SPEAKERS WE ADORE

Mario Vinasco has over 15 years of progressive experience in data driven analytics with emphasis in machine learning and data scence programming creatively applied to eCommerce, advertising, customer acquisition/retention and marketing investment.  Mario specializes in developing and applying leading edge business analytics to complex business problems using big data and predictive modeling platforms.

Mario holds a Masters in engineering economics from Stanford University and currently works as Director of Analytics and Data Science at Credit Sesame a disruptive FinTech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, responsible for customer management, retention and prediction.

Until recently, Mario worked for Uber Technologies applying data science to marketing investment optimization, advanced segmentation of customers by propensity to act, churn, open email and the set up sophisticated experiments to test and validate hypothesis.

At Facebook in the marketing analytics group he was responsible for improving the effectiveness of Facebook’s own consumer-facing campaigns. Key projects included ad-effectiveness measurement of Facebook’s brand marketing activities, and product campaigns for key product priorities using advanced experimentation techniques.

Prior roles included VP of business intelligence in digital textbook startup, people analytics manager at Google and eCommerce Sr manager at Symantec.

Currently, Audrey heads up the APAC region for ECOMMPAY and is responsible for the overall business and expansion in APAC.
She leads a strong and dynamic team that manages acquisition, engagement, and partner strategy for  Asia. Audrey has more than 17 years of professional experience in brand marketing, business development, market expansion, and partner management.  She is a key talent in digital payments where she was with PayPal and Braintree for 7 years holding multiple portfolios from heading sales and partner teams to Country Manager of Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. She was also instrumental to the growth of Braintree setting up and managing the sales, partner, and accounts team in Asia.

Founding executive of Lenovo's global online strategy, starting in 2006 across it's b2c and b2b businesses. Over the last 13+ years led a global team that has helped craft and drive Lenovo's Global online sales from 5 countries to 35+ countries and lenovo.com's footprint into 90+ countries. During this period revenues and units have grown by over 7X + revenue growth and profits by over 10X in B2C. B2B revenues have increased substantially through custom portals for Global and international customers.

Steve started Crowd Resources Consulting in 2019 to provide non-NASA related organizations with resources for leveraging the crowd-based expertise and
solutions required to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving global economy.
Steve also currently serves as the Deputy Manager of NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI), which is working to infuse challenge and crowdsourcing innovation approaches at NASA and across the federal government. CoECI focuses on the study and use of curated, crowdsourcing communities that utilize prize and challenge-based methods to deliver innovative solutions for NASA and the US government.

Scott Gould is an international speaker and advisor in engagement. He helps changemakers and organisations to get people highly engaged around their mission.
He shows leaders the way to the heart of engagement in a world where so much is only skin deep, which is vital if we are to solve the profound challenges facing humanity today.

Received a bachelor's degree at Volgograd State University with a degree in Finance and Credit. Anton holds a Master's Degree in Science in Financial Mathematics from Halmstad University.

Multilevel experience in the sales and development of Alfa-Bank's corporate business, including the development of relationships with large international clients - KraftHeinz, Mercedes, Uber, etc.
Currently develops international direction of E-commerce in Softline. Anton is responsible for entering new markets and working with global partners in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Mike has been in the payments, chargebacks and fraud arena for 19+ years. He has been in his current role with Ethoca for 3 ½ years working with product department along with card brand rules and regulations. Prior to Ethoca Mike was with a top 3 US Issuer bank and Acquirer for 16 years.

An entrepreneur since the age of 18, Rolands Mesters is a graduate of Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, has been awarded Forbes Latvia 30-under-30 and has graduated Google Demo Days in London.

Andris Anspoks is managing innovation development system in the Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia. Andris also leads Materize – a unit responsible for technology transfer and contract research and Open Access Laboratory concept implementation in the institute, which is linked with organizational changes, quality management system implementation, and long term sustainability of the institute. All this is a key part of the CAMART² project, one of the biggest Horizon 2020 projects in Latvia. Andris also has the experience in the private sector (including Hewlett Packard), have established a couple of companies (Capital, RIX Technologies), worked in public administration (created information systems for Register of Enterprises, Customs and Tax administration). This all allowed him to understand all three parties involved in research: researchers, industry and public administration.

David G.W Birch is an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services. He is Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion (the secure electronic transactions consultancy that he helped to found), Technology Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (the London-based think tank) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey Business School. He is an internationally-recognised thought leader in digital identity and digital money; was named one of the global top 15 favourite sources of business information by Wired magazine and one of the top ten most influential voices in banking by Financial Brand; created one of the top 25 “must-read” financial IT blogs; was found by PR Daily to be one of the top ten Twitter accounts followed by innovators, along with Bill Gates and Richard Branson, rated Europe’s most influential commentator on emerging payments by Total Payments and was recently awarded “Contributor of the Year” by the Emerging Payments Association.

 Education: medical doctor ( radiation oncologist), MBA for RBS, University of Buffalo and the University of Ottawa. Work experience: oncologist, moved to pharma industry - 18 years at pharma, last position - General Manager and Chairman of Board at Roche Finland. Since 2013 - consulting private enterprises and state institutions.

Dr Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating ageing. He received his BA in computer science and PhD in biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian ageing and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

David Francis is the founder and CEO of Ozanam Strategic Insights. He is currently advising Global Data Consortium as it expands into the emerging and developing world. 

Margarita has 10+ years of experience in project management in different spheres like art, design, IT and more than 5 years of experience as a leader and people manager in Product. Her greatest strengths are building great teams and getting things done. Margarita's recent interests are strategy, sustainability and sports (esp swimming).

Maxim has started his career in investment banking and has managed more than 30 deals with a total value of over $500m. In 2012 he started consulting startups which led him to become a co-founder in GR Capital VC firm. He currently manages $70m in assets and leads fundraising of the next GR Capital's fund.

Graduated from the Aviation Institute in 2011 and is in love with aviation with all his heart. Eugene would have become an aerodynamics engineer if he had not become an IT specialist. He joined the ECOMMPAY company in 2017 transferring from a completely different field - healthcare. Before fintech, he dealt with medical and predicative systems. Eugene always puts the reliability of the created and operating systems in the first place. Now Eugene is responsible for stability, operation, SRE and the development of such systems as DWH, RCS, financial system in the company.

Simon Reader is a partner at Ecospend Technologies and Trunor Financial Technologies, based in London, where is responsible for deals, partnerships, growth and vision. His interests include the works of the American social theorist Thomas Sowell, the British educator Tony Sewell and the Canadian human rights activist and broadcaster Mark Steyn. His own work has been published in the Wall Street Journal and featured on the BBC. He is a longtime student of martial arts. 

Artur as a Partner Manager at ECOMMPAY assisted in the implementation of several projects, like the launch of Open Banking in the UK, the launch of Mobile Commerce in the UK, the development of Open Banking by ECOMMPAY. He is the product of owner of various Alternative Payment Methods. Before ECOMMPAY, Arthur worked as a Sales Supervisor at International Travel Network for 1,5 years. 

Hacker and computer security consultant, winner of numerous hacking competitions. Spent half of his life breaking software to see how to fix it.

Ever since early teenage years, Janis has demonstrated a great deal of insight, wisdom and persistence, he concurs with Viktor Frankl on the highest freedom ever given to humanity; to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

He started very low - like a yard keeper, and today Janis is an internationally recognised motivational teacher, life and business coach delivering to projects all around the globe.

Yolanda:
With a solid technical and financial background and multi-lingual, Yolanda has 10 years' experience in international business development e.g in Nordic/Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. Now working as Senior Business Development Manager in Neonomics based in Headquarter Oslo, Norway.

Currently focused on Open Banking, helping Payment Service Providers, Fintechs, ecommerce merchants, banks join the fast race of PSD2 in Europe: facilitate digital payments, bank data retrieving via one powerful Unified API. 

Bjørn: 
With an extensive background in Sales and service, both in B2C and B2B, the past 9 years of which have been at management/C level. Bjørn’s strengths lie in strategy and business development, sales and process optimization and in the ability to build relationships at all levels. Now currently working from the danish office as Country Manager for Denmark, with a full focus to empower a wide selection of industries with access to the newest development in open banking.

As a Partners Team Lead at ECOMMPAY for 4 years, Olga Karablina successfully launched variety of projects for the company: ECOMMPAY as a processor of APPLE PAY, ECOMMPAY as app-in payment in Telegram, ECOMMPAY as a pilot integration into PayPal Commerce Platform, Open-Banking by ECOMMPAY and various integrations with local payment providers globally. 
Before ECOMMPAY, Olga lived in Cape Town, South Africa for 8 years, and worked as a Business Developer Inbound Travel Operator. 

After getting the degree in computer science, Irina had a carrier as a software developer for around 10 years. But then she changed the direction and dived into waters of commerce and business development for international IT companies.

After obtaining an MBA degree, such employers as Elko Group, Xerox, Travelport appeared in her career portfolio. For more than 25 years Irina is dealing with sales and operation management for large international companies, which sell their products or services through a network of partners.

Now Irina works for an online travel agency and is trying to overcome the new reality of the post-pandemic world of 2020.

For the last nine years, Oles has been actively researching and developing computer vision and natural language processing systems.

Since 2018, he’s been working on the face swap technology with a successful launch of the internationally viral app Reface. He has extensive experience in video processing using deep learning methods for detecting objects and actions, predicting image depth maps, semantic segmentation, and generating subtitles for images and video studios in Hollywood. With VideoGorillas, he worked on the 4x resolution increasing in videos and the restoration of Orson Welles’s movie for Netflix.

Together with a team at Reface, he developed and implemented a face swap technology for photos, GIFs and videos – one-of-a-kind universal neural network that is trained to swap any human faces in real-time with just one photo. More than 55 million users have already tried this technology.

Greg Mathers is a senior associate with the Adizes Institute and managing director of Adizes Latvia. Greg regularly works with management teams around the world on organizational therapy and transformation. He has founded and run four of his own businesses in the tourist publications, hospitality and education sectors.

Xavier Gomez is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of INVYO. In 2018, he founded INVYO, a SaaS company that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help financial institutions see tomorrow's opportunities in the Financial sector. Xavier shared a vision that Data analytics will empower human intelligence, as a speaker in different global events (AI for Finance, Paris Fintech Forum, Finovate Series, etc...)  
Before INVYO, Xavier worked for banks, in Credit Suisse, as Director, in a different top management position (wealth management and Investment banking) between London, Paris and Zurich, and in Pictet as a global multi-asset portfolio manager. Xavier has a master from ISC – Institut Supérieur du Commerce (Master Graduate School Management – Finance) in 2000. He holds a certification from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) specialization Fintech (2016) and is a graduate of HEC Paris in Private Equity (Leadership Executive program in Private Equity in partnership with France Invest - French Association of Private Equity) in 2017.

Taavi Tamkivi has been working in the financial crime-fighting field for over a decade. First started out in Skype where he led Fraud, Analytics and Revenue Assurance teams moved on to Transferwise, where ended up leading the global AML team. In 2018, Taavi decided the time is right to launch his own regtech company and focus efforts to build the smart tools financial institutions need to fight financial crime more effectively.

As a Head of Localisation at Skyscanner, Hristina’s main focus is building a strong localisation team and robust processes in order to enable Skyscanner’s teams to build products and create experiences for international users in over 35 languages. In addition, she provides coaching and consulting to help businesses and individuals succeed on their global journey. Hristina is a frequent guest speaker at UX, Product and Localisation conferences and events and has created a signature Localisation workshop for UX Writers and Designers.

Dr Javier Marcos Cuevas, a management educator, researcher and consultant with 20 years of experience working in academia, consultancy and in multinational corporations.

The director of Learning for Performance, a boutique training practice for Sales Effectiveness and Strategic Customer Management. He holds positions as Senior Industrial Fellow at the University of Cambridge IfM ECS, and Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, and teaches at IE, University of Michigan – William Davidson Institute and other business schools.

Building a funding deep-tech startups over the last 7 years, started as a founder of the first Latvian oil&gas engineering startup, later moving deeply into biotech and staying there. Currently - CEO and co-founder of Longenesis, as well as a managing partner of LongeVC - an early-stage longevity-focused 35M EUR seed fund. Visiting faculty at Riga Graduate School of Law, teaching MA courses in IP protection and venture capital.