Steve Kirsch, CEO Token #fintechbanking

Steve Kirsch is the CEO of Token, a Silicon Valley startup company building the infrastructure components for next generation payments. He has pioneered several core computer technologies (optical mouse, Internet search, spam filtering, and secure identity) and founded 7 high tech companies, two with billion dollar market caps (Infoseek and Frame Technology). He has BS/MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

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Sam Ostler, Venture Analyst Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator #fintechbanking

Sam Ostler, Venture Analyst at Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator. Sam joined the Startup Accelerator Investor Team in 2015 and his responsibilities include facilitating investment activities, portfolio management, and external partnerships. The Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator is a hands-on program designed to advance startups that create solutions for enterprise customers – inside and outside the financial industry. Prior to Wells Fargo, Sam was a developer for a number of startups and graduated from the University of Southern California with a BA in Economics and a Minor in Computer Security.

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Michael Gardner, Managing Dir Center BNY Mellon Innovation Center, Silicon Valley #fintechbanking

Michael Gardner is a managing director and head of the Center at the BNY Mellon Innovation Center, Silicon Valley. Mike is responsible for ensuring access to the best and latest Silicon Valley expertise and technology, to supplement other company innovation centers and technologists around the world. Mike has nearly 30 years of experience in software engineering and executive leadership. At Borland, a well-known programming tools provider, he led teams pushing the envelope of databases, compilers, and Java. He co-founded and ran PeachPit Press, an early innovator in the desktop publishing revolution. At Lutris Technologies, he ran a large software engineering consulting practice, and later shipped one of the industry’s first application servers and helped pioneer a commercial business model based on publishing open source software. Mike ran the Search engineering teams at Ebay and ran a very large codebase conversion.

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John Stewart, Global Head Scouting & Research RBS #fintechbanking

John Stewart is Global Head of Scouting and Research for the Royal Bank of Scotland. John joined RBS in March 2011 and relocated to San Francisco in March 2014 as Head of Silicon Valley Solutions. His role is to lead the global teams that identify new and innovative technologies that improve the way customers interact with RBS and help to progress them through to being live solutions and services. John has held senior roles in financial services since 1987 at TSB Bank, IBM, Barclays and KPMG where he had a lead role in the UK Government Banking Transformation Programme and helped to resolve some of the financial organisations impacted by the global financial crisis. John lives in Marin County with his wife and is enjoying the California weather and wines.

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