Our Team

AREIEL WOLANOW

• Founding leader of IBM’s financial services practice for East Africa, where he led the delivery of the machine-learning based credit scoring engine for Kenya’s mPesa mobile payments platform
• Founding leader of IBM’s blockchain services practice for ASEAN, where he sold and delivered IBM’s first blockchain consulting project, for HSBC and Bank of America
• Led the delivery of a blockchain-based trade settlement prototype for Lloyd’s of London
• Led the design of Deutsche Telekom’s blockchain-as-a-service platform
• Currently expert advisor to UK Parliament on Blockchain and AI; previously advised other central banks and financial regulators around the world
• Invited by the G20 to speak on the impact emerging technology will have on financial inclusion

KEFIRAH KANG

• Led the design and delivery for the 1st fully licensed and regulated virtual bank in Hongkong
• Serves as CTO for Finexos, a FinTech start-up. Finexos AI driven financial management platform — successfully delivered their first prototype
• Designed and delivered loyalty program for Melco entertainment – one of the largest casion/resort operators in the world
• Advised digital strategy and led the online referral program for Walmart China. The program has boosted their online new customer conversation ratio by 50% in 6 months

EWAN PUCKLE HOBBS

• Designed and implemented the operating model that enabled Garanti Bank of Turkey to move from the 42nd to the 2nd largest bank in its market
• Led business architect for the $1.2B customer-centric transformation program at Banorte, Mexico’s largest domestic bank
• Led the design of the digital compliance transformation for Standard Chartered Bank
• Led the development of target operating models for Maybank in Malaysia and Equity Bank in Kenya

CHRIS JUSTICE

• Co-founded the launch of an innovative hybrid proof-of-work / proof-of-stake DLT protocol that integrated a distributed, hashed file storage platform to extend the trusted ledger of DLT into applications requiring equivalent trust for all types of files.
• Led the EMEA business for a global buy-side investment manager responsible for business development, strategy, operations and compliance. Regulated as an approved person for UK authorised firm.
• Led corporate and VC-funded start-ups and turn arounds in Asia, including CEO and Co-founder of a media tech start-up to NASDAQ IPO

IQBAL ALIKHAN

• Developed the first cognitive artificial intelligence (AI), predictive risk management algorithm and data structure for acquisitions [USA]
• Conducted the adoption of Blockchains to trade finance for financial institutions, with HSBC, Bank of America & Monetary Authority of Singapore [Singapore]
• Restructured the alternate investment portfolio to match industry focus and aligned it with the growth interest of the corporation [USA]
• Launched and operated the first PE fund for the corporation returning 15x on the portfolio with over 1⁄2 billion in additional revenue in 3 years [China]
• Deployed a decisions engine for credit at a global institution [USA]

YOLANDA BERRY

• Advisor to start-ups who recognise that world change will be dependent on human behaviour change
• The first person in history to take a support call from another planet, after the initial Mars Pathfinder mission, 1997
• Using behavioural science, increased the recycling rates in North-somerset county  [UK]

WESLEY XIE

• Led the architecture, design, and product delivery of the first fully licensed virtual bank in HK
• Led the team that won the FDA 2020 FinTech Hackathon for Finexos
• 10+ years of working experiences on digital transformation and FinTech in companies like Vodafone and Daimler

Nick Palmer

• Over 10 years’ experience in sustainability and in particular decarbonisation and circularity utilising pyrolysis. Prior to that several years in the offshore oil & gas sector with water treatment.

• Focus on community scale projects and technologies that offer decentralised energy and added value through by-product recovery and re-use.

• Breadth of technical awareness and knowledge from projects across UK, America and South East Asia

• Developed disruptive business in embryonic Innovator sector, bringing new technologies to market

Loria Wu

• Guiding scale agile transformation for Top1 express company in China mainland

• Advised digital strategy and led the data management program for HUAWEI

• Designed and delivered hotel booking program for Melco, and was apart of the quality assurance team. The program increased around 300 thousand active users to the Melco

Donald Hanson

• 33-year career at IBM focused on the banking and financial services segment before retiring in 2016 to pursue independent consulting and follow his interest in projects for economic inclusion
• Lead IBM’s effort to consolidate Citibank Asia’s 16 mainframe data centers to three, generating billions of dollars in savings
• Lead a team that pioneered the first secure internet banking transaction in Asia, paving the way for internet banking
• Developed the IBM Banking Industry framework to leverage the advantages of Service Oriented Architecture in the development of solutions for Banking.
• Responsible for the sale and execution of IBM’s first implementation of Watson AI for Banking in Asia – second globally

Tharun Prabhakar

Master’s student at Yeshiva University with a proven track record of steering and delivering multiple AI and machine learning projects. 

Tharun is proficient in feature engineering, Azure Databricks, spaCy, and other tools and excels at effectively communicating complex technical information to technical and non-technical stakeholders. 

Tharun holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation Engineering from SRM University, where he garnered multiple honors and awards for his prowess in robotics challenges and competitions.

Nick Drury

Robin Fairless

Dr Thanasarn Hongpaisanvivat

• Veteran of Project/Program management in Banking and others industries in Thailand
• Previously worked with Bank of Thailand on BAHTNET/2, BAHTNET/3, Data Management System, Data Management System Platform Transformation, PM training > 120 persons
• Joint lecturer of Mini Data Science program at Mahidol University

Darren Oliveiro-Priestnall 

• 25 years industry experience in software engineering and cybersecurity for companies including leading a team for BAE AI and writing security policies and supporting FCA risk assessments
• Cofounder of three blockchain businesses and one consultancy.
• Certified Ethical Hacker, Network Defense Architect and Certified Blockchain Professional (C|BP)
• Public speaker at conferences in the UK, Europe and Asia and trainer, ran master classes at the London Stock Exchange and presented at Oxford University and Imperial College
• Contributor to numerous public blockchain projects including popular DeFi projects

Charles Ayorinde

• Collaborating with the Risk Analytics team at MS Amlin, contributing to enhancing risk analysis capabilities across all legal entities. Gathering requirements, developed processes, designed interfaces, conducted demonstrations, completed UAT, and provided support for migration efforts.
• Working alongside AXA XL’s Cede Reinsurance team, Integrated the post-merger business processes and migrating data to a single database. Worked to identifiy and resolve process gaps, implemented new reports, and initiated a project for a Bordereaux Approval Process.
• At Lloyd’s of London, collaborated with the LMA and Market to drive new claims solutions and improve customer experience as part of the Claims Transformation Project and explored alternative technologies, specifically Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), for conducting London Market business as part of the Reimagine the Bureau project.