Financial Services Symposium

Antoine is a data practitioner passionate about distributed computing and advanced analytics. He graduated with a master’s degree in computational astrophysics, and is a published author of “Mastering Spark for Data Science.” Antoine has been pushing both engineering and science disciplines side by side to extract commercial value from large data sets. More recently, Antoine served as director of data science at Barclays UK, leading their AI practice and driving Barclays through their data and analytics transformation. With his expertise in enterprise architecture and his commercial experience delivering data science to production in a highly regulated environment, Antoine joined Databricks as the technical director for financial services, helping our customers redefine the future of banking.

Alan serves as the head of data strategy for the largest reinsurance brokerage, Guy Carpenter, belonging to Marsh McLennan, with a primary focus on the enterprise data lake platform and data science product practice. Prior to financial services, his career spanned 12+ years of startup technology companies and consulting covering adtech, e-commerce and logistics in roles as CTO or director of data. He is an expert in cloud technologies, distributed computing, optimization algorithms, data architectures and machine learning with an academic background in mathematics and computer science from University Chicago and University of California, San Diego.

Jay is a senior director and leads data provider partnerships at Databricks. Prior to Databricks, he was the head of marketplace platforms at S&P Global. At S&P, he held multiple roles across the firm in corporate strategy and development, business development and GTM strategy. Jay has his M.B.A. from Columbia University.

Nathan is a seasoned programmer, conversant in the language of business, enabling the translation of strategic vision into highly functional software without sacrificing quality or fidelity. Vigilant in identifying opportunities to align IT practices with business processes, and to increase efficiencies. He is also the author of the liveProject “Create an Open Banking App Using OpenAPIs and Spring Boot,” by Manning Publishing, 2020. His forthcoming book on “AI-Powered Development” is due in late 2023, also from Manning Publishing

John is the VP of data strategy at Mastercard, where he’s responsible for the enterprise data sourcing strategy, working to create the next generation of products and solutions. John has more than 20 years of experience as a business transformation leader. He’s delivered business intelligence products for startups and Fortune 500 clients in clinical, retail, financial, payments and big data industries, and led teams to ideate, build, patent and support enterprise data products. He worked at Mastercard early in his career before serving in operations, product, sales and strategic roles with ADP, Medco/Express Scripts, Consumer Reports and multiple startups. In addition, John directed ADP’s data science lab, achieving multiple patents while delivering patentable products to the marketplace. John holds a B.A. from Fordham University. He’s also Six Sigma Black Belt and a certified snowboard instructor.

Stephen is co-creator of Morphir and an executive director at Morgan Stanley, where he has performed a variety of technical leadership roles. Stephen’s career has spanned a number of industries. He has presented extensively on Morphir, functional domain modeling and software development. He has an M.S. in computer science from NYU and a B.F.A. in music performance.

Marcela is Databricks’ global insurance leader, based in NYC. She is originally from Mexico, where she studied actuarial science at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), before moving to Boston for postgraduate studies at Harvard University. She has more than 17 years of experience working in the insurance industry in both commercial and personal lines in all areas across the insurance value chain (claims, underwriting, pricing, marketing and actuarial science). Prior to joining us, she led the insurance analytics practice at EY, leading teams of data scientists and actuaries to implement complex analytics solutions for the largest insurance companies. She has done business in Japan, Korea, U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil. She has authored more than 13 publications on analytics and AI. Outside work Marcela likes to spend quality time with her husband and daughter. She’s passionate about diversity and is one of the original Organization of Latino Actuaries co-founders.

Omar is passionate about people, community, frameworks, communication and measurement. Omar is currently VP, Field CISO at Databricks. In the past, he was Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of $26B Highmark Health as it grew YoY by $1.5B for 9 years. Prior to Highmark Health, Omar was at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, where he had product management and marketing responsibilities for their security solutions portfolio with customers in 72 countries. To sustain the effective delivery of cyber risk mitigation at scale, Omar led the development and execution of 14 frameworks and 8 measurement programs. For this focus on resilience and scalability, he has been profiled by: Wall Street Journal, SANS, Forrester, Gartner, NACD, Reuters, HIMSS, CSO Magazine, CMU and others. Omar has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Omar currently serves on the boards of HITRUST, The FAIR Institute and Leadership Pittsburgh; he also serves as an advisor to a half dozen tech firms and as faculty for the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Arron is the SVP & Deputy CIO at Everest Insurance, where he’s responsible for Architecture, Data & Analytics, Automation, Innovation and Digital Transformation. Arron has more than 30 years of experience in the Insurance industry, both as a business and technology leader. After joining Everest last year, Arron led the development of a Global Data & Analytics Strategy that resulted in the delivery of an Azure Data Lake designed to support needs across the organization. Throughout his career, Arron has led the strategy and delivery of a wide variety of Digital Platforms, Data & Analytics Capabilities and Architectural Solutions for Travelers Insurance, Farmers Insurance, Beazley Insurance, Liberty Mutual and Selective Insurance. He holds a BA from Marietta College, along with CPCU and ARM professional designations.

Steve has spent the past 18 years in the data analytics and infrastructure space operating as a founding engineer, leading product, and building platform-driven businesses. He brings his healthy obsession for analytics, visualization, and data-driven storytelling to Databricks as the product leader for Databricks' collaboration products, including Delta Sharing, Marketplace, and Clean Rooms.

Jojy is a partner in Deloitte’s Global Financial Services Industry (GFSI) Strategy & Analytics Practice. Jojy co-leads Data, Analytics & AI for GFSI and is the global lead partner for Deloitte Consulting. Jojy is also the global cloud data and analytics leader for Deloitte. He is a trusted advisor to clients globally in banking, capital markets, insurance and asset management sectors. He is involved in the hands-on delivery of data and analytics transformation programs including integrated financial risk and regulatory reporting, customer 360/720, data and analytics cloud modernization, and operational execution of data governance. He is an ex-Wall Street structured finance investment banker/quant and has published multiple books on structured finance.

Junta is the global industry leader for financial services at Databricks, where he is responsible for driving the adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform across capital markets, banking/payments, insurers and data providers. Prior to joining Databricks, Junta spent 14 years at Goldman Sachs in New York, where he most recently served as the head of Asia Pacific sales in the Equities Division. He is a contributing business and technology writer for various publications and speaks frequently about digital transformation in financial services at conferences and media outlets around the world. Junta is bilingual in English and Japanese and holds a B.A. in economics and international studies from Northwestern University.

Ricardo is a principal solution architect at Databricks specializing in machine learning. As part of this role, he supports companies looking to scale data science operations, optimize machine learning training and deploy models to production. Previously, he worked as a technical lead and data scientist at FINRA, primarily working with financial time series and big data anomaly detection applications. He completed a mathematics Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.

Eon joined Databricks in 2022 as technical director for financial services. He has extensive experience in the financial services industry, with close to a decade’s experience advising organizations across the Americas and EMEA on developing their data asset strategy and building data-driven businesses. Before joining Databricks, Eon held the position of chief data officer at a London-based private equity firm. He was responsible for the data strategy and transformation program across a portfolio of 15 insurance businesses. Before that, he spent 5 years at a major South African bank, building data partnerships with corporate clients and delivering AI-based solutions to combat financial crime.

Ephrim is a vice president and technology fellow at Goldman Sachs. He has been building APIs, transactional data systems and middleware at Goldman Sachs. In his current role he’s focused on the use of data models for building data APIs and implementing data governance. He’s also interested in data authorization and cloud infrastructure. He is an active contributor and maintainer in the FINOS Open Source Legend project. Ephrim graduated with a masters in computer science from Indiana University.

Ashley has been working as a solutions architect in the financial services vertical for the past three years, helping to drive success through the adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse platform at some of the largest banking and capital markets firms. Previously, Ashley was the technical lead for the AML team within Capital One's Center of Machine Learning.

Julia is a product lead at dbt Labs, and she also co-hosts the dbt Labs Analytics Engineering Podcast, which covers trends in data and technology. Before joining dbt Labs, Julia was a principal at NEA, a venture capital firm, where she invested in developer, infrastructure and data startups. She has a dual B.S. in computer science and management science & engineering from Stanford.

Mark has spent the last 20 years in the data management space. He started his career in IT roles managing large enterprise data integration projects, systems and teams for companies like Motorola, Abbott Laboratories and Walgreens. Mark has applied his data management subject matter expertise to customer-centric, practitioner-focused product marketing, most recently at Talend. He currently serves as the vice president of product marketing for Matillion.

David joined Databricks in 2019 and is the Head of Security Field Engineering. He and his team work globally to help customers safely deploy data and AI solutions by describing how Databricks fits into security architectures and by collecting and sharing best practices through white papers and packaged tools. David has been in InfoSec for 17 years and previously spent six years at Splunk as a Principal Security Strategist, where he wrote the most widely used security detection app for the platform.

Talia is a delivery solutions architect at Databricks. She has been working with customers within the financial services vertical to drive success through onboarding, enablement and adoption strategy of Databricks Lakehouse. Previously at Databricks, Talia was helping large enterprise customers across retail, manufacturing and insurance. Talia also has data science/management consulting experience delivering machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) engagements across multiple lines of business for Fortune 50 financial services clients within EY’s Advanced Analytics Practice. She is Spark 3.0 certified.