Thinking Outside
the Vault

As founder and CEO of Upright Position Communications, Paul has worked with some of the world’s leading companies and journalists. Prior to founding Upright in 2012, Paul headed public relations operations for Splunk and Visa, and sat on President Obama’s Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. Prior to moving to California, Paul lived in Singapore for 12 years. Paul holds a degree in Broadcast Journalism from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

Financial services professional focused on providing guidance to companies in the Fintech ecosystem as they navigate partnering with the banking industry. Prior to joining Customers Bank, Brandon has worked for SouthState Bank, Atlantic Capital Bank and Wells Fargo.

Natalia is an Open Finance Specialist at Sensedia, helping businesses through the journey through Open Banking. Natalia is responsible for guiding Brazilian companies in the steps to be compliant with Open Banking regulation. With vast experience in project management, she leads  high-performance teams on the implementation of highly scalable and reliable solutions.

Randy is a leading software industry analyst, integrating diverse bodies of thought to create new and powerful ways to design business software. He has previously worked for companies including Forrester Research, Sprint, and Andersen Consulting. He also writes for Life Love Illusion on topics that are wide ranging at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and culture — reading, watching, walking, and sometimes creating in search of our better selves.

Don leads FDX by engaging with FDX members across the financial services and Fintech ecosystem to develop and implement the FDX API technical standard and to promote FDX’s five principles for permissioned data sharing: Control, Access, Transparency, Traceability & Security. Since its launch in October 2018 with 21 founding members, Don has grown the nonprofit standards body to over 200 member organizations and 28 million consumers have been migrated to the FDX API.Prior to this, Don spent more than 20 years with Bank of America, where he served in key leadership roles as the Privacy Officer of their Military Bank, the Digital Banking VP for Military Bank, VP in Digital Banking, and most recently as a Senior VP in Global Information Security.

Chris enjoys executing on open-ended, challenging, cross-functional organizational problems, projects, and initiatives (without taking an eternity).Chris draws upon successful experiences across a variety of industries and roles such as banking, audit, quality assurance, healthcare, engineering, research, IT, and higher education. Chris is also a consulting professor at Duke University - Fuqua school of business and as an adjunct associate professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. Deeply supportive of startups as they are vehicles for innovation and job creation, he is an angel investor and a startup advisor/mentor for early stage firms from Pre-Seed to Series A.

Filipe is a software architect/developer with 10+ years of experience in the software development processes. With solid knowledge in the spring framework ecosystem, software development using Java, container based applications using kubernetes environment and CI/CD processes and has experience in public cloud (AWS and GCP) using some tools like EKS, GKE, SQS, Google PubSub, DynamoDb and others.Currently working with APIs, microservices and cloud applications. Practitioner and enthusiast of the Domain Driven Design and the GO programming language.

Leads global banking industry activities for AWS. In this role, he works with leading banking and lending organizations globally to transform their existing businesses and bring innovative solutions to the market by leveraging cloud capabilities. Charith brings over 15 years’ experience developing solutions for financial services organizations across Asia, EMEA, and North America. Prior to AWS, Charith worked at Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG, and was responsible for multiple, complex digital transformation programs. Across these engagements, Charith has managed the end-to-end lifecycle, including defining the business strategy, optimizing operating models, and implementing technology to meet business and regulatory outcomes.