Hosts & Speakers

Professor George Calhoun bridges technology entrepreneurship and academic finance at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he directs the Quantitative Finance program, the Hanlon Financial Systems Research Center, and serves as Managing Director of CRAFT—the National Science Foundation-backed Center for Research Toward Advancing Financial Technologies. His work focuses on the intersection of technology and markets, preparing the next generation of asset management talent and fintech leaders.

Before joining academia, Professor Calhoun spent 25 years as a technology entrepreneur and executive, co-founding InterDigital Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: IDCC) and serving as Chairman and CEO of Illinois Superconductor Corporation. He has extensive experience in capital markets, leading public offerings, private financings, M&A transactions, and due diligence assessments for major private equity and hedge fund firms.

Professor Calhoun is author of Price & Value: A Guide to Equity Market Valuation Metrics (Springer/Apress) and a Forbes contributor covering markets, technology, and financial innovation.

Paul Das is Founder and CEO of ProFundCom, the leading digital marketing platform for asset managers and hedge funds. Since founding the company in 2003, Paul has built an integrated platform that unifies email, data, web, and social media activity in one integrated system. The result: digital engagement analytics that drive sales and marketing effectiveness for fundraising and measurable AUM.

Paul remains hands-on in leading product development and client teams while setting company strategy with the executive board. Over two decades, ProFundCom has become the industry standard for how fund managers leverage digital marketing to attract and retain investors.

Previously, Paul founded eMiddleware, which was acquired by Oracle, and serves as founder and board member of Clearview Financial Media. His software expertise was honed at AT&T, Microsoft, and Apple in both the UK and USA.

Paul holds a first-class degree in Electronic Systems Engineering from Kingston University, where he won the Cadence Design Prize for his final year project.

Art Silva leads digital engagement across Fidelity Institutional, one of the largest investment platforms in the world. As Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Engagement & Martech Solutions, he oversees the foundational strategies for client acquisition, engagement, and retention across Fidelity's institutional and wealth management channels.

Art joined Fidelity in 2019 as Vice President of Campaign and Content Marketing for Fidelity Institutional before being promoted to his current role. Prior to Fidelity, Art led marketing for a major business unit at Honeywell, reflecting his cross-industry perspective on digital transformation.

Mr. Silva earned his B.S. in industrial technology management with a minor in communications from Rhode Island College. He also holds executive leadership certifications from the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and from Wharton through SIFMA’s Financial Industry Executive Leadership Program. Mr. Silva also holds FINRA Series 7 and 24 licenses.

Ben Hunt is co-founder of Perscient, an AI research firm that pioneered the use of language models and unstructured data analysis for investment strategies. He founded Epsilon Theory in 2013, a newsletter and website read by more than 100,000 professional investors and allocators for its application of narrative and game theory to market dynamics.

Ben has managed a billion-dollar hedge fund and served as chief strategist and chief risk officer for a $13 billion asset manager. He has researched narrative and unstructured data for more than 30 years, beginning with his doctoral work at Harvard University. Before entering finance, he was a tenured professor of political science and has co-founded three technology companies built on his research.

Jessica Fernandez leads global marketing for Direxion, one of the largest providers of leveraged and inverse ETFs with approximately $50 billion in assets under management. Appointed Global CMO in 2025, she is focused on extending the firm’s presence across products, channels, and international markets, while strengthening Direxion’s leadership in investor education on complex vehicles.

Jessica brings more than 20 years of asset management marketing experience. Before joining Direxion, she served as CMO of Calamos, head of North American retail and institutional marketing at Invesco, and held senior marketing and sales roles at Oppenheimer Funds, CION, and AllianceBernstein. She began her career at Morgan Stanley.

Jessica holds a B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from Monmouth University and maintains FINRA Series 7, 63, and 24 licenses.

Jessica is from a proud Stevens alumni family.

Gui Costin founded Dakota Funds as a fundraising firm for boutique asset managers. Then, he built a parallel intelligence platform for the investment industry. On the fundraising side, Dakota has helped asset managers raise more than $40 billion. On the data side, Dakota Marketplace has become a leading source for up-to-the-minute info on allocators, used by thousands of investment firms.

Gui is the author of three books: Millennials Are Not Aliens, a guide to engaging the next generation of investors; The Dakota Way, which reveals the process and discipline needed to become a world class fundraiser; and his most recent book, Be Kind, which argues that a hard-charging culture and kindness aren't in conflict.

His work has been featured in Forbes, Citywire, Morningstar, and Investment News.

Dave Carey co-founded ROI Training in 2003 with a fundamental insight: enterprises investing in technology only realize their return when their people actually know how to use it.

Over twenty years later, that insight has made ROI Training one of the most decorated cloud and AI training organizations in the world: a ten-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year and nine-time Training Industry Top 20 Company, serving more than 1,000 enterprise clients globally.

Today ROI Training delivers AI training across Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Databricks: from generative AI fundamentals for executives to advanced agentic AI development for engineers. The firm's AI Clarity platform brings that same curriculum to organizations navigating enterprise-wide AI adoption.

Dave has delivered training programs across more than 20 countries and values time spent with people who are both talented and humble. He earned his B.A. from the University of Mary Washington.

Lak Lakshmanan is co-founder and CTO of Obin AI, which builds deep domain AI agents to solve complex workflow problems in financial services. Obin AI is backed by Motive Partners, a preeminent fintech investor.

Before Obin, Lak spent a decade at Google Cloud as Director of Data Analytics and AI Solutions. There, he co-founded the Advanced Solutions Lab and built the training infrastructure that brought machine learning to enterprises worldwide.

Lak also advised portfolio company CTOs on AI strategy at Silver Lake Partners, a global technology private equity firm, and was previously a Director of Data Science at the Climate Corporation and a Research Scientist at NOAA.

Lak is the author or co-author of six O'Reilly books, including: Machine Learning Design Patterns, Google BigQuery: The Definitive Guide, and Generative AI Design Patterns. He also created several of Google's foundational machine learning courses on Coursera.

He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the society's highest honor, awarded for his data science contributions to predicting severe weather. Lak's intellectual focus is identifying patterns in complexity, then building systems to navigate that complexity. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering.

Moshe Lieberman is co-founder and Chief AI Officer of Steward, the AI-powered AML software platform for investment firms. Steward automates investor onboarding and ongoing AML/KYC monitoring for private markets funds, banks, and asset managers. The platform is trusted with over $100 billion in investor assets and delivers same-day onboarding in the majority of cases.

Before Steward, Moshe was on the founding team at Lemonade, helping build the AI-driven insurance platform from the ground up through its IPO on the NYSE. Before that, he was a founding engineer at Fiverr, the global freelance marketplace that also went public. Two startups, two IPOs, and now he's building his next company backed by Motive Partners.

Russ D'Argento is the founder and CEO of FINTRX, which provides data on 4,000+ family offices, 40,000+ RIA and broker-dealer firms, and over 760,000 financial professionals. The firm is an industry leader for private wealth intelligence in asset management distribution.

Personal experience inspired Russ to build the solution. Working in family office marketing and cap intro, he watched asset managers struggle to navigate a fragmented, opaque landscape: thousands of RIAs, broker-dealers, family offices, and wealth teams but no unified, actionable intelligence. In 2014, he bootstrapped FINTRX as a solo founder. After building the model, he raised $9 million of Series A venture capital.

FINTRX helps firms raise capital and drive growth from a single platform. Asset managers, hedge funds, and private equity firms rely on FINTRX to find the right clients and firms before their competitors do.

Russ holds a B.A. from the University of Connecticut, where he was a four-year starter for Huskies baseball. He was also a member of the Hyannis Mets of the Cape Cod Baseball League, which produced Yankees captain Aaron Judge, Mets slugger Pete Alonso, and Hall-of-Famer Todd Helton.

Maria Anthony co-leads wealth and asset management technology investing at Motive Partners, the specialist private equity and venture firm exclusively focused on financial technology.

Founded in 2016, Motive has raised $6.4 billion for early-stage, growth, and buyout investments. With over 160 professionals in New York and Europe, the firm invests across six subsectors: Wealth & Asset Management, Banking & Payments, AI Data & Analytics, Capital Markets, Insurance, and Business Services.

Motive's portfolio includes multiple billion-dollar outcomes, such as the recent $1.8 billion exit of With Intelligence to S&P Global. Active investments in category-defining companies range from CAIS, InvestCloud, and FNZ, to Dun & Bradstreet and Obin AI.

Before Motive, Maria was a Vice President at Vera Equity, an early stage, fintech-focused venture capital firm which she helped launch alongside the two founding partners. Maria began her career as an investor at General Atlantic on the Internet & Technology team.

She holds a BBA from the University of Notre Dame.

Liam Hanlon leads the insights team at Jump, an AI-powered intelligence platform for financial advisors. Jump has more than 32,000 advisors on the platform, nearly one in ten in the U.S., and is adding 2,000 more each month.

Jump automates the administrative work around advisor-client meetings and engagement — note-taking, CRM updates, follow-ups, compliance documentation — across more than one million conversations a year. Jump's research shows the platform saves advisors over 250 hours a year, with 90% reinvesting that time in client service and revenue-producing activities.

As Head of Insights, Liam leads the team that turns Jump's data into research and intelligence for the industry. His team studies how advisors actually work: which conversations drive client retention, what time-savings translate into revenue growth, and how AI adoption patterns elevate top-performing advisors. These findings are based on one of the largest datasets on financial advice ever assembled: one million conversations annually.

Before Jump, Liam spent seven years at EY in the Wealth and Asset Management Business Consulting practice, where he led AI adoption strategy and quantitative and qualitative research on financial services.

He earned his Bachelor of Science degree with Honors in Quantitative Finance from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

James Tsai is helping lead one of the most consequential infrastructure projects in capital markets today: the Google Cloud collaboration with CME Group on tokenization. With BMO as the first bank partner, the project is moving from pilot to commercial deployment in the second half of 2026. The vision is frictionless 24/7 institutional settlement for margin, collateral, and capital workflows. The potential prize: hundreds of billions of dollars in collateral freed from a market structure built for a different era.

His Substack series, The Microeconomics of AI in Financial Services, models the economics of cognitive labor and legacy technology as embedded costs constraining financial firms. He argues that AI's real impact is loosening the grip of these inputs on firms’ economics.

At Google, James leads global go-to-market strategy for financial services, advising the largest banks, asset managers, and exchanges on translating cloud investment into measurable business performance. Earlier roles include senior go-to-market positions at Workday and SAP, where he was a Value Engineering principal for financial services, and five years at Bank of America leading sales analytics.

James holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and a BA with honors from Middlebury College.

Citywire reaches over 90,000 wealth professionals worldwide through 27,500 stories a year published in five languages by more than 60 specialist journalists.

Alex Steger runs the US editorial operation from New York. He built and launched two American titles, Citywire RIA and Citywire Pro Buyer, that have become essential reading for advisors and asset managers navigating the US financial markets. Financial professionals across the country know Alex as a voice of inquiry and thought leadership at Citywire events.

Alex has spent over 15 years covering asset and wealth management from both sides of the Atlantic, breaking exclusive stories on the firms and people moving the industry.

In London, he ran Citywire's flagship UK publication, where he grew both revenue and readership and was promoted as the youngest editor in the company's history.

Alex holds a BA in History from the University of Manchester.

David Teten invests in the companies building the next generation of investment technology. As a Partner at Orange Collective, a fund backed by 150+ Y Combinator alumni, he backs AI-native startups reshaping how investors generate alpha.

He is cofounder and Chair of Action Tank, which uses AI to empower advocacy groups and other nonprofits to better accomplish their mission. David is also Chair of AltsTech, a community of investors in alternatives using AI, technology and analytics to generate alpha, and Founders’ Next Move, for tech founders exploring new ideas.

David has held roles with emerging companies and emerging funds across the venture capital ecosystem, from managing director to founder to CEO, with multiple exits. He has advised institutional investors including Goldman Sachs Special Situations Group, Icahn Enterprises, Birch Hill Equity Partners, and the Sawiris family office, and earlier in his career worked in M&A.

David has contributed original research on investing to Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor, PE Hub, and TechCrunch, and is co-author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online. He founded Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York, now the largest angel group on the East Coast. He earned his MBA from Harvard and BA from Yale.

Suvrat Bansal built Clarista to solve the problems he experienced firsthand in the industry. As Chief Data Officer at UBS Asset Management and Head of Data Strategy at Credit Suisse, he oversaw data architectures supporting trillions of dollars in assets. He experienced the friction directly: the gap between siloed documents, enterprise systems, and business users demanding real-time answers.

Clarista is AI architecture that unifies real-time data, documents, and analytics, and creates an intelligence layer for fast, auditable decisions across wealth, private markets, and insurance. Critically, robust governance is applied across the process. Clarista is the product and service that Suvrat wanted as a data and technology leader on the front lines but could not find.

At UBS, Suvrat led data strategy, analysis, and governance across 18 domains. At Credit Suisse, he applied technology for diverse applications, from supporting market data for $500 billion of AUM to security systems. Earlier, Suvrat spent thirteen years at Morgan Stanley, where he rose to Head of Transformation and Data Strategy for Asset Management in New York and London.

Suvrat holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School and a B.E. in Electronics from Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur.

Larry Black has spent four decades aligning narrative, message, and audience: first as an international financial journalist, then as a chief marketing officer with prominent index providers and asset managers, now as the co-founder of an AI platform built for regulated finance.

Wheelhouse, launched in November 2025 in partnership with VShift, is a strategic AI platform for asset managers and regulated firms. Wheelhouse unifies sales, marketing, strategy, and compliance into a single production system, with positioning, brand, and regulatory guidelines embedded at every step. The platform is the culmination of work Larry began at BlackMoss, the strategic consultancy he founded in 2020.

Larry brings over 25 years of marketing leadership. As Global Head of Marketing for LSEG and the FTSE Russell indices, he led brand and growth strategy as the firm became a leading global index provider with $16 trillion in benchmarked AUM. Earlier, as Deputy Head of Marketing and Communications at AllianceBernstein, he oversaw the firm's transition to digital.

Larry began as a journalist and international financial correspondent. He wrote and contributed to The Independent, New York magazine, Globe & Mail, International Herald Tribune, CNN, and the BBC. He reported from the United States, France, Brazil, Hungary, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and the Arctic.

Larry holds an Executive MBA and a BA in History and Political Science from McGill.

Al Collins co-founded Wheelhouse on the critical lessons learned across decades building digital systems and marketing programs for regulated industries. As founder and CEO of VShift, the New York digital agency he launched in 2006, he has worked with enterprise-scale firms in financial services, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceutical, aerospace, and real estate. Wheelhouse applies that experience to the AI question: how do enterprise organizations deploy generative tools while sustaining strategic clarity across functions?

VShift's practice spans digital experience design, martech architecture, customer engagement, and leadership advisory. Wheelhouse extends that practice into a unified production system for sales, marketing, strategy, and compliance — with positioning, brand, and regulatory guidelines embedded at each step.

Earlier, Al held leadership roles at MarchFirst and Reach Networks, an early Silicon Alley digital marketing firm which he co-founded.

Al has been an active member of the New York technology community since the early 1990s. He holds a BA in English Literature and Biology from Denison University.

Louis LaValle is the Founder and President of the Digital Fiduciary Standards Board (DFSB), an independent governance initiative focused on fiduciary standards and institutional best practices for digital asset investment managers. He is the author of the Handbook on Digital Fiduciary Investment Standards, a practitioner-focused framework for governance, diligence, controls, and fiduciary best practices in digital asset investing.

Louis is also the Founder and CEO of Frontier Investments, a private investment office serving ultra-high-net-worth families and select institutions across alternatives and digital assets.

Before Frontier, Louis was President and Senior Portfolio Manager at 3iQ Digital Assets, where he built the U.S. institutional business and launched QMAP, the industry's first actively managed crypto hedge fund managed account platform.

Earlier roles include senior positions at Neuberger Berman, Permal, SkyBridge, and Morgan Stanley. He is a regular commentator on digital assets, hedge funds, and institutional allocation trends.

Louis holds a BA, with honors, from New York University.

Milan Patel is co-founder and President of Yayati, an options-focused fintech firm. Milan leads product for PLASMA — the first options overlay operating system for asset and wealth managers — and VOLT, the affiliate asset manager focused on tax-optimized single-stock option strategies.

Before Yayati, Milan spent eight years at Goldman Sachs in Multi-Asset Solutions covering pensions, endowments, foundations, family offices, and asset managers. He specialized in cross-asset quantitative investment strategies and structured $1B+ derivative transactions across every asset class before launching Yayati with one of his clients.

He has served on Stevens Institute of Technology's School of Business Advisory Board since 2019, and holds a B.S. in Quantitative Finance from Stevens with minors in Mathematics and Economics.

Milan applies quantitative investing to sports betting markets — a longtime hobby, briefly a profession.

Mackenzie O'Connor is a Senior Vice President of Product Management at CAIS, where she leads the development of trade workflows and platform features that help financial advisors access and invest in alternative assets more efficiently, reducing complexity so advisors can move faster and with greater confidence.

Mackenzie has been at the forefront of bringing AI-powered capabilities to the CAIS platform and is actively shaping how the firm continues to leverage AI to transform the advisor journey in alternatives distribution.

Mackenzie started her career at Morgan Stanley after graduating from Boston College with a Bachelor's in Computer Science.

Jenny joined Motive Partners in 2025 as a Managing Director of Business Transformation.

Previously, she served as Chief Architect and Global Head of Architecture and Innovation at Broadridge Financial Solutions, where she led the company's shift to a platform-first organization, unifying a diverse product portfolio into a single, modern ecosystem. Her leadership spanned engineering transformation, architecture modernization, and AI enablement across global operations, including capital markets, wealth management, and regulatory communications.

Prior to Broadridge, Jenny was CIO of the Business Banking group at RBC, where she led digital transformation across the commercial banking business and served on the RBC Ventures investment board. Before that, she headed TD Ventures at TD Bank Group, launching and managing a strategic venture fund investing in fintech, AI, and blockchain startups.

Earlier in her career, she worked at Bain & Company, advising global financial institutions and private equity firms on growth and operational transformation, after beginning her career at Deloitte Consulting in Toronto and Shanghai.

Jenny earned a Bachelor of Applied Science at the University of Waterloo, an MA in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA in Finance from Wharton.

Ionut Florescu, Ph.D. is Research Professor of Financial Engineering at Stevens. Dr. Florescu also serves as Director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Lab and Director of the Financial Technology and Analytics program.

His research spans stochastic processes, high-frequency finance, and machine learning in financial markets — with a focus on rare events, market microstructure, and systems under stress. His work is also about applying sound mathematical modeling across science and engineering: from computer vision and cryptography to geophysics, oceanography, meteorology, and biomedicine.

Dr. Florescu has organized multiple NSF-funded international conferences and has received research grants from the CME Foundation, UBS, and the NSF-backed CRAFT center. His doctoral students now hold senior roles at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Interactive Brokers.

Prof. Florescu is a driving force for the Stevens High Frequency Trading Competition, a worldwide event for university teams to deploy algorithmic trading strategies on SHIFT, Stevens' proprietary simulation platform.

He is the author of several books on probability, stochastic processes, and financial engineering, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the High Frequency journal. Dr. Florescu earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from Purdue University, and degrees in Mathematics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest.

Zachary Feinstein, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Financial Engineering at Stevens. He also serves as Co-Director of Ph.D. Programs. Prof. Feinstein studies what happens when financial systems break. His research focuses on financial contagion, systemic risk, and the mathematics of how failures cascade through interconnected networks. His work has been published in Operations Research, the European Journal of Operational Research, Finance and Stochastics, and the SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics.

More recently, Dr. Feinstein has turned that lens on emerging financial technology. His work on decentralized finance and automated market makers through the NSF-backed CRAFT center examines the structural risks embedded in DeFi protocols. He also led a CRAFT research project applying AI to compliance reviews, exploring how machine learning can detect regulatory issues that traditional processes miss.

At Stevens, Prof. Feinstein teaches machine learning, natural language processing for financial applications, time series analytics, and pricing and hedging. He earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton.

Rich Kerr is the lawyer fund and asset managers call when they need to know what they can and can’t say, sell, or build. He advises mutual funds, ETFs, investment advisers, and broker-dealers on the full range of SEC and FINRA regulatory issues that govern the investment industry.

Rich is leading the new Boston office for Haynes Boone, a leading international law firm ranked among the top 100 in the U.S. with over 700 lawyers in 20+ global offices.

Rich has spent over 20 years counseling fund sponsors, directors, and trustees. In addition, he has become a leading voice on the compliance implications of digital assets, cryptocurrency, and blockchain.

He co-authored “Tokenizing Traditional Markets” in The Review of Securities & Commodities Regulation and the ETF Handbook. Rich has spoken at the Fund Directors Conference, the ETP Forum, and dozens of regulatory and compliance events on topics ranging from marketing and crypto to AI.

Rich earned his J.D. from Suffolk University Law School, cum laude, and his B.A. from Boston University.

Rick Lake is founder of Narrative Alpha, a consultancy that builds thought leadership, digital distribution strategies, and communications programs for asset managers and alternative investment sponsors. He is the creator of the Promptwright™ framework and the 7 Prompt Archetypes, tools that help financial professionals harness generative AI to accelerate growth.

Rick co-founded Lake Partners, Inc., one of the early alternative investment consulting firms, growing it from startup to over 5 billion in advisory assets. He co-launched one of the first daily liquid alts fund-of-funds, achieving a 5-star Morningstar rating and more than 550 million in assets. He has testified at the SEC Hedge Fund Roundtable and co-edited a foundational reference book on private equity and venture capital.

Rick has lectured at Boston University's Digital Business Institute and spoken at the Morningstar Investment Conference, LinkedIn, MIT, Yale, and the London Business School. His work has been featured in Barron's, Bloomberg TV, and other national media.

A Harvard graduate in Folklore & Mythology, Rick studies how narrative patterns and oral tradition inform modern AI architecture, recasting timeless storytelling frameworks as practical tools for the age of AI.

Paul Magnone leads global strategic alliances at Google, building partnerships across artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and emerging technologies. With over 30 years in the field, he has a track record of translating complex technology into business impact.

Co-author of Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance Between Intuition and Information (Wiley, 2022) and Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning in Information (Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), Paul and his co-authors developed "Quantitative Intuition" (QI), a framework for combining data science with executive judgment.

At IBM, he launched four global consulting practices that generated over $1 billion in new revenue. He also held leadership roles at Deloitte Consulting and several startups. Paul holds four patents and has mentored in the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program.

At Columbia Business School, Paul teaches courses on data-driven decision-making and quantitative intuition. He serves on the Management Board of Advisors for Stevens Institute of Technology's School of Business, where he earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Technology Management.

His work has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and at industry conferences worldwide.