Past Speakers Americas

Balaji Ganesan is CEO and co-founder of Privacera, a SaaS-based data access and governance platform that enables analytics teams to access data without compromising compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and HIPAA. Before Privacera, Balaji and Privacera co-founder Don Bosco Durai, also founded XA Secure. XA Secure’s was acquired by Hortonworks, who contributed the product to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache RangerTM. Apache Ranger is now deployed in thousands of companies around the world, managing petabytes of data in Hadoop environments. Privacera’s product is built on the foundation of Apache Ranger and provides a single pane of glass for securing sensitive data across on-prem and multiple cloud services such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, GCP, Snowflake, and Starburst and more. To learn more visit https://www.privacera.com or follow the company @privacera.

Mr. Navarro is responsible for the strategic planning and project management unit. In his role of strategist, he assures the bank is aligned and focused on its priorities. He has advanced analytical skills and a continuous improvement mindset to the bank. Before joining Banesco USA, he worked for 4 years at Banesco International as a Strategic Planning Consultant supporting all affiliates of the Banesco Group in their Strategic Planning Process. Rafael has an Engineering Degree and holds an MBA Degree with a Finance Concentration from Babson College where he graduated Magnacumlaude.

Jonathan Alloy is a transformative, innovative, and inclusive business and technology leader in New York, with a record of delivering compelling digital products for Credit Suisse as VP Design Thinking, Wells Fargo as VP Technology and Innovation, and DuPont as Marketing and Strategy Manager. As well as inspiring diverse global teams and generating excitement from applied creativity at Fortune 100 companies, he has also trained NASA executives in crisis communications and served as Deputy Marriage Commissioner for San Francisco. He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan and is completing a Master’s in International Relations at Harvard University.

Allan is an accomplished banker and leader with a twenty year track record as a commercial banker and market executive in the commercial banking and specialty finance space. Allan is also former CEO and Co-Founder of PaidUp, a financial technology company designed to support youth sports clubs. Allan and his co-founders launched the startup in Austin, TX where they supported youth sports clubs across the domestic U.S. Applying what he has learned in FinTech and banking, Allan is now Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Technology Officer at an entrepreneurial bank called @encorebank.

After earning his undergraduate marketing degree, Allan earned his MBA from Texas Tech University in 2000. In 2014, Allan also earned his Certified Private Wealth Advisor designation through the Investment Management Consultants Association (“IMCA”) and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Featured as a “Top 100 Women in Fintech” by Fintech Magazine, Cory McCruden (she/her) is a thought leader and senior consultant to the wealth and asset management and banking industries and an expert in Client Experience and Digital Transformation. Cory works with financial services leaders on growing and scaling their businesses and creating work cultures where teams thrive. She is a regular speaker and writer on fintech, the future of work, technology, marketing, and diversity and inclusion in financial services.

Cory was the Chief Client and Advisor Experience Executive at Waddell and Reed, a Fortune 500 wealth manager with over 1300 advisors and $70 Billion in client assets, and was the Head of Digital Client Experience at RBC supporting the business client segment, representing $4 Billion in revenue and supporting nearly one million customers. In these roles, she significantly improved profitability, launched market leading value propositions and campaigns, and increased client and advisor engagement and satisfaction.

A Rotary Scholar and graduate from Yale University, Cory has passed the Series 7, CFA Exam Levels I and II, CAIA Exam Level I, and the Canadian Securities Course. She is a proud graduate of New York City’s public school system, and serves on the Board of Yale’s Graduate School Alumni Association, where she is Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. Cory is based out of her hometown, New York City and believes in a holistic approach to work and life, enjoying raising her nine year old son, traveling, practicing yoga, and exploring and supporting local arts communities and creators wherever she goes.

Ruchi is a Product Executive, Digital Transformation Leader, and Innovation Catalyst with more than a decade of experience across Banking & Financial Services, Global E-commerce, and Management Consulting.

At People’s United Bank, Ruchi currently heads Enterprise Digitization leading Strategy, Partnerships, Process Optimization, Product Management, and overall execution. Previously as Director of Digital Products at the bank, she has successfully led Commercial Digital Identity Tokens, Bank’s Conversational Voice Banking platform on Amazon Alexa and enabled several large-scale strategic initiatives including SBA PPP commercial lending, Capital Markets LIBOR regulatory changes as well as Interest rate reduction program for retail customers driving Bank’s resiliency to succeed during pandemic times.

Prior to Banking, Ruchi has led Global Product Line across 40+ countries scaling services including launching, building the very first SaaS B2B enterprise product at Pitney Bowes, along with being an entrepreneur/Founder.

Ruchi is also a featured speaker on the American Banker Thought Leadership series on Digital transformation, a Keynote speaker on Future DIgital Finance, and a panelist on other industry panels. She is also part of “Women in Product” at Facebook and was selected to the very first Facebook Inaugural conference being one of 250 women selected out of 3000 candidates worldwide along with selected to be part of summits like “The Fortune Most Powerful Women in NEXT-GEN” in technology by invite only.

She believes in giving back to the community, supporting diversity, and advancing women’s careers.

Alex Yang is responsible for CashPro Connectivity and data transmission security, the CashPro API client community, and GTS’ open banking strategy. He and his fellow product managers focus on how they can best deliver commercial banking data and services to clients and their technical service providers in real-time. He serves on the board of the Afinis organization, and enjoys collaborating with industry peers on the topic of API standardization.

Alex joined Bank of America as a summer intern, and has spent his entire career in GTS product management. He has been responsible for global payments and foreign exchange, EDI and ISO XML, invoice presentment and biller gateways, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Treasury Management System (TMS) integration.