Speakers

Arkadi Kuhlmann, Founder & CEO, ZenBanx Holding Ltd
Arkadi Kuhlmann’s vocation and avocation have been to reinvent and revitalize consumers’ relationship with their money. Kuhlmann introduced the world to direct banking with a simplified customer focus when he founded ING DIRECT Canada in 1996, creating the brand strategy, recruiting the senior leadership team and growing the bank during 1996-2000 to a successful market position while serving as the bank’s president and CEO. He then repeated this process in 2000, founding ING DIRECT USA and led its growth to become the nation’s largest savings bank and number one direct bank, with more than $84 billion in deposits and 7.8 million customers. As the bank’s chairman, president and CEO, Kuhlmann executed his vision to create a retail-focused bank that offered an easy-to-use savings, checking, mortgages, and investment products direct to consumers. Following the sales of ING DIRECT USA, Kuhlmann founded ZenBanx in 2012 and began creating the next generation of global, mobile banking.

Usha Ananthasubramanian, Chairman and Managing Director, Bhartiya Mahila Bank Ltd
Usha Ananthasubramanian is the chairman and managing director of Bhartiya Mahila Bank a bank focussed on the banking needs of women and on promoting female empowerment in India. Ananthasubramanian started her career in the actuarial department with Life Insurance Corporation and subsequently started her banking career with Bank of Baroda. Before she joined Bharatiya Mahila Bank, she was executive director at Punjab National Bank. In a banking career spanning over 31 years, Ananthasubramanian has worked in various positions as well as been nominated leader of the core management team constituted by the Ministry of Finance to coordinate the establishment of Bharatiya Mahila Bank.

Neal Cross, MD & Chief Innovation Officer, DBS Bank
Neal Cross is managing director and chief innovation officer at DBS Bank as well as a strong advocate for a culture of innovative thinking. Cross has more than 20 years’ experience in financial services technology. Prior to DBS, Cross was at MasterCard where he was responsible for driving innovation as vice president of MasterCard labs in the company’s Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa regions. Cross started working in the Asia region with Microsoft in Australia and later in Singapore as financial services industry director. Currently, as DBS moves to shape the future of banking, Cross is driving the bank’s innovation agenda to enhance customer experience and better engage customers in the digital landscape.

Axel Winter, Global Head of Process & Data Architecture, Standard Chartered Bank
Axel Winter is global head of process & data architecture at Standard Chartered Bank where he started out gaining ownership of key transactional banking platforms. In the past, Winter has worked as CTO for Cisco Systems, global chief architect at GE Capital, and as a consulting executive for Deloitte and Accenture pioneering their cloud and e-business. In the earlier nineties Winter ran a startup which aimed to implement internet and e-businesses in various countries across the Asia region.

C K CHAN, Global Head of Digital Mobile and Channels Engineering, HSBC
C K Chan has overall responsibility for the development and deployment of mobile banking systems and engineering of a new series of channel services to support the digital strategy of HSBC. He began his career as an engineer in Fairchild Semiconductors, and entered his IT career with Hong Kong Telephone before joining HSBC's newly set-up group systems development centre in Vancouver, Canada in 1990. He moved back to Hong Kong in 2007 to lead the channel systems development teams. During his 24 years with HSBC he led developments in core banking, CRM, data warehouse, and front-end systems, which are deployed in banks across multiple countries.

Patrick Maes, GM Strategy & Planning, Global Technology Services and Operations (GTSO) and CTO, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ)
Patrick Maes currently leads ANZ group’s technology, services and operations (GTSO), responsible for defining the strategy for the GTSO division and helping the group execute this strategy by driving efficient delivery of technology. He is an executive with over 30 years’ experience in banking, advanced technology, architecture, systems development, and management consulting. He joined ANZ in August 2010 as CTO and GM technology strategy & enterprise architecture. Prior to this, Maes was with HCL Technologies as global principal consultant, investment and transaction banking. He has worked with many companies across Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, including start-up investment bank WIT Capital, Rabobank International, IBM, and Axa amongst others.

Micky Lo, MD & Chief Information Risk Officer APAC, BNY Mellon
Micky Lo joined BNY Mellon in July 2013 as chief information risk officer APAC. He has over 25 years of IT experience in the financial services industry spanning multiple disciplines, including regional and location management, IT and security architecture, distributed computing engineering, technology infrastructure operation, outsourcing/in-sourcing management, IT risk management and technology audit. Prior to joining BNY Mellon, Lo was the head of IT security APAC and head of technology Greater China for Deutsche Bank. He has also held various key management positions at JPMorgan and Citibank. Lo serves as an advisory board member of the information systems faculty at City University of Hong Kong and as industry advisor of the bachelor of management science and information management programme of Hang Seng Management College.

Dennis Khoo, MD and Head of Personal Financial Services, Singapore, United Overseas Bank
Dennis Khoo is the managing director and head of personal financial services, Singapore at United Overseas Bank (UOB) where he is responsible for consumer banking business in Singapore, covering all consumer banking products and segments from core banking to privilege banking. Prior to joining UOB in 2013, Khoo worked for Standard Chartered Bank, holding various positions including global head, personal and preferred banking, head of consumer banking (Singapore & Brunei), general manager, lending/retail banking products, wealth management and head of marketing, business intelligence, e-commerce & strategy. He started his career with Hewlett-Packard.

Feng Li Hua, Assistant President and Head of Retail Banking, Bank of Beijing
Feng Li Hua has been assistant president and head of retail at Bank of Beijing since 2011. She has also been director of corporate finance, private banking and wealth management since 1996. Feng specialises in wealth management and customer relationship management, and helped built the foundation of retail banking business branding and customer segmentation, devoting herself to maintaining rapid growth and the development of the scale of customer. She has won several awards due to her outstanding performance in wealth management. She also serves as director of Bank of Beijing Scotiabank Asset Management.

Abhijit Singh, Head of Retail Bank Technology, ICICI Bank
Abhijit Singh heads the retail technology group at ICICI Bank. He is responsible for the provision of technology services to the retail bank, rural and inclusive banking as well as SME and mid-corporate segments. Singh has experience in managing large scale IT transformational projects across retail and commercial banking, global transaction services, private banking and global markets. He set up and managed an IT captive organization servicing 50+ countries across all continents providing technology development, production support and project delivery services. Singh also set up a centre for excellence to manage large-scale core banking implementations and to provide post implementation support. Prior to ICICI Bank, Singh held IT leadership roles for RBS, ABN Amro Bank, ANZ and NSE IT.

Subba Vaidyanathan, Executive Director and Global Head of Transformation for Retail Products, Standard Chartered
Subba Vaidyanathan currently works as the head of transformation for retail products for Standard Chartered Bank. Until recently the bank’s head of retail products for ASEAN, Vaidyanathan has close to 25 years of experience in retail banking and payments across Asia, the Middle East and India, including the management of significant acquisitions and business integrations. His payments experience spans various global payment systems such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and local payment networks like NETS, EzLink and bank to bank payments. Recently he was at the forefront of a market-first mobile payment and banking service, Dash, which was launched in partnership with SingTel.

Arthur Wong, Head of IT, China Construction Bank (Asia)
Arthur Wong is head of IT at China Construction Bank (CCB) Asia and has over 25 years of experience in the field of information technology with major banks and financial institutions in the Asia Pacific region. Wong joined China Construction Bank (Hong Kong) as head of IT in 1996 and left the bank in 2008 for Fubon Bank (HK), Sun Hung Kai Financial and then KKR Asia, where he was also head of IT. Subsequently, he rejoined CCB Asia in early 2014. Wong is also co-founder of popular Hong Kong discussion forum HKGolden.com.

Voranuch Dejakaisaya, Head of Information Technology Group, Krungsri Bank
Voranuch Dejakaisaya has over 20 years in IT banking and finance industry. In July 2009 she was appointed head of information technology at Krungsri Bank. Dejakaisaya has held leading roles in managing a number or IT integrations and acquisition projects. Prior to Krungsri bank, she worked for GE Capital Thailand for 11 years with her more recent position being as IT leader for Southeast Asia global banking responsible for overseeing IT initiatives of GE Money across Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Damien MacRae, General Manager, Premium Banking, Westpac Retail & Business Banking
Damien MacRae was appointed general manager of premium banking at Westpac retail and business banking in June 2012. He leads an international team of bankers located in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and London who provide banking and financial services via a relationship banking model targeting mass affluent customers. In addition he is responsible for Westpac’s migrant and expatriate strategy and leads the retail referral partnerships, business and priority segments. Prior to this he served as state general manager, NSW retail and before that as general manager, Third Party Distribution. MacRae has also held the position of head of secured finance for Westpac, responsible for managing the mortgage portfolio, pricing and process management. Prior to joining Westpac in June 2003, MacRae worked for NatWest in London.

Li Lin, Head of Strategy & Development Department, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank
Li Lin is the general manager of strategy & development department of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. Mr. Li has been engaging in commercial bank operation, management and research for years in the fields of strategy management, risk control and macro-economy. He has published articles in major research magazines and has shared research results on the choices of business model and sustainable growth of domestic commercial banks under the new technology development environment. Recently, Mr. Li’s main research focus is information & communication technology development, mobile internet and the internet and its impact on commercial banks.

Arnab Ghosh, Head of Cards & Consumer Lending, Vietnam International Bank
Arnab Ghosh is a consumer banking and payments professional specializing in emerging markets across the Asia Pacific region. In 2014 he joined Vietnam International Bank as head of cards and consumer lending. Prior to that, he was a director and business head for cards and ATMs at Maritime Bank, Vietnam where he envisioned the payments business strategy for the bank. Ghosh served several roles spanning across sales, marketing and product management for the cards business of HDFC Bank in India. He won multiple awards including the industry’s highest honours for product excellence and marketing in the region.

Lee L. Hou, VP, Information and Security, ZenBanx
Lee L. Hou is currently vice president of information and security at ZenBanx, and has over 25 years of executive leadership experience in banking technology and business processes. He joined Zenbanx with a group of experienced bankers and technologists on a venture to build a new retail mobile platform featuring multi-currency savings and cross border payment services. With ZenBanx, Hou has played a number of leading roles including pioneering its end-to-end cloud-based banking/payment infrastructure and systems, establishing the framework for risk management and regulatory compliance, and managing its overall information and security system. Prior to this, Hou worked for FIS.

David Moskowitz, Founder, Coin Republic
David Moskowitz founded Coin Republic to help educate the public about Bitcoin and create a platform to help them buy and sell the virtual currency easily. He is a successful entrepreneur and operates the only cash-in/cash-out Bitcoin kiosk in Singapore. In June 2013, he launched an online Autobuy system, which allows clients to use their Singapore iBanking accounts to quickly purchase Bitcoin and send them directly to their wallets. He is a well-known Singapore evangelist for Bitcoin and local Bitcoin businesses and has helped to promote Singapore as a Bitcoin hub to the world.

Jerry Ross, Advisory Board Chairman, GlobeOne
Jerry Ross is currently chairman of the advisory board at GlobeOne as well as a lifelong entrepreneur and innovator in the international business and financial world. He has worked on inclusive financial initiatives for numerous multinational organizations and authored several corporate strategic policies advising business leaders on his long-term vision of digital banking and payment technology. These policies are centered on delivering seamless, connected, and convenient experiences for a broad demographic of users. Ross has advised companies, financial institutions, and governments on innovation, strategic design, and financial inclusion in a wide range of industries including banking, consumer goods, high tech, industrial and digital.

Ron Hose, Co-founder and CEO, Coins.ph
Ron Hose is co-founder and CEO of coins.ph, Philippine's leading Bitcoin exchange. Hose was a founding partner at Innovation Endeavors, an early stage venture capital fund backed by Eric Schmidt. He was also co-founder of TokBox, a consumer video conferencing company that was acquired by Telefonica. TokBox was backed by Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, Stanford University and some of Silicon Valleys’ best-known angel investors. Hose holds a Bachelors and Masters degree from Cornell University and is also an active investor and adviser to several Silicon Valley startups.

Nizari Mohamed, Director, Technology Risk Management, RHT Compliance Solutions
Nizari Mohamed has over 20 years of IT experience mostly in the banking industry. He was formerly vice president with JPMorgan Chase leading IT risk management for 15 countries in the Asia Pacific region. He was also the IT security head for Coutts, RBS and vice president for Citibank managing 55 countries in the area of disaster recovery & business continuity. While in Citibank, he was the lead project manager for data center disaster recovery certification SS507. Mohamed was an IT auditor with Ernst & Young during his earlier career.

Keith B. Carter, Visiting Senior Fellow of Decision Sciences, NUS Business School, Singapore
Keith Carter is the author of the book “ Actionable intelligence: A guide to delivering business results with big data fast!” which lays out appropriate ways to establish a culture of fact-based decision making, innovation, forward looking measurements and appropriate high-speed governance. Keith Carter teaches as visiting senior fellow of decision sciences at National University of Singapore’s business school. He has led and established global supply chain initiatives on areas including: Knowledge management, transformation, governance and data management. He previously worked at Estee Lauder in supply chain, and Accenture in financial services and government.

Connie Leung, Senior Financial Services Industry Director, Industry and Global Accounts – Asia, Microsoft
Connie Leung is the senior financial services industry director of worldwide industry and global accounts Asia at Microsoft, providing strategic direction and leadership for all aspects of the financial services business. Before joining Microsoft, Connie was a director, payments & trade markets, Asia Pacific at SWIFT responsible for corporate, payments and trade markets activities in Asia Pacific. Prior to joining SWIFT, Connie held management positions with various financial information services providers including as Misys, Surecomp and Fidelity Information Services, offering trade finance, core banking, treasury and payment systems to banks.

Krupal Raval, Senior Vice President, Finance, Digital Realty
Krupal Raval is the senior vice president, finance for Digital Realty. In this role, he oversees a range of financial functions for the company in the Asia Pacific region, including new potential joint venture partnerships and other new capital transactions. Raval joined Digital Realty in early 2014 as vice president, investor relations, where he was tasked with strengthening investor confidence, helping increase the firm’s equity market capitalization and attracting new investors. Previously he served as the vice president, capital markets at Alexandria Real Estate Equities. He has also been a research analyst for Fidelity Management and Research. Raval has more than 10 years of exposure to the financial services industry, both as a sell-side analyst as well as a buy-side investor.

Luke McCormack, Vice President & Managing Director, Asia Pacific
Luke McCormack is the vice president ad managing director of the Asia Pacific region for Pegasystems. He is responsible for business growth and driving client success and manages the sales and consulting groups located in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing and Bangkok. He has been at Pegasystems for the last ten years and during which time has been responsible for building the APAC professional services business and sales organisation as well as entry into new markets in the ASEAN and Greater China regions. McCormack also worked with organisations such as Accenture and Citibank.

Mitch Green, Principal - Payment Solutions, HCL Technologies
Mitch Green has over 30 years of experience in payments and switching systems on multiple platforms such as ON/2, Euronet Gold-net (IST Switch), Postilion, Base24-eps, UP Hub, MTS and Distra Switch. He has focussed on retail and transaction banking environments with recent attention towards payment hubs and how they can transform the modern payments environment. Green has detailed experience in payment messaging protocols such as ISO 8583 and ISO 20022 as well as the network-specific implementation of these protocols from Visa, MasterCard and SWIFT. At HCL he is responsible providing payments advice and consulting services across the APMEA region.

Rick Woodham, Chief Technology Officer, FIS Asia Pacific
Rick Woodham serves as chief technology officer for FIS in Asia Pacific. In this role, he is responsible for solution innovation, leading edge technology implementations and facilitating banks in their journey to customer centricity. Woodham has been with FIS for more than 20 years in key management roles across many geographical operating units of FIS. He has provided leadership and strategic consulting in retail banking and payment systems. Having worked with banks in the region for more than 12 years, Woodham has an extensive perspective of the regional financial services landscape.

Gaurav Zutshi, Independent Payments Expert
Gaurav Zutshi is an independent consultant in the fin-tech space with over 17 years of experience leading innovation, new product development and business development at top firms including Citibank, Visa, ANZ Bank, IBM, First Data and an entrepreneurial stint at Obopay. Most recently he was vice president for APAC product and innovation at First Data managing the product portfolio and developing innovative solutions for the financial institution, retailers and B2B client segments. Prior to that, at Citibank, Zutshi was SVP of the Asia Pacific innovation lab where he developed product prototypes and new business models around cross-border payments, corporate cards and Forex optimization.

Alexander Escucha, senior vice president, China Banking Corporation, Philippines
Alex Escucha is responsible for strategic planning, investor relations, marketing services, public relations, strategic marketing and customer aspects of IT in China Banking Corp, the first privately owned bank in the Philippines. With over 25 years of banking experience across multiple disciplines, he has management expertise ranging from strategy formulation to project implementation. He has also served as chairman of the Federation of ASEAN Economic Associations.

Hugh Qing Yun Zeng, Research Manager, The Asian Banker
Hugh Qing Yun Zeng recently joined the The Asian Banker as research manager in charge of China research as well as risk management. Prior to joining the company’s China office, he worked for American Express in Singapore. Zeng has also been an investment operations officer at OCBC Bank, where he gained exposure to operations and technology, product, and project management in the areas of QFII, QDII, and wealth management. He was instrumental in helping OCBC build its QDII platform in 2011. He started his career with HSBC where he held the positions of product specialist, wealth management operations associate and settlement analyst.

Advisory Council

Anne Weatherston
Anne Weatherston has over 28 years of experience in banking and technology. She was group CIO of ANZ Bank for four years, during which she was responsible for a major transformation of the bank’s technology strategy which resulted in a major turnaround of underlying infrastructure and the design and execution of a new technology roadmap to underpin the bank's super-regional agenda in Asia. Prior to ANZ, Anne was group CIO at Bank of Ireland. She has also played technology leadership roles at Santander, National Australia Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Eric Tachibana
Eric Tachibana has held senior banking roles at Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and most recently as Chief Operating Officer for the Asia Pacific technology office at UBS where he covered business management, enterprise applied innovation, strategy, marketing and engagement for investment banking, wealth management, and asset management. Eric has experience as entrepreneur in Silicon Valley as well as a successful private equity fund manager. He has also taught as an adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore and Thammasat University business schools. Currently he is working with Amazon Web Services in Platform Strategy and transformation.

Pravir Vohra
Pravir Vohra has over 30 years of working in the banking industry with senior roles in technology at ICICI Bank, State Bank of India and Times bank. He retired as the President and Group Chief Technology Officer of ICICI Bank in 2012 where he was responsible for IT strategy and innovation, enterprise architecture, process automation and leveraging technology synergies across the operations of the bank. Pravir is now a mentor to two start-up companies and advisor to a few technology companies.

Jaspar Roos, Chief Inspiration Officer, XL Family and Founding Partner, Ventur.es
Jaspar is a renowned authority in the field of innovation and was chief inspiration officer for ABN AMRO Bank for many years. Managing the innovation and venturing lab Dialogues Incubator, Jaspar has been one of the pioneers in themes such as wearable technology and crowdfunding. He is also a columnist with the Dutch Financial Times, international keynote speaker, advisory board member of an hospital incubator and expert innovation member of the OISP group for the European Commission. He is partner at XL Family, an international incubator and accelerator.

Programme Manager
Gerlinde Gerber
ggerber@theasianbanker.com

Delegate Registrations & Sponsorships
Janice Chua
jchua@theasianbanker.com