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 NuCypher 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 Michael Egorov, NuCypher‘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?

Before starting NuCypher, I worked on infrastructure tools at LinkedIn, where we faced some of the thorniest scaling challenges in the world. But my background is as a scientist and physicist. I was a bronze medalist in the 2003 International Physics Olympiad and graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. I later worked as a post-doc on ultra-cold atoms in an area closely related to quantum computing.

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

I find the technical details of our proxy re-encryption technology particularly fascinating. In brief, proxy re-encryption allows you to transform data encrypted under one set of keys into being encrypted under a second, different set of keys. This is a direct re-encryption, with no intermediate decryption step. This allows us to do some really neat tricks around key rotation and access delegation for the platforms we support.

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

Simple is good, so I’m going to choose key rotation. Currently, key rotation in Hadoop has to be done manually, which means shutting down encryption zones, sending data to the key management service, decrypting it, encrypting it with the new key, and sending it back to the storage layer. Many of our customers are dealing with petabytes of data and this process can literally take a half or even a full day. A full day of downtime! With NuCypher, we can perform key rotation in a few seconds.

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 CardLinx 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 Silvio Tavares, CardLinx Association‘s CEO & President:

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

An electrical and computer engineer by training, my first job was at AT&T Bell Labs where I worked on one of the earliest methods for web-based payments. Since then, I have authored over fifteen granted or pending patents in the fields of digital commerce, electronic payments and payments analytics. My work in the business side of payments informed the direction of the technologies I pursued. These leadership positions included my time at ABN AMRO Investment Bank in London, where I was Director and Head of Financial Technology Investment.

More recently, I was Global Head of Information Products, SVP at Visa, leading a business unit generating several hundred million dollars in annual sales and successfully launching key new products in the areas of payment fraud detection, digital marketing and merchant loyalty. I joined Visa from First Data, the leading payments processor, where I was Global Head of Information and Analytics, SVP. At First Data I created and launched SpendTrend™, First Data’s U.S. macro-economic spending indicator based on credit card transaction data.

My work at the intersection of payments and technology culminated in the founding of the CardLinx Association, where I am President and CEO. Working with our founding members including Mastercard, Discover, First Data, Facebook and Microsoft, we’ve become the leading voice for the card-linking and online-to-offline industries.

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

Consumer spending makes up 70% of the US economy. 90% of that spending occurs in stores not online. Card-linking enables companies to link a consumer’s online data with their in-store shopping. We are excited to announce to the fintech industry the first open source card-linking software.

The underlying technology was developed by Microsoft and they have provided the codebase for its Earn card-linking platform on the CardLinx website. It is free and publicly available. The software demonstrates API access to the leading payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover) and is available for banks, digital publishers, messaging platforms and other tech companies to build on the code and bring their card-linking and loyalty programs more quickly to market.

Just as other platforms experienced explosive growth after APIs were made available, like Apple’s App Store and Facebook’s messaging API, an open source card-linking code is the next logical step in the development of card-linking and the overall growth of the online-to-offline industry.

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

We released the open source code at the beginning of January. At this time there are a number of companies using it as a foundation for their own card-linking and loyalty programs. I will be excited to share the names of the companies at my demo on March 21 at FinDEVr New York!

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, Cooper Press, 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 NuCypher 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 MacLane Wilkison, NuCypher‘s CEO & 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’m a software engineer at heart but started my career at Morgan Stanley where I advised technology, media, and telecommunications companies on M&A and equity/debt financings. I spent a lot of time covering internet infrastructure
during the early innings of cloud infrastructure. I also saw first-hand the security and compliance obstacles faced by large enterprises in adopting these new technologies. At NuCypher, a lot of the problems we’re solving have to do with removing these roadblocks to cloud and big data adoption.

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

We embed access policies directly into encryption so that security follows the data wherever it goes. This allows us to deliver the full security of encryption while avoiding the typical functionality and performance tradeoffs.

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

I’m particularly excited about the use cases we’re seeing around secure and auditable cross-organizational sharing of encrypted data. With NuCypher, it’s possible to delegate and revoke access to your data to third-parties in a cryptographically secure way. We have several customers building shared industry data lakes with multiple participants contributing data — something which historically has required a trusted third party to manage.

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.