Customer-Facing Technologies

Ed Andersen is the Managing Director of Mobile and Advanced Tech at Morgan Stanley (formerly E*TRADE). In this role, he is responsible for developing and executing an integrated, long-term strategy for mobile and emerging digital platforms to serve investors with a wide array of investing and trading objectives, levels of sophistication, and overall investing experience.

Under Ed’s leadership, and in partnership with his colleagues, E*TRADE’s mobile offering was named by Barron’s as the Best Mobile Trading app (2021, 2020, 2019), Kiplinger’s #1 for Mobile (2021, 2020), and given a 5-star rating by stockbrokers.com (2021, 2020, 2019), among other third party awards.

Prior to joining E*TRADE, Ed spent over 10 years at TD Ameritrade holding a number of digital leadership roles roles spanning mobile and web platform management, emerging platform development, enterprise digital capabilities, digital service, content strategy, and customer education. Ed began his professional career at PWC focused on Retirement Plan administration, then, moved to Datek Online Brokerage in 1999 where he held positions in customer service, operations, customer education, and digital product management.

Ed has spent the majority of his 20 years in Financial Services focused on empowering individual investors with the tools, platforms, content, and education they need to accomplish their goals. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master’s Degree from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Finra Series 7, 66, and 24 licenses.

Joe Kennedy leads PwC Financial Services’ Technology Architecture and Application & Emerging Tech practices. He has more than 27 years of experience leading design, development, delivery and operations of high-performance transactional and information systems in critical FS environments. He possesses expertise in strategic planning, enterprise information integration, enterprise architecture, systems development, agile, disruptive technologies, telecommunications, operations, infrastructure, support and user experience. Joe holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from Clark University and speaks internationally on a range of architectural, integration and disruptive technology topics.

The pandemic has pushed businesses to increase their investments on customer facing technologies to redefine business processes, customer relationships and marketing strategies, with the expectation to increase customer stratification and reduce long term operational costs. Customer facing tools such as digital signage, chatbot, virtual customer assistants, video conferencing, and digital payments are quickly developing empowered by technologies such as AI, AR/VR and blockchain. Firms should be rethinking their strategy of customer-facing channels, such as self- service, and channel optimization, and be smart at effectively targeting their customers utilizing data analytics. 

Damon Edwards is Senior Director, Product at PagerDuty. Previously, Damon was a Co-Founder of Rundeck, the makers of the popular open source runbook automation platform acquired by PagerDuty in 2020. Prior to Rundeck, Damon was the Managing Partner of DTO Solutions, a DevOps and Operations Improvement Consultancy. Damon has spent the past 22 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT Operations. He is noted for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large-scale enterprise organizations.

Damon is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps, SRE, and Operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.

When failure is inescapable, response capabilities determine our ability to protect customer satisfaction. Join us as PagerDuty’s Damon Edwards discusses the opportunities for improving outcomes by taking a holistic approach to applying automation throughout the entire incident response lifecycle.

From detection and remediation of the underlying technology issues to enhancing customer service interactions, this talk will highlight how high-performing organizations are applying automation to improve customer satisfaction, reduce downtime, and contain the costs of incident response.

Doug Shum is the Director of Financial Services Solutions at Appian Corporation, developing solutions to solve for the multiple financial institutions business needs. His primary focus is to design and develop solutions that enable this key market to face new competition in today’s digital- first world. The Connected Suite of Customer Lifecycle Management solutions help drive revenue growth, manage the ever changing regulatory environment, and drive efficiency in onboarding, servicing and KYC operations.

Doug has worked in financial technology for over 25 years. Prior to joining Appian, he was the Director of Product Management & Strategy at Fiserv. In this role, he led teams responsible for the product portfolios for data & analytics, risk & fraud, customer loyalty, account pricing, digital marketing, and professional services. Doug also spent 10 years consulting with banks and credit unions designing lending & deposit product offerings, performing efficiency reviews, performing software conversions to new platforms, lending best practices, assisting with charter mergers, designing general ledger structures, and developing custom programs.

When not focused on financial technology, you will find Doug on the baseball field coaching his youngest sons (13 years old) travel baseball team. Doug and his family enjoy the mountains, outdoors and of course baseball.

Global financial services institutions are adopting low-code solutions to rapidly transform their manual, fragmented, and risk laden processes to client onboarding, servicing and KYC. Appian industry expert Doug Shum, Director of Financial Services Solutions, will lead an informational session on how to simplify, accelerate, and modernize customer onboarding. Sharing real-life examples, Doug will demonstrate how companies can accelerate time-to-market, empower business users and enhance customer service with end-to-end connectivity.

Rajeev Sharma is the Chief Technology Officer at Grid Dynamics. He has 25+ years of engineering and leadership experience. Mr. Sharma was awarded the Scientist of the Year award for his work on the Design of Agni-III Solid Rocket Propulsion systems. He holds a Master’s degree in Management & Systems Design from MIT Sloan and a Master’s degree in Space Engineering & Rocketry (BIT MESRA) from Birla Institute of Technology.

Often lost in enterprise digital transformations is a geographical and social view of what the customer experience means in the larger perspective. Not every potential customer has access to the same infrastructure, hardware, and access. Different regions in a country might have vastly different customer needs. Their ability to fully participate in the digital economy now and in the future might not be what we expect. This is most evident in what are usually referred to as “emerging markets”, for example, farmers in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, street vendors, small business owners in remote locations. It is also apparent in rural parts of the US. These customers are often overlooked when organizations design their next generation of customer experiences.

This presentation will focus on how financial services institutions can design to include these underserved clients in their digital initiatives.

Henry is the Sr Solutions Marketing Manager at Redis where he drives the vertical industry solutions go-to-market strategy and messaging. He has over 20+ years in the IT industry as a product marketer and product manager at HPE, Dell, and F5 Networks with broad technical and business experience in developing, launching, and managing software solutions that meet the digital transformation needs of data driven industries including financial services, retail, and healthcare.

He received his Master of Business Administration from the University of Houston and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Global banks and financial services enterprises face exceptional challenges in today’s age of real-time. The acceleration of online services and evolving customer behaviors have propelled the need for seamless, instant digital experiences which depend on real-time data delivered in less than a millisecond. From personalized banking to fraud detection, decisions need to be made based on data from a multitude of sources in a variety of data formats. In this session, Redis’s Henry Tam, Principal Solutions Marketing Mgr, will highlight some examples of organizations that have met rising consumer expectations by simplifying and modernizing their application architecture with an in-memory multi-model data platform, without disrupting their legacy data systems.

Joe is the Director of Sprinklr’s Global CXM Best Practices team, focused on inspiring and simplifying the CXM unification journey for some of the world’s largest enterprises. Joe is also the host of Sprinklr’s internal talk show, DJTV, which highlights Sprinklr culture, celebrates successes, and features employees from around the world. Prior to his 8 years at Sprinklr, Joe worked in the social and digital marketing space for a decade in-house at MTV Networks, and as a consultant for the NBA, DirecTV, Stanley Black & Decker, amongst many other brands. Joe is a graduate of NYU.

Customer retention and growth is increasingly important in today’s market. This applies to expansion into new banking products, as it does for wealth transfer and cross generational growth. Joe will discuss trust building as an ongoing process, accelerated by contextually understanding behaviors to deliver personal experiences and services, thus driving meaningful brand loyalty.

Madhu has over 25 years of experience in banking operations and technology management, spreading across architecture, digital, payments, artificial neural networks and consulting. Currently, he is managing director and lead consultant for the Bank Modernization Practice at NTT DATA. As a thought leader and practitioner, he delivers modernization outcomes by leveraging banking business, domain, operations and technology functions.

Before banks focus on new tools and technologies that enable world-class customer experiences, they must adopt a new and adaptive mindset. Consumers are demanding convenient, hyper-personalized experiences, regardless of whether they are streaming a movie or opening a checking account. In response, banks must embrace a new and adaptive mindset, a mentality that will meet the need to transform their business and operating models from product-focused to customer-centric.. This reimagined model requires a modern core and platform architecture that enables distributed agile ecosystem strategies with “core-less” platform, open banking, and embedded financial services at the point of sale. Some believe this is defined as Banking 4.0. We believe this mindset goes beyond Banking 4.0 and builds the foundation for Banking 4^x..

In this session, you will uncover real-world examples that demonstrate how this new approach, known as Banking 4^x , will change your cloud strategy whether private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid, and transform your outlook on the latest banking tools and technologies.

Joe Kennedy leads PwC Financial Services’ Technology Architecture and Application & Emerging Tech practices. He has more than 27 years of experience leading design, development, delivery and operations of high-performance transactional and information systems in critical FS environments. He possesses expertise in strategic planning, enterprise information integration, enterprise architecture, systems development, agile, disruptive technologies, telecommunications, operations, infrastructure, support and user experience. Joe holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from Clark University and speaks internationally on a range of architectural, integration and disruptive technology topics.

For more than 20 years, Grant Asplund has been sharing his insights on how businesses can best protect themselves from sophisticated cyber-attacks in an increasingly complex world. As Check Point’s chief evangelist, he travels the world enthralling audiences with his passionate and relational storytelling at conferences like RSA and Next100 CIOs and numerous media interviews. Grant’s wide range of cyber security experience informs his talks, having served in diverse roles ranging from sales, marketing, business development and senior management for Dome 9, Blue Coat Systems, Neustar and Altor Networks. As CEO of MetaInfo, he led its acquisition by Neustar. Grant is the host of the TalkingCloud podcast (www.talkingcloud.podbean.com) on Cloud security.

Megan Haran is the director of digital personalization & orchestration at Charles Schwab. With more than 25 years of experience in the financial services space, Megan is an established leader with deep expertise in digital product management, content strategy, and design and execution for web, mobile and social platforms. Throughout her career, Megan has focused on improving the client experience and deepening engagement by creating and delivering relevant and personalized content. In her current role, she is spearheading a new initiative at Schwab to enable segmentation and personalization at scale across digital and human touchpoints.

Prior to Schwab’s acquisition of TD Ameritrade (TDA), Megan led TDA’s program to drive digital self-service and digitize and automate paper-based experiences. Megan also served as director of research, overseeing the firm’s award-winning research offering.

Eileen is the new head of Strategy & FinTech Partnerships for Commercial, Corporate & Investment Banking Digital at Wells Fargo. Prior to this role Eileen led Strategy & Transformation in Access Digital Channels at JPMorgan focusing on investment programs, leading strategic communications and the client engagement program. Before joining JPMorgan in 2019 Eileen was at Bank of America leading Strategy, Innovation & Data in Business Banking as well as other strategy and innovation roles in their treasury and consumer businesses. She started her career at E&Y doing financial consulting. She went to Babson College for undergrad and got her MBA at Boston College. Eileen is passionate about the intersection between technology, client experience and payments and is active in the industry.

Lance is part of a team of professionals at SAP that provide industry thought leadership and expert consultation to support customer co-innovation, enterprise transformation, and business process performance improvement programs. Bringing over 30 years of experience to his current role as a Sr. Principal, Industry Executive Advisor at SAP. Lance’s priority is to lead customer engagements to assess strategic objectives, innovation scenarios, key improvement opportunities and other sources of incremental economic value.

Frank Walsh brings extensive cyber technical leadership experience to his role as Field CTO. He manages the HUMAN Security Global Sales Engineering Team and all enterprise security integration efforts connected to the HUMAN Security platform. Frank’s experience spans leadership and development roles in design, integration and launch of cutting edge technology solutions used by millions of end-users across the globe.

Prior to HUMAN Security, Frank served as Chief Security Architect at Virsec, VP of Solution Architecture at Malwarebytes, Director of Technical Account Management at Tanium, Solution Architect at Amplify, and Director of Online Solution Development and Senior Software Engineer at Career Systems International. Throughout these roles Frank played a critical role in the design and implementation of enterprise software solutions and ensuring those software solution’s security with hundreds of familiar brands in the Fortune 1000 marketplace.