AI in Finance

Heather Bellini brings over two decades of experience in technology and financial services to her role at InvestCloud. Before joining the company, she served as CFO at cybersecurity software firm Deep Instinct and spent nearly 10 years as a Partner and Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, where she led the Technology Research Group specializing in software equity research and analysis. A seasoned leader, Heather has overseen and led research diligence and investor education on over 20 IPOs for numerous tech companies and currently drives InvestCloud’s financial strategy, ensuring sustainable growth and value creation​.

Aaron Brown spent 40 years on Wall Street as a trader, portfolio manager, head of mortgage securities and risk manager for some of the largest global financial institutions, the last ten as risk manager for AQR Capital Management. He has written books (The Poker Face of Wall Street, Red-Blooded Risk, Financial Risk Management for Dummies and A World of Chance), and many articles, including regular columns for Bloomberg and Wilmott magazine, as well as a video series, “Wrong Number” for Reason Magazine. Aaron holds an SB degree in applied mathematics from Harvard, and an MBA in finance and statistics from the University of Chicago. He splits his time between Manhattan, Las Cruces and Coronado Island.

Currently CEO of Revolut in the UK, Francesca is a growth-leader and entrepreneur with almost 20 years of experience in financial services. Before joining Revolut in December 2023, she was CEO of Molo, the UK’s first digital mortgage lender, a company which she founded in 2017 and grew successfully to exit in 2023. Previously Francesca had held several senior roles in some of the largest banks in Europe, including Deutsche Bank and Barclays. She started her career in consulting and private equity at McKinsey & Co. and Bridgepoint Capital between London and Milan. She holds a PhD in Banking and Finance from the University of Rome, MBA (Hons) from Columbia Business School, Diploma from Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Francesca was nominated a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2014. 

When she is not busy with work, Francesca enjoys spending time with her two sons, playing the piano, travelling and playing any type of sport.

Xiaomo (Shawn) Liu is an Executive Director at JP Morgan AI Research focusing on machine learning and natural language processing to improve the productivity in financial services. 

Prior to JP Morgan & Chase, Xiaomo was a Director of Data Science at S&P Global and a senior research scientist at Thomson Reuters. His work has been reported by numerous news media and won industry awards for inventing AI-driven technologies such as Reuters Tracer and Westlaw Quick Check. 

Xiaomo holds a PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. Through his career, Xiaomo published more than 50 peer reviewed papers and 10 US patents in the area of NLP and AI.

Nan Lu is a Director at BlackRock AI Labs. Nan focuses on Asset Strategy / Financial Engineering at BlackRock, leading efforts in equity finance, capital markets, and prime finance use cases by applying machine learning, quantitative modeling, and optimization. Over the past two years, Nan has initiated efforts to apply AI in the fundamental investment process at BlackRock.  Nan has hands-on knowledge of quantitative financing and LLM driven AI development for investment industry.

Before joining BlackRock, Nan spent 15 years in Prime Brokerage at Credit Suisse, where he led development in trading, inventory management, and pricing strategies serving hedge fund clients. During this time, the technology used included quantitative modeling, big data, and machine learning. 

Nan graduated with a B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, before attending the University of Maryland at College Park, where he earned an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Nan is also a CFA charter holder and volunteers as a mentor for the CFA financial analyst competition, which is participated in by students from business schools.

Jeff McMillan serves as Head of Firmwide Artificial Intelligence. In this role, McMillan works across the Firm to help install and ensure appropriate AI strategy and governance, partnering with the various business and infrastructure areas to identify and prioritize AI opportunities. 

Previous to this role, McMillan served as Head of Analytics, Data, and Innovation for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, where he played a key role in driving the technological evolution of the business. Jeff has held a variety of leadership roles at Morgan Stanley, as well as other financial services firms in the areas of Investment Products, Research, Operations, Digital Strategy and Technology. 

Jeff is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point where he earned a BS in economics. Upon graduation, he served on active duty as an armor officer and scout platoon stationed in South Korea and Fort Knox, KY. Jeff is a 2-time Ironman Triathlete and a competitive boxer with a lifetime record of 1-0.

Vasant Prabhu retired as Vice Chairman & CFO of Visa, Inc in September, 2023. He had been Vice Chairman since 2019, and CFO since 2015. Vasant has been CFO at several large US public companies spanning multiple industries including, financial technology, media, travel, consumer retail and consumer goods. He was EVP & CFO of NBC Universal (2014-2015), Vice Chairman & CFO at Starwood Hotels & Resorts (2004-2014), EVP & CFO, President e-commerce at Safeway (2000-2004).

From 1998-2000, Vasant was President of the Information & Media Group at The McGraw-Hill Companies. He was CFO of various divisions of PepsiCo (1992-1998), including Pepsi-Cola International and PepsiCo Restaurants International. His tenure at PepsiCo included stints overseas in Europe and Latin America. He started his career at Booz, Allen &Hamilton (1983-1992) where he was a Partner serving media and consumer goods companies.

Vasant is a member of the Board of Directors at Delta Airlines and Intuit. He is on the Board of Kenvue, Johnson &Johnson's Consumer Health spin-off, where he Chairs the Audit Committee. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution. In the past, Vasant has served on the Boards of Mattel and Knight Ridder, as well as a Trustee at The Nature Conservancy California and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Vasant holds an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and a BTech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai (India).

Vasant lives in Greenwich, CT with his wife Sumati and their dog Poppy.

Mike Schuster joined Two Sigma in New York as the head of the AI Core team in 2018 and Managing Director where he has been working with a growing team of AI researchers on challenging machine learning problems for the financial space. Previously he was part of the Google Brain team in California, where he co-led the development of the new Google Neural Machine Translation system (featured in the New York Times Magazine article “The Great A.I. Awakening”), worked on large language models and human-like speech synthesis. Earlier at Google he did research and development on all aspects of speech recognition on Android including launching the first versions of the Japanese and Korean speech recognition models, working on YouTube recommendation systems, and many other machine learning related projects. He was also an early contributor to Google’s open-source machine learning toolkit TensorFlow. Mike’s 25+ year professional career brought him to Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, Nuance in the U.S., and NTT in Japan. Mike holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan and a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Gerhard-Mercator University, Germany.

Amanda Stent is the head of AI Strategy & Research in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg. They have worked in several roles in industry and academia. Most recently, they served as inaugural director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College from 2021-2024. From 2016-2021, they served as NLP Architect in Bloomberg's Office of the CTO, a role in which they helped the company achieve and maintain technical excellence and broad applicability of NLP solutions, as well as architected and coordinated the development of new Bloomberg Terminal-based and Enterprise product offerings that use NLP.

They previously held positions as Director, Research and Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo, as Principal Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs — Research, and as associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, NY. Amanda holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester, has authored or co-authored over 100 papers on natural language processing, and is co-inventor on over 35 patents.

Bing Xiang is Head of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research within Engineering. He joined Goldman Sachs in 2023 as a managing director.

Prior to joining the firm, Bing served as a director of Applied Science at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leading AI lab teams across several countries. He was responsible for a dozen of cloud-based AI services in the area of Generative AI, Large Language Model (LLM), code generation, search, question answering, recommendation, forecasting and business analytics. Prior to Amazon, Bing worked at IBM Research, Thomson Reuters and BBN Technologies on various AI, machine learning and natural language processing issues. He has more than 20 years of research and development experience. Bing has published more than 100 papers on AI and machine learning and has numerous patents granted. He serves as an area chair and program committee member at top-tier conferences. 

Bing received a BS degree in Electronics from Peking University in 1995, an MS degree in Signal and Information Processing from Peking University in 1998 and a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2003.