Our fintech_devcon speaker lineup – Part 3

Keynote

Generative AI and the next era of fraud detection

🏆 Neha Narkhede - Co-founder and CEO at Oscilar

Where do we even begin with Neha? She’s a genuine star in the tech world. Born and raised in Pune, India, she moved to the US in 2006, earned a master’s in computer science, and went on to lead the data streams charter at LinkedIn. While there, she and her co-founders created Apache Kafka, and then went on to co-found Confluent, where she led product and technology. Now, in her current role as co-founder and CEO of Oscilar, Neha is one of America’s wealthiest self-made women.

In other words, she’s amazing and her keynote will be equally impressive. Neha will describe a new category of risk management—AI Risk Decisioning—where real-time generative AI and a natural language interface work together to respond faster and more effectively to fraud and risk. She’ll walk us through the six foundational pillars of AI Risk Decisioning and how they transform the way we understand, detect, and mitigate fraud. And this won’t be purely theoretical; Neha will walk us through the real-world applications and benefits of AI Risk Decisioning, including faster investigations and response times, the detection of complex fraud schemes, and fewer false positives. Whether you’re into AI, serious about security, or just want to feel smarter, you won’t want to miss Neha’s keynote.

Workshop sessions

Secure coding demystified: data security best practices

🏆 Ryan Cooke - Co-founder and CEO at Jumpwire

🏆 William Huba - Co-founder and CTO at Jumpwire

Ryan has nearly 20 years of experience working at early-stage startups. He’s been a co-founder of several companies, from enterprise SaaS to a neobank and payments company. Trained as an engineer, Ryan still looks for chances to code whenever he can; his enthusiasm for secure development drives him to sharpen his skills as a white-hat hacker. William is an engineer who’s held infrastructure roles at Spotify and Google and enjoys working with distributed systems to solve (and sometimes create) problems. He holds a BS in Information Security and Forensics from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Together, these Jumpwire founders will lead a hands-on workshop where attendees will refactor a web application to improve its defense against common risks—including the new categories added to the OWASP Top 10 in 2021. If you’re looking to level up your secure coding skills, this is the session for you.

Leveraging LLMs and proactive messaging to build support function

🏆 Joe Emison - Co-founder and CTO at Branch

🏆 Arvind Sontha - CEO at Kyber

With degrees in both English and Mathematics, Branch Co-founder Joe Emison has a talent for tapping into both the right and left side of his brain. Throw in a law degree from Yale Law and it’s obvious that he has smarts to spare. Joe has founded numerous companies, all valuable enough to be bought: BuildFax (acquired by DMGT), Spaceful (acquired by Xceligent), BluePrince (acquired by Harris Computer), and EphPod (acquired by Wind Solutions). Arvind Sontha, CEO of Kyber, signed on full-time with Google when he was just 19 years old, led an ML Engineering Team on Google Search, and he’s a licensed P&C Broker. Arvind is currently the primary developer building Branch’s solution with Joe.

Arvind and Joe will be walking workshop attendees through their current stack, processes, and how they’ve made use of LLMs in the context of member support. They’ll share what they’ve learned while iterating on their technology and support practices over the last five years. Don’t miss the chance to learn how they’ve kept customer reviews at 4.8/5.0 and higher—unless customer satisfaction doesn’t matter to you. (We’re guessing it does, though.)

Roadblock sessions

​How to avoid the mistakes everyone makes in fintech

🏆 Simon Taylor - Head of Strategy and Content at Sardine

You might know Simon Taylor from his Fintech Brain Food blog, which has more than 30,000 subscribers across the financial services and technology sector. In his 20+ years in tech and financial services, Simon helped deliver one of the very first mobile banking apps in the UK, led payments change at Barclays, and has worked with a lot of clients (including HSBC, Meta, Stripe) through his advisory firm 11:FS. In other words, he’s done it all. And seen a lot—including some pretty common mistakes. In his fintech_devcon session, Simon will lay out a few simple truths: payments are easy but edge cases are hard; lending is easy but getting paid back is hard; and everything is compliance. He’ll run you through the common mistakes that everyone makes, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to build fintech without blowing up your business. You won’t want to miss this one!

Composable API first design for REST with OpenAPI

🏆 Ross Hamilton - Principal Software Engineer at Deepsee.ai

Ross Hamilton has spent a lot of his 15-year engineering career working with APIs. At Salesforce, Ross was a volunteer member of the Center for Enablement for Commerce Cloud APIs and an active member of the company’s API Stewardship Committee. Ross has also contributed to defining and socializing API standards via Google’s api.dev. He’s currently a Principal Software Engineer at Deepsee.ai, and he’s bringing his API game to fintech_devcon. He’ll talk attendees through the OpenAPI Specification (OAS, formerly known as Swagger), introducing some common pitfalls, how to overcome them, and best practices for following the principles of API First Design. He’ll demonstrate how to build composable schemas, multi-file schemas, compiling multi-file schemas, and, time permitting, how to test and generate code from your schema. Don’t miss this one!

Embracing idempotency: Future-proof your API with zero disruptions

🏆 Mustafa Ali - Founding Software Engineer at Method Financial

Before becoming a Founding Software Engineer at Method Financial, Mustafa earned a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Rochester and worked on product-facing and on-chain applications at Topl, a web-3 ESG protocol. Mustafa will take a deep dive into the concept of idempotency—or the property of identical requests receiving the same response no matter how often requested. He’ll explain why embracing an idempotent-first mindset is vital for API-first companies. He’ll offer practical guidance for engineers, PMs, and builders on how to create idempotent-first APIs without impeding progress—as well as how to incorporate idempotency with minimal changes to code and without disrupting user experiences. If you’re looking for ways to future-proof your product, this concept and this session are musts!

Trailblazing transformation: How to navigate the path from conceptualization to full production

🏆 Jack Gibson - Head of Payments Architecture at J.P. Morgan

Jack Gibson, currently the Head of Payments Architecture at J.P. Morgan, has led projects and strategy for organizations like National City Bank, PNC Financial Services Group, and PayPal. He’s a senior leader who has transformed technology and organizations through architecture, engineering, and mentoring. He brings decades of experience to bear on the questions of how to anticipate and respond when your product, feature, or function fundamentally challenges the status quo of your organization.

Jack will address the impact of organizational and cultural dynamics on building a software platform and share ways to work with and through a multitude of teams to build and drive change. If you’re looking for tips and lessons to make you a better builder and a better leader at scale, Jack’s session is for you.

​From crisis to control: Guiding clients through fraud attacks

🏆 Caroline Lu - Fraud Analytics Manager

Caroline Lu spent four years with American Express in the credit and fraud risk group—where she helped Amex launch their first-ever personal checking account in early 2022. She was also a fraud analytics manager and resident fraud expert at Alloy. Drawing from these experiences, Caroline will share valuable and practical insights into managing fraud—from the initial triage to immediate actionable steps—as well as key analyses to present to clients to help empower them throughout the process. With Caroline’s help, you’ll walk away from this session with strategies for safely reopening operations post-attack and ways to regain control and minimize future risks.

​Bringing a custom LLM to a new market and a new language

🏆 Michael Cullum - VP of Engineering at Bud

Michael Cullum’s been killing it for more than 15 years in software and data platform engineering. And, perfectly in line with fintech_devcon’s mission of sharing knowledge, he’s been actively involved in open source projects with significant contributions to the Symfony and PHP communities. In this session, he’ll be deep diving into large language models. While LLMs have been part of the mainstream conversation for 12 months, Bud’s been training them for almost 12 years. Michael will share what they’ve learned and offer best practices for where to begin incorporating LLMs, how to train them for new languages and markets, and more. In other words, you’ll go way beyond the headlines and buzz surrounding LLMs in this session. Don’t miss it!

Card payments 201: Fundamentals of offering credit

🏆 Pritee Tembhekar - Head of Product at Lithic

Lithic’s Pritee Tembhejar, formerly of Plaid and Coinbase, has a gift for demystifying all things card-payments related. Her session at fintech_devcon will speak to the huge increase in the number and kinds of companies that want to build credit products—particularly credit cards to their users. The truth is that even those of us who understand the basics of card payments sometimes don’t fully grasp all the pieces involved: card processors, lenders, capital needs, servicing, collections, etc. It’s a lot, especially when you add in all the options for each of these building blocks, like what tech is used to build them and how they’re configured. Again, it’s a lot. But Pritee’s here to help. So, if you’re ready to move past Card Payments 101 and level up your understanding of how to build and offer credit products, this session is for you.

Up next

Three speaker roundups down, one to go! Are we saving the best for last? There’s only one way to know for sure… check back here for our final group of speakers. You can also stay updated on all things fintech_devcon-related by signing up for our newsletter. And if you haven’t yet, be sure to register and book your hotel so you won’t miss your chance to connect with other builders and see these speakers live. Stay tuned and we’ll see you soon!