See MapD and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Todd Mostak, MapD’s CEO & Founder:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I think most people would consider my path to becoming a CEO of a startup to be unorthodox – even for startups.

I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in Economics and Anthropology. After graduation I moved to Syria to teach English for Berlitz while learning Arabic myself. I found the language and culture fascinating and would go on to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo where I also worked as a translator and occasional writer for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm.

With my eye on academia I went to Harvard, where I started to work on my master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies with a focus on how social media impacted the Arab Spring. My thesis involved performing analytics on hundreds of millions of tweets – and I didn’t have access to the computational horsepower or visual analytics tools to do it effectively. I had cross-registered for a database systems class at MIT where I built a prototype database that ran on graphics cards rather than on conventional processors. This allowed me to do and see things in the tweets that I would have never found using traditional methods.

With the encouragement of MIT Professors Sam Madden and Michael Stonebraker I ended up joining their Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and working full time on this concept of a fast system (database + datavis). In 2013, we won Nvidia’s Early Stage Challenge and decided to make MapD our sole focus.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

MapD has leveraged the parallel processing power of GPU to create the world’s fastest data exploration engine. By pairing a lightning fast, SQL-compliant, GPU database with a cutting edge visual analytics engine, MapD allows multi-billion record datasets to be queried and visualized in milliseconds. For organizations, this means that they can tackle problems that are far larger, far more complex, far more difficult than previously imagined – without losing any grain level detail.

Speed of thought data exploration used to stop at tens of millions of rows – constrained by both the performance of CPU-bound databases, but also by the performance of in-browser visualization solutions. To go beyond those limitations meant waiting minutes, if not hours to see your results. MapD’s GPU-powered software reframes that conversation.

Now hundreds of billions of rows can be scanned and visualized in less than a second. The ability to truly explore massive datasets, the way humans crave, rapidly testing and validating hypotheses with millisecond response times is now possible. Further, the ability to visualize that data – at any level desired, comes into frame; from a model of every wind pattern in the Pacific to a single gust of wind, from 1.2 billion taxi rides in NYC to a single trip to JFK, from hundreds of millions of political donations to those on your street.

The biggest challenges facing the financial services industry invariably involve data. Creating a framework to evaluate every datapoint, without downsampling or indexing means we can engage broadly, rapidly and successfully on issues like alpha generation, fraud, AML and operational risk.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that my favorite implementation was our Tweetmap. It was the first thing I built and was the primary tool to explain the power of speed at scale for several years. We have since expanded, not just in terms of other public demos but in terms of what our clients are doing.

This is what excites me the most – the types of problems our clients are applying our technology to solve. In financial services, it is clearly our hedge fund clients, who are looking at billions of rows of data (production data, clickstream data, product data, weather data) to find nuggets of alpha. These are challenges that were simply too big for their existing infrastructure and their ability to look across all of it means that they can “see” more than their competitors. They like that.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

See Symphony Software Foundation and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Gabriele Columbro, Symphony Software Foundation’s Executive Director:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I have been in the open source software business for about 15 years now, across Italy, Netherlands, UK and the United States. Given my early engagement with mainstream open source communities, I am an Apache Software Foundation committer, and having covered virtually every technical role (Sales Engineer, Principal Consultant, Head of Support, Product Manager) in an enterprise open source company like Alfresco, I have built a deep understanding of every persona’s perspective on technology.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Our Foundation’s key differentiation is definitely the open source + open standards combination we can bring to the financial services industry on a pervasive technology like the Symphony platform. With the impressive roster of Members and our Foundation features, we feel we have an unprecedented opportunity to enable traditionally siloed firms to collaborate in the open, providing a leveled playing field for larger FinServ and smaller FinTech firms to bring true innovation to the industry.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Our Foundation hosts around 50 open source projects, so it’s a hard choice. I believe the most powerful usage of the Symphony platform in the trading world is through its bots, which can perform natural language processing and bring so much needed automation in the trading front-office and most importantly back-office workflow.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

See Finicity and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Nick Thomas, Finicity’s Co-Founder & EVP:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?
Before joining Finicity, I worked for organizations of all different sizes, including Komodo, Unicity, 3Com, US Robotics and Megahertz. Overall, I have more than 20 years of experience in technology design, development and marketing. More than 15 of those years have been focused on personal financial wellness and data aggregation. I’ve spoken internationally on topics such as fintech, finance, regulatory standards, crowdfunding and mobile payments, and my views on mobile technology, pervasive computing, APIs and credit/lending decisioning have been featured in major media outlets like American Banker.

As the co-founder of Finicity and executive vice president of our data services business, I oversee a passionate and energetic team dedicated to innovating in the financial services sector.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

At FinDEVr New York, we’ll be demonstrating our new Finicity Connect drop-in UI widget, which will enable developers of financial management, payment and lending apps to more rapidly stand up Finicity’s data insights and aggregation services. This is an exciting fintech solution because it further simplifies the experience of utilizing our rich aggregation platform. Our technology is a game-changer because it’s a great example of utilizing big data to transform industries and day-to-day living for individuals.

For example, utilizing our modern RESTful API, we can now incorporate transaction data into an existing business system, like loan origination. We’re digitizing the credit decisioning process, making it faster, simpler, more secure and more accurate — while also making it a better experience for lenders and consumers. It really will be transformational.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

One of our favorite implementations of our data insights and aggregation technology will be in the credit and lending space. By utilizing the real-time data we can access through aggregation, we’re able to generate asset and income verification reports. This is a key component of the loan origination process which, to date, has basically been a “pen and paper” process.

Now, we are enabling lenders to see validated information rapidly. For consumers, they won’t have to chase down all the information, and that’s just the beginning. With real-time data, we’ll actually be able to generate a financial health picture for those that may be well suited for a loan but don’t have the credit history a lender is looking for. This is just one example of an industry that we’re transforming with our solutions. There are others we’re already helping, and I’m sure we’ll see new ones pop up in the future.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

See Prevoty and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Kunal Anand, Prevoty’s CTO & Co-Founder:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I started my career as a Software Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA Space Center located in Southern California. In my role, I got to work on a combination of business applications and space/mission software. It was great to experiment with novel programming languages and homegrown frameworks – and there were plenty! The most important lesson I learned was how to work with a multi-disciplinary team at the rapid pace of business. I’m grateful to the many managers and mentors I had to help me learn the characteristics to become a leader.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing
about your technology?

At Prevoty, we’ve developed a technology that automates security controls and intelligence from within applications. We’ve taken it a step further by marrying an application’s context with a language theoretic methodology (LANGSEC) that doesn’t rely on past definitions and signatures. This approach is the reason that Prevoty’s runtime security solution can work in production and at scale (processing millions of requests per second). The technology works across polyglot environments (.NET, Java, Ruby, Python, Node, PHP, etc.) and different kinds of apps (web apps, web services, micro-services, third party apps, etc.).

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Of the dozens of implementations, a few of my favorite include: A) a global payments provider that processes millions of RPS, B) the world’s largest e-commerce and retail stores – you can imagine the threat landscape and scale during Cyber Monday, and C) an innovative health care provider (Oscar). All of our customers are doing very novel things with our intelligence: some are using it to automate an overall defense network (coordinating with other technologies/products/services) while others are using it to prioritize secure coding work or build a risk heat map across the organization.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

See FixNix and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Shanmugavel Sankaran, FixNix’s Chief Nixer:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I have 11 years’ experience in the IT security field at Microsoft and IBM. This career path gave me a wide exposure to IT security challenges and mitigating them. The complexity of the security issues provided me intricate details of the technology revolving around IT security.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

FixNix’s unique positioning is the cloud offering of products the likes of RSA and metric stream. Its intuitive UI and seamless workflows enable users to reduce man-hours involved in the process. GRC for anyone will be the advantage of the FixNix products.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Implementing RBI security framework through their cloud for co-operative society banks in India to use compliance products. This enabled them to follow compliance as a culture where the product is affordable and requires less training. This has brought down risks considerably in their process management.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

See FairCom and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Evaldo Horn de Oliveira, FairCom‘s Director of Business Development:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I started my career as a researcher working on automation and artificial intelligence systems, controlled by neural networks. That quickly evolved into a system architect role in software development, leading teams to develop tailor-made solutions for a multitude of enterprise-level customers.

Over my career I have worked with major clients such as Coca-Cola, GM, Citibank, Bank of New York, among many others, in a variety of operating systems, programming languages and databases. The design, implementation, and delivery of these projects gave me a deep understanding of the complexity of the co-existence of DevOps. This experience led to a clear insight of how critical it is to keep thinking out-of-the-box to create unique solutions that cover so many requirements. Knowing the limitations of the infrastructure helps me today to support the decision process of customers when selecting new technologies. It also helps me define the roadmap our solutions need to follow to attend to the future needs of these customers.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Our technology has evolved over the last 30 years to become the leader in the non-relational database market. We focus not only on performance and reliability, but also on our unique capabilities of flexible data schema management. Our customers have leveraged our technology as a competitive advantage to became leaders in their fields: payment systems, fund management, meta-data processing, and ERPs, to name a few. They all have a common need to manipulate non-relational data in an ultra-high throughput scenario, without sacrificing reliability. The additional capability of SQL that comes with our technology completes the offer, allowing these customers to integrate both non-relational and relational worlds on top of a single data set. High availability and recoverability are crucial in an embedded environment, making us the leaders in embedded transactional ACID databases.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

It’s hard to pick a single favorite implementation when there are so many cases that are unique in terms of innovation. If I have to pick one, my choice would be Visa Europe. A typical non-relational database environment, Visa Europe processed more than 18.9 billion transactions in 2015, peaking in excess of 2,000 transactions per second, with service levels and standards for authorized and cleared transactions at 99.999%. The Visa Europe network has maintained 100% availability for more than 100 months in a row, relying on our database technology to achieve such levels of reliability and performance. This would not be achievable with a relational-only database, mainly because a typical payment transaction requires zero relationship checks. We are very proud of this implementation, which is running and constantly expanding for several years already.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.