Moderator: Nikhil Aggarwal, Promontory Financial Group
Nikhil Aggarwal is managing director of Promontory Financial Group, an IBM Company. He draws on 20 years of analytics experience to advise clients on anti-money-laundering and financial-crime compliance. He has extensive experience in program design and review, with a focus on applying machine learning and analytics to risk assessments, models for rating client risks, transaction-monitoring system optimization, suspicious-activity reporting, metrics and reporting, and model validation. His client engagements focus primarily on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of transaction-monitoring systems by deploying machine-learning models, undertaking rule design and threshold tuning/calibration, and deploying case/alert risk-scoring models. Nikhil joined Promontory from Standard Chartered, where he headed the analytics function for financial-crime compliance. His roles included leading a global team of data analysts and data scientists to set and maintain the operating parameters of the bank’s monitoring, screening, and filtering systems.

Conchi Aisa, The World Bank
Concepcion Aisa is a seasoned international executive in the financial sector and banking industry with over 15 years of professional experience. At the World Bank (WB) Treasury, she focuses on designing customized financial solutions and risk management strategies for client countries and emerging markets. In this role, she leads the WB Treasury banking services practice for clients in Latin America and the Middle East. She is also responsible in her team for the Climate Change and Environment financing agendas, and provides advisory and capacity building services. In 2017, she was a recipient of the WB Group Presidential Award on Innovation as part of the core team that developed innovative financing solutions for refugees and their host communities.

Concepcion spent the first year at the World Bank as a Climate Finance Specialist in the Environment Department. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2009, she worked in BBVA’s securitization and core capital management team at BBVA’s headquarters. She has also held various positions with leading private and public institutions in Brussels, Mexico and Madrid, focusing on a range of financial and economic issues.

Concepcion holds an MA in International Political Economy from the University of Warwick (UK) and a MSc in Business, Finance and Economics from the University of Zaragoza (Spain).

Kim Lacey, Key Bank
Kim Lacey is currently the Chief AML Officer for Key Bank, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is responsible for oversight of the bank’s BSA/AML and OFAC compliance programs. Prior to joining Key, Kim served as the Managing Director, Global Head of AML Infrastructure and Strategy for Citibank, where she had responsibility for global AML policies, issues escalation, SAR reporting, communications, regulatory tracking, training, and acted as the Chief Administrative Officer for the Global AML Compliance Program. Prior to her time at Citi, Kim served as the AML Strategies and Planning Manager for two years, and the head of AML for eight years, at SunTrust Bank in Atlanta, Georgia. Before moving into AML, Kim practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer for twelve years in private practice and at SunTrust Bank. Kim graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and received her Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Tulane University School of Law, where she served as an Associate Editor on The Tulane Law Review and was a member of the Order of the Coif. She is a member of the Georgia and Florida Bars.

Meera Das, BMO
Meera Das has over nineteen years of experience in building analytics solutions in financial services, risk, financial crime, and the related data and technology. She has a history of successfully applying data analytics to meet regulatory compliance and monitoring requirements, for anti-money laundering, antiterrorist financing, and bank secrecy act obligations. She also has significant experience in developing and executing strategies related to model development frameworks and in building high performing modeling and analytical teams. Across a number of roles, Ms. Das has experience assisting clients to use technology to meet compliance objectives related to AML/ BSA, OFAC and other sanctions requirements, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), SEC and FINRA regulations, consumer finance regulations, FATCA, and other regulations. This wide range of experience allows Ms. Das to advise and provide sound feedback across platforms and technologies used to operationalize Machine Learning and AI models. She is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) and a graduate of the University of Toronto and London respectively.

Michael P. O'Malley, PNC Bank
Michael P. O'Malley has more than 25 years’ experience in in modeling and analytics as an employee at or consultant to numerous top financial institutions. Dr. O’Malley currently oversees AML/BSA/ KYC customer risk rating methodologies at PNC, where he previously oversaw the bank’s model validation function, including all models used throughout the bank. He joined PNC in 2011 and immediately put particular focus on building validation capabilities for financial crimes models, in particular AML/BSA transaction monitoring as well as fraud, sanctions screening, and cyber tools. Dr. O’Malley received the CAMS certification and has spoken at numerous industry meetings regarding model risk associated with AML transaction monitoring tools.

Dr. O’Malley began his career in Washington at the Federal Reserve Board and later held leadership positions at GE, Deloitte, and RBS before PNC. Michael earned a PhD in Economics from MIT and a BA in both Economics and German from Williams College.

Manju Seal, Independent Advisor
Manju Seal is the former Head of Sustainable Finance and Capital Markets ESG Lead, Bank of Montreal. She was the Project Lead for launching BMO’s Sustainable Bond Program and its first sustainability bond issuance (2019). She launched and led the BMO CM’s Sustainable Finance Advisory with corporate and institutional clients, incorporating ESG criteria in investments and financing. She advised clients in identifying impactful solutions around sustainable bond underwriting, policy/taxonomy, product development and other sustainable financing activities. She spearheaded the broader enterprise-wide strategy and thought-leadership around sustainable finance. She was the original co-host of the award-winning BMO Sustainability Leaders Podcast Series. She co-authored BMO’s Sustainable Financing Framework for repeat issuances (Canada’s first) and was a key contributor towards BMO’s public sustainable finance commitment (2019) of CAD $400 Billion. Her unique combination of buy-side and sell-side experience along with demonstrated leadership in ESG/sustainability provides a distinctive and valuable perspective.

Manju has 20+ years of professional experience ranging from asset management, investment banking, debt capital markets and board leadership. Since 2003, she has provided transformative leadership and corporate governance for nonprofits focused on sustainable development, gender equality and poverty alleviation. Her banking career started at Goldman Sachs where she specialized in structured finance and risk management. She has master’s degrees in business administration, mathematics, and ethnomusicology.

Moderator: Nitin Guar, IBM Research
Nitin Gaur currently leads IBM Financial Sciences research practice, as a part of IBM Research. In this role, Nitin leads a team that aspires to play a pivotal role in reshaping the future of the financial services industry with faculty, advanced technology, and superior design in the field of financial sciences and financial technology. Transforming the financial services industry with technology into a new era with Blockchain, AI, and ML, qualitative. and quantitative modeling.

In previous role, Nitin Gaur, served as Founder and Director of IBM Digital Asset Labs - serving to devise industry standards, use cases, and working towards making blockchain for the enterprise a reality. In parallel Nitin also served as CTO of IBM World Wire - a cross border payment solution utilizing digital assets. Nitin also Founded IBM Blockchain Labs and led the effort in establishing blockchain practice for the enterprise.Prior to this role he was working in capacity of CTO, IBM Mobile Payments and Enterprise Mobile Solutions. Nitin holds MS in Management Information systems and MBA in Finance from University of Maryland. Nitin is also appointed as an IBM Distinguished Engineer and is an IBM Master Inventor with a rich patent portfolio.

Agostino Capponi, Columbia University
Agostino Capponi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University, where he is also a member of the Data Science Institute. He also serves as a consultant at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Agostino's current research interests are in blockchain technologies, cryptocurrencies, market microstructure, systemic risk, and economic networks. Agostino’s research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, U.S. Department of Energy, IBM, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Global Risk Institute, and many other private agencies. Agostino's research has been recognized with the 2018 NSF CAREER award, the JP Morgan AI Research Faculty award, and with a prize from the MIT Center for Finance and the Harvard Crowd Innovation Laboratory.

Agostino is an Editor of Management Science in the Finance Department. He is also a co-editor of Mathematics and Financial Economics, and the financial engineering area editor of Operations Research Letters and of the Institute of Industrial Engineering Transactions. Agostino currently serves as an associate editor of Operations Research, Finance and Stochastics, SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics, Stochastic Systems, and many other journals.

Chaochao Chen, Ant Group
Chaochao Chen received his PhD degree from Zhejiang University, China, in 2016, and he was a visiting scholar in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, during 2014-2015. He is currently a Staff Algorithm Engineer at Ant Group. His research mainly focuses on recommender system, privacy preserving machine learning, graph representation, and distributed machine learning. He has published more than 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, including KDD, NuerIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, TKDD. He serves as a review editor of Frontiers in Big Data, and (senior) program committee members of top-tier international conferences such as IJCAI, AAAI, ACMMM, and WWW.

Paul Griffin, SMU
Currently, Paul is a member of the faculty of Singapore Management University (SMU) teaching postgraduate and undergraduate students in IT and FinTech as an Associate Professor of Information Systems. He gained a PhD at Imperial College London in 1997 on Quantum Well Solar Cells and Thermophotovoltaics and is now researching disruptive technologies applications and impact specializing in blockchain and quantum computing. Paul has been advising companies on smart contracts since 2014 and is teaching courses on blockchain, smart contracts and quantum computing as well as presenting at events, judging hackathons, and moderating panel discussions on FinTech. His research covers decentralised solutions and the application of quantum computing in finance with a number of projects on-going for blockchain consensus, trade finance and portfolio optimisation. Prior to SMU he led application development on global, regional, and local projects for over 15 years in the UK and Asia in the financial industry. During this time, as well as leading IT development teams, he worked on outsourcing and IT support. Prior to that he worked on scanning tunnelling microscopes in university and industry for 8 years.

Oshani Seneviratne, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Oshani Seneviratne is the Director of Health Data Research at the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oshani's current research interests span knowledge representation, provenance, and decentralized systems. Oshani obtained her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2009 and 2014, respectively, under the supervision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At MIT, Oshani conducted research on Accountable Systems for the Web at the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). Oshani is the founding chair of the AIChain workshop series started in 2019 and continued again in 2020 and 2021. Oshani is a guest editor of the Semantic Technologies for Data and Algorithmic Governance issue at the Semantic Web Journal, and she actively reviews for the Journal of Web Semantics, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, and many conferences, including ISWC, Web Conference, IEEE Blockchain, and IEEE DAPPS.

Paul Griffin, SMU
Currently, Paul is a member of the faculty of Singapore Management University (SMU) teaching postgraduate and undergraduate students in IT and FinTech as an Associate Professor of Information Systems. He gained a PhD at Imperial College London in 1997 on Quantum Well Solar Cells and Thermophotovoltaics and is now researching disruptive technologies applications and impact specializing in blockchain and quantum computing. Paul has been advising companies on smart contracts since 2014 and is teaching courses on blockchain, smart contracts and quantum computing as well as presenting at events, judging hackathons, and moderating panel discussions on FinTech. His research covers decentralised solutions and the application of quantum computing in finance with a number of projects on-going for blockchain consensus, trade finance and portfolio optimisation. Prior to SMU he led application development on global, regional, and local projects for over 15 years in the UK and Asia in the financial industry. During this time, as well as leading IT development teams, he worked on outsourcing and IT support. Prior to that he worked on scanning tunnelling microscopes in university and industry for 8 years.