hybrid multicloud based open financial API services platform. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science & engineering from the University of Michigan in USA in 1990. Before joining IBM in 1993, he was with Bellcore researching on B-ISDN based personal ubiquitous application services. He has won one IEEE Best Paper Award, received six IBM corporate-level Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, held 30+ patents, and published 50+ refereed technical papers in the areas of in the areas of enterprise services computing. He is Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing and Distinguished Member of ACM. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing and has served as a guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and CIC/IEEE China Communications. He is Steering Committee Member of IEEE World Congress on Services (SERVICES), IEEE Cloud Computing for Emerging Markets, ACM/IEEE Symposium of Edge Computing, and CCF International Conference on Service Science. He is General Chair of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Computing and Co-Chair of 2019 IEEE SERVICES Symposia. He has an ITIL Foundation certificate in IT Services Management and a Micro MBA certificate.
Panelist:	Rong (Emily) Liu, Associate Professor, School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology Dr. Rong Liu is an Associate Professor of Information Systems in the school of business at Stevens Institute of Technology. Before joining Stevens, she was a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center focusing on core banking innovation and business analytics. Her research interests include Blockchain, FinTech, text mining and machine learning. In particular, she is interested in extracting signals from financial textual information to detect corporate behaviors such as stock movement, insider trading, frauds, and bankruptcy etc. She received her Ph. D. in Business Administration from The Pennsylvania State University in 2006.
Panelist:	Ricardo Collado Soto, Assistant Professor, School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology Dr. Ricardo A. Collado is Assistant Professor at Stevens School of Business and graduated from the Rutgers Center of Operations Research (RUTCOR) at Rutgers University, NJ. He has previously served as a Professional Specialist at Princeton Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis (PENSA) from the Department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering (ORFE) at Princeton University, NJ. Dr. Collado also held a position as Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at Stern School of Business, Department of Information, Operations & Management Sciences at New York University, NY. His research focuses on the science of decision-making in the presence of risk and utilizes dynamic stochastic optimization as its primary tool. This line of research impacts areas such as finance, management science, competitive energy markets, auction theory, and homeland security. Dr. Collado's applied research program focuses on developing methods to solve difficult problems in dynamic pricing & demand response and optimizing the design and control of energy portfolios. These methods include the development stochastic approximation algorithms and risk-averse quantum algorithms using current quantum hardware.
Panelist:	Michael Goul, General Chair IEEE Services 2019 Symposia; Associate Dean for Faculty & Research, WP Carey School of Business, Arizona State University Michael Goul is Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and a Professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Michael oversees faculty and department affairs and leads initiatives to advance faculty excellence. In addition, he oversees the School’s portfolio of research centers, coordinates the School’s Ph.D. Program, and he represents the School on University research initiatives such as those associated with advanced analytics. While Associate Dean, standings in the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development rankings improved from #43 to #12 in Economics and #31 to #18 in Business & Management. From 2013 - present, the School’s published research ranks #23 in North America and #25 Worldwide in a prominent top 100 business school research ranking. Michael’s most recent research efforts are in the areas of big data/data science, services computing and analytics in the Internet of Things. He recently guest edited dual special issues of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing and Informs Service Science on aligning business and technical services research. Michael is a member of the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council Research Advisory Board. In summer 2016, Goul was recognized with the Outstanding Leadership Award by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing. He has published over one hundred articles, authored cases and he conducted analytics research at companies including adidas, American Express, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, eBay, Intel, the U.S. Army and Teradata.
Panelist:	Jorge Sanz, IEEE Fellow; Research Scientist, IBM Research; Professor, Luxembourg Institute of Science & Technology Professor Dr. Jorge Sanz has over 30 years of applied and industrial research as well as extensive experience working with global corporations in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has specialized in Financial Services and Advanced Manufacturing, working in the past also with Telecommunications companies and Government enterprises.Jorge has worked at different times in IBM, for over 20 years at the IBM Research Division in Silicon Valley, California, and also as Director on different international assignments in Latin America and Singapore. He has been Global Chief Innovation Officer in Banking for IBM Research, rounding 18 years of innovation efforts in the finance industry. In academic terms, Jorge has held different professorial positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, leading to a Full Professor appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in 1993. He was President of the University of Saint Andrews in Argentina, in 2000. Jorge was the Founding Director of the Business Analytics Centre at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2013, leading an analytics program that became top-branded in Asia-Pacific and among the most successful ones worldwide. Jorge founded in 2017 the first Applied Research Centre in Luxembourg on Finance Innovation and Regulatory Systems and Technology, leading it as Scientific Director and hosted by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology.
Panelist:	Christophe Spoerry, Entrepreneur in residence, AREA42 Christophe Spoerry is an entrepreneur in residence at AREA42, the trade innovation ecosystem. He is also the founder and CEO of Alpine Style, a venture builder specialized in trade finance and credit insurance, and an advisor to startups reinventing B2B financial services. With a dual background in payments and trade credit insurance, his innovation interests are in the field of marketplace and platform business models, trade social graphs and new trade-related risk data markets, as well as decentralized autonomous applications. Christophe holds an MSc in computer and data science from Telecom Paristech.