Advisory Board Biographies

Prof. Philip Treleaven, Director, UK Centre for Financial Computing & Analytics, UCL

Philip Treleaven is Director of the UK Centre for Financial Computing and Professor of Computing at UCL. Twenty years ago his research group development much of the early fraud detection technology and built the first insider dealing detection system for the London Stock Exchange. 

For the past 12 years Prof. Treleaven’s research group has developed algorithmic trading systems with many of the leading investment banks and funds, and for the past 4 years they have worked on HFT trading risk and systemic risk with the Bank of England and FCA. Current research includes the application of blockchain technology to financial compliance and regulation.

About the UK Centre for Financial Computing & Analytics

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The UK Centre (financialcomputing.org) is a collaboration of UCL, Imperial College and London School of Economics and the major financial institutions and commercial organisations.

The UK Centre has over 80 PhD students and 300 associated Masters students working on finance and business analytics, and is unique in placing them in banks, funds and companies to develop advanced analytics and software. 

Jane Walshe, Co-Founder and CEO of Enforcd

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Jane Walshe is co-founder and CEO of Enforcd, a RegTech start up that is on the Bank of England’s FinTech Accelerator. Jane is a Chartered Fellow of the CISI, and a financial services regulatory barrister who previously worked in the FCA’s Enforcement Division, in house at JP Morgan, and as a consultant at Simmons & Simmons. She is consultant Editor of ‘Individual Conduct in Financial Services Firms’ – a practitioner guide published by Sweet & Maxwell.

About Enforcd

Enforcd is an innovative company that uses technology to aid regulatory compliance.  

Its flagship product is The Enforcement Database, which uses global regulatory enforcement data, related news and insights to help firms identify, manage and mitigate the conduct risks they face.

The database enables financial services firms to save staff time, reduce costs, reduce operational risk and improve both their internal culture and client outcome.

Roland Fejfar, Vice President, Fintech IBD, Morgan Stanley  

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Roland is a Vice President in Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking Division covering FinTech across EMEA and South East Asia. In his role, Roland is advising clients on corporate finance related matters, including private capital raisings, IPOs, equity and debt offerings, and M&A, especially around the following ecosystems:

  • FinTech Disruptors: Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning, Blockchain, CryptoCurrencies, InsurTech, RegTech, WealthTech, Alternative Finance Marketplaces, Mobile Money/ Banking
  • Capital Markets Infrastructure: Pre-Trade (FinInfo, FinSoft), Execution (Brokerage, Alternative/ OTC Trading Venues, Exchanges, HFT/ Algorithmic Trading, Electronic Market Makers) and Post-Trade 
  • Payment Companies: E/M Commerce, Omni-Channel, Merchant Acquirers, Payment Networks, Payment Processors, Card Issuers, Fraud Detection, Loyalty, Advanced Data Analytics Services 

Previously, Roland worked for a long/ short hedge fund and as an academic research assistant in empirical asset pricing. He holds a Master in Financial Economics from Oxford University and a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the University of St. Gallen. Additionally he’s on the Board of The Showroom, a leading London-based non-for-profit centre for collaborative and process-driven contemporary art

About Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley mobilizes capital to help governments, corporations, institutions and individuals around the world achieve their financial goals. For over 75 years, the firm’s reputation for using innovative thinking to solve complex problems has been well earned and rarely matched.

A consistent industry leader throughout decades of dramatic change in modern finance, Morgan Stanley will continue to break new ground in advising, serving and providing new opportunities for its clients.

Morgan Stanley is committed to maintaining the first-class service and high standard of excellence that have always defined the firm. At its foundation are four core values — putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas and giving back — that guide its more than 55,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 43 countries.

Carl Weir, CEO, CrossVerify

Carl is the CEO of Cross Verify. Prior to Cross Verify, he was responsible for building Uphold.com (Cloud Based Payment Company) unique private blockchain payment platform, that has processed over $1 billion in transactions over the blockchain

Carl has had 20 years experience in Banking / Finance, Fintech, and startups. He also started the 2nd ever Mobile advertising platform for WAP mobile products and was a pioneer in Psedolite communications systems.

Carl has held several Senior position within the Financial community. Most recently, Carl was EMEA Head of Cross Asset FIX Connectivity for HSBC Global Banking & Markets in London. He was also involved in new market models and strategies, new platforms, and standards / practices for bleeding-edge products utilizing the FIX Protocol.

About CrossVerify

CrossVerify, through its product, CrossVerify uniquely offers facial, retina and fingerprint biometrics linked directly to AML and KYC documentation held in a private blockchain utility.

CrossVerify has already secured contracts in 4 countries, across insurance, construction, trucking, financial services security, Digital Wallets and Commodities.

CrossVerify is in a unique position for the growth of digital identity.

Charles Delingpole, CEO, ComplyAdvantage

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Charles founded ComplyAdvantage in 2014, and as CEO leads the product development and growth of the company. Prior ComplyAdvantage, Charles co-founded MarketInvoice in 2011, now a leading invoice financing company.

About ComplyAdvantage

ComplyAdvantage is a RegTech business using AI, machine learning and big data analytics to help firms make intelligent choices when complying with regulations relating to sanctions, money laundering (AML), terrorist financing (CFT), bribery and corruption. Its unique proprietary database of individuals, organisations and associated entities provides dynamic real-time insight into financial crime risks.

Afsheen Afshar, Chief Data Science Officer, JP Morgan Chase

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Afsheen Afshar is the Chief Data Science Officer of the Corporate and Investment Bank at JPMC, covering all lines of business.  He is passionate about using data and analytics to improve how people make decisions in a variety of industries, from finance to medicine to advertising to search.  

He previously led teams at Goldman Sachs that centralized, analyzed, and presented insights from large financial data sets in order to reduce cost, mitigate risk, improve client service, and maximize profitability.  

He completed a dual-doctorate degree (MD/PhD) as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program at Stanford.  During his electrical engineering PhD,  he created cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to find trends in large quantities of parallel data and to make predictions in real-time. 

Specialties:  
Management: leading multiple global teams (>50 HC) through periods of great change and expansion; 
Medicine: firsthand experience in healthcare delivery; understanding of doctors’ and patients’ desires and needs;  
Engineering: machine learning, Bayesian inference, prediction methods, expert programmer (C/C++, Matlab, etc.); signal processing; systems analysis, including feedback and control

Nirvana Farhadi,  Global Head – Financial Services Regtech, Risk & Regulatory Compliance Affairs, Hitachi Data Systems 

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Nirvana Farhadi, is a global RegTech compliance, operations and risk expert across multiple Financial Services sectors and jurisdictions.

As the former Head of Regulatory Reporting at KPMG, she has lead the business, practice, and development for Regulatory Transaction Reporting. She has served as a lead regulatory expert across various Trade, Transaction, Periodic, and Positional reporting requirement under various global regulations including, but not limited to: MiFID, MiFID2/MiFIR, EMIR, REMIT, DFA, SEC, CFTC, Hong Kong TR, Canadian TR, ASIC TR, Commodities Position Reporting, and Threshold reporting requirements.

She has over 17 years of senior experience in the Financial Services industry. As an extension of her work she has been heavily involved in workshops and studies with the involvement of key market participants as well as NCA’s across Europe and the US on regulatory compliance, operations and reporting matters and finding strategic robust solutions.

As a Regulatory Trade and Transaction Reporting expert in the industry, she has provided training to a broad spectrum of industry stake holders, which have included global investment banks, Asset Managers, Trading Venues, Regulators, and Members of the European Parliament.

Jochen Leidner

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Dr Jochen L Leidner is Director of Research at Thomson Reuters, where he leads the corporation’s London R&D site, which he founded in 2013 after serving in innovation-related functions in Scotland, the USA and Switzerland.

He has worked in academic research & teaching roles (University of Edinburgh, Saarland University and University of Zurich), for larger companies (SAP, Thomson Reuters) and startups.

He holds Master’s degrees in Computational Linguistics, English language and literature, computer science (from Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg) and in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (University of Cambridge). His doctorate in informatics is from the University of Edinburgh.

His awards include scholarships (DAAD, Cambridge), government PI grants (Royal Society of Edinburgh

Enterprise Fellowship in Electronic Markets for his work on mobile search), scientific awards (ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium Award (2004); Social Media Soc. best method paper award (2016)) and industry recognition (Thomson Reuters Inventor of the Year 2015 and again 2016 for the best patent application).

He is an author or co-author of several dozen scientific publications, he is a frequent speaker at international events and also has been appointed as a Scientific expert for the European Commission.

Leah McGrath Goodman, Finance Editor, Newsweek  

An award-winning investigative journalist, author and speaker, Leah McGrath Goodman is senior writer and finance editor for Newsweek magazine. She has written for Forbes, Bloomberg, Marie Claire, Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The Financial Times, Institutional Investor, CNN/Fortune and The Guardian. 

Born in Boston, she started at Dow Jones & Co. in 1998 after being recruited from university by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. She was trained in Princeton by editors of The Wall Street Journal.

She wrote for a decade in New York, Dubai and London as a general assignment reporter, senior writer, editor and special correspondent (in roughly that order). In 2006, she left Dow Jones as its youngest special writer and began writing as a freelance journalist. 

In 2008, she signed her first publishing deal. “The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked The World’s Oil Market,” released by HarperCollins in 2011, was called “a riveting tale of greed gone mad” by Bloomberg Businessweek and “twice as crazy and outlandish as any plot that Hollywood could concoct” by Fortune. 

The book was nominated for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Book of the Year Award. 

From 2010 to 2011, Goodman was a visiting faculty member and fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 

In 2011, while working on her second book in the Channel Islands (UK), she was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport for more than 12 hours and thrown out of the country after disclosing to authorities her research into human-rights violations and crimes against children on the island of Jersey. 

In 2012, Goodman was officially banned from the UK — and Jersey — the first time this had happened to a journalist in the UK in at least a decade.

In 2013, her UK visa was restored following international media coverage, a Change.org campaign and the formal endorsement of her work by UK Parliament. That year, she joined Newsweek.

Jason Boud, Startup CEO, Entrepreneur In Residence, Mentor, Investor, ex-Corporate

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Jason co-founded Beyond Enterprise (@enterprisebe) in 2014 a company providing advisory services specialising in Identifying and Reducing Risk, before setting up the RegTech Forum – a vibrant community of regulators, regulated firms and their technology and service providers. Facilitating discussion, collaboration and insight on the challenges and opportunities within RegTech – and ultimately a marketplace to do business.

Jason is an Speaker, Advisor, FinTech & RegTech Mentor/Investor at Barclays Techstars accelerator , StartUpBootCamp FinTech and the FinTech Innovation Lab

Startup CEO @regtechlondon, Advisor, Mentor/Investor @clausematch @cutover @enforcd, @getpenta @FinTechLabLDN #RegTech #corporate #innovation.