Big Data In Banking

Abhishek is an expert in the areas big data and consumer payments.

He is the co-founder of Tresata, a big data startup that helps companies identify their core data assets, manage, maintain and enhance the intrinsic value in them and build data factories and products to monetize that value.

Abhishek has over a decade of experience in various strategic and operational leadership roles in banking, technology and consulting. Abhishek is also a Member of the Faculty at one of the premier Retail Banking Management Programs in the US.

A featured speaker on these topics, Abhishek is a die-hard supporter of all things open source and is recognized in the industry as a visionary on how to create value by building, transforming (or disrupting) business eco-systems.

Abhishek is also the Founder and President of Foundation Ten10, a one-of-a-kind network driven non-profit focused on training, educating and nurturing children with learning disabilities.

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Roy Lowrance has worked at the intersection of business strategy and technology strategy for almost 40 years. As a management consultant, he worked at McKinsey and Company where he focused on financial services companies. He then was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group, where he focused on leveraging information technology for competitive advantage and was responsible for the information technology practice in the Americas. In information technology organizations, he was CTO at Capital One and at Reuters. At present, he is the Acting Director of New York University’s center for computational economics within the Courant Institute. Mr. Lowrance is a founder of Advanced Valuation Analytics Corporation where he develops real estate valuation and mortgage default prediction models. He has a B.A. in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He is a doctoral student in machine learning at NYU.

RICHARD PRAGER is Managing Director and Global Head of BlackRock’s Trading and Capital Markets for Fixed Income. He is a member of the Fixed Income Executive Committee, BlackRock’s Operating Committee and oversees and coordinates all trading across BlackRock’s fixed income platform.

Prior to moving to his current role, Mr. Prager was a member of BlackRock’s Financial Markets Advisory Group (FMA) within BlackRock Solutions. FMA advises clients in managing their capital markets exposure and businesses. Prior to joining BlackRock in 2009, Mr. Prager worked for Bank of America for over eight years in several senior management roles, and was most recently Global Head of Rates, Currencies and Commodities. Previously, Mr. Prager oversaw other parts of the Global Markets business, had several regional leadership roles in Latin America and Asia and served as the Enterprise Risk Manager. From 1999 to 2000, he worked for General Re Financial Securities, where he headed Northern European sales. Previously, he was a Managing Director and the Global Co-head of Emerging Markets and High Yield at Internationale Nederlanden Groep. From 1984 to 1993, Mr. Prager worked at Westpac Banking Corporation as a Senior Vice President and Chief Manager of Global Derivatives. He began his career at Noonan Astley & Pierce as a foreign exchange broker.

Mr. Prager earned a BS degree in zoology from Duke University in 1981.

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Allen Weinberg is a director in the New York office, and a co-leader of the Operations & Technology Practice.

He has served a broad range of financial services companies on IT and operations strategy and redesign. Examples of his work include: developing an IT and operations strategy for a global universal bank; an IT infrastructure offshoring strategy for a global broker dealer; an online strategy study for a leading U.S. retail/high-net-worth brokerage; a mid- and back-office redesign project for a commodity trading organization, focusing on opportunities to reduce errors and implement straight through processing; and an IT vision project for a global investment bank, to develop the strategy, governance and metrics for the IT infrastructure and applications development group.

Allen is a consistent contributor to McKinsey’s knowledge building efforts in investment banking, sales and trading, IT and operations, and outsourcing and offshoring. He is a member of McKinsey’s Non-Profit Practice, and has worked extensively with the Robin Hood Foundation on strategic issues.

Allen has a BA in history and psychology from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an MA in Politics and Economics from Oxford University, and a JD degree from Harvard University Law School.

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