Bio

Raja Chris is a Director and Head of IT Infrastructure at Annaly Capital management, a diversified capital manager that invests in and finances residential and commercial assets with over $125 billion in their portfolio. At Annaly, Raja is responsible for the design and delivery of next generation products, cloud providers, services, technologies and IT functions critical to achieving Annaly’s strategic growth priorities. He provides leadership for the continued development of an innovative, robust, and secure information technology environment throughout the Company.

“The WSTA’s diverse membership puts it in a unique position to share knowledge with and educate technology professionals regarding current challenges, solutions, and future directions for the industry,” says Raja. “Being part of the WSTA has offered me the unique opportunity to provide members with an education and knowledge sharing platform designed to drive industry-wide changes in future technology, such as Blockchain, CICD, AI, RPA, and Cybersecurity, etc.”

Raja has spent over 20 years engineering solutions and overseeing technology teams in the financial services industry. He has guided global, matrix, and cross-functional teams in IT architecture design, development, and implementation for improved infrastructure stability, performance, and team productivity. His leadership approach is to partner with business leaders and his IT team to drive innovation and use technology as a strategic lever in achieving aggressive growth targets and his vision.

Before joining Annaly, Raja was Head of Engineering and Operations at Nomura Security and led implementation of strategic enterprise architecture methodologies and ensured all processes aligned with corporate technology roadmaps and best practices; established solid systems and policies to enforce architectural review and identified requirements based on company business goals.

Prior to that, Raja held various senior roles at SAC Capital, and Citi Group.

Raja is currently a WSTA Board Member and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

You can contact Raja via LinkedIn or email him directly at rchris@annaly.com

Bio

Johna Till Johnson is the CEO & Founder of Nemertes Research, an 18-year old research-advisory firm specializing in the business impact of emerging technologies. Ms. Johnson spearheads Nemertes’ security and risk management practice, where she works with Fortune 200 financial services, manufacturing, utility, and other leading organizations.

Ms. Johnson’s career in information security began more than 25 years ago when, as a young engineer, she developed security products for Mosler Security Systems. In the early 1990s, she ran the lab-testing program at Data Communications Magazine, which uncovered vulnerabilities in the then-novel RSA two-factor authentication system. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Johnson ran the Global Networking Strategies Service at the META Group, which included META’s security and risk management offering. Subsequently, she served as the Chief Technology Officer overseeing the security practice for Greenwich Technology Corp., a global consulting and engineering firm that developed and implemented leading-edge security architectures for financial services firms and other global organizations.

Bio

Mark Ostrowski is the Head of Engineering for the East region of US at Check Point Software Technologies. Mark has over 20 years’ experience in IT security and has helped design and support some of the largest security environments in the country. As an evangelist at Check Point Software, Mark provides thought leadership for the IT security industry outlining the current threat landscape and helping organizations understand how they can pro-actively mitigate and manage risk in our world of digital transformation. Over the past 17 years at Check Point, Mark has worked with the top customers in both size/scope and revenue transforming how they leverage security solutions to create secure infrastructure in two of the largest cities in the US, Boston MA and NYC, NY. Most recently Mark received the ‘Region of the Year 2019’ at CPX 360. Mark holds a degree from the college of engineering at UMass Dartmouth and CCMA at Check Point.

Bio

Sean leads product marketing for Hyland’s content services platforms, including both Alfresco and Nuxeo. Sean joined Hyland earlier this year and brings over twenty years’ experience managing and marketing content management products and solutions at OpenText, Dell EMC, and other organizations.

Bio

Krishna is the co-founder and CEO of Fiddler, a Machine Learning Monitoring company that empowers companies to efficiently monitor and troubleshoot ML models with Explainable AI. Prior to founding Fiddler, Gade led the team that built Facebook’s explainability feature ‘Why am I seeing this?’. He’s an entrepreneur with a technical background with experience creating scalable platforms and expertise in converting data into intelligence. Having held senior engineering leadership roles at Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Microsoft, he’s seen the effects that bias has on AI and machine learning decision making processes, and with Fiddler, his goal is to enable enterprises across the globe solve this problem.

Bio

Stew Katz has been a Director of Innovation at Verizon since fall 2019. He stood up a team whose mission is to find customer and business pain points, and match them up with startups and other technology partners to form pilots. His team works across channels and focuses on improving the customer experience. Stew comes to Verizon from Warner Music Group where he headed up a Product Design and Innovation group for several years. Prior to that, he ran User Experience at Digitas NYC, where he worked on brands like American Express, Samsung, Delta, and Diageo.

Bio

Benjamin has 28 years of experience in IT, including 21 in the financial services sector at companies such as Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Annaly Capital.  Benjamin has a broad and deep understanding of the technologies used on Wall Street and experience designing a wide range of architectures and strategic design solutions.  His emphasis is on complex integrations and migrations, directory services, platform governance, automation and centralization. Benjamin also works closely with internal and external audit teams to ensure regulatory compliance and manages the cybersecurity committee at Annaly.

Bio

Apurva Mehta is the CTO for UBS Americas, and for UBS Wealth Management US, where he is responsible for architecture and innovation. He joined UBS in 2015, after working in various roles at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Neuberger Berman.

Apurva has founded three companies during his career in electronics, pharmaceuticals and consumer products. He has also played an advisory role with two startups.

Apurva has an MS in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers and MS in Technology Systems from SUNY.