Past Speakers Nordics

Logi Karlsson is the Executive Director for Digital and Innovation at Islandsbanki. Islandsbanki is one of Iceland’s leading companies and offers universal banking services. Like many other banks, Islandsbanki has been on a transformation journey and has succeeded in making its key services purely digital in the last few years.

Logi´s background comes from marketing where he holds a Ph.D., and he has held senior roles both in the banking and travel industries. Logi specializes in digital transformation and strategy and has served as a change agent in Islandsbanki since joining in 2016.

Niki Charilaou started her career at Laiki Bank (and subsequently at Bank of Cyprus) in 1998 holding since then various managerial positions in Group Finance, Investment Banking and Compliance.
Since 2014 she is the designated Anti Money Laundering Compliance Officer at Bank of Cyprus, leading the revamping of the AML Compliance Program of the Bank from scratch in respect of policies, procedures, systems, training, monitoring and assurance.

She served for three years as the Chair of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Cyprus’ (ICPAC) Compliance Committee, supporting the Institute on compliance matters to ensure effective monitoring of its members and of the accounting profession.

She is a notable speaker on ML/TF issues and has been invited to speak at several international compliance conferences in Cyprus, Greece, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK.
She is a qualified Chartered Accountant (member of ICAEW) and a Certified Anti Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS).

Wide expertise in the field of Electronic Signature & Digital Identities. Francesco is daily committed to the promotion of digital transformation processes and the proposition of technologies and solutions to make digitalization accessible to all and with added value for businesses and citizens. His motto is “Digitalization is optimization, not a need”

Conrad Ford is the Chief Product Officer at Allica Bank, which is building a new relationship bank for SMEs with the latest technology. Allica Bank was recently named by The Times newspaper as one of the UK’s Top 20 fintechs.

Previously Conrad founded leading fintech Funding Options, named in the 2021 Financial Times FT1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing firms, before stepping down as CEO in 2019.

More recently, Conrad has advised a number of the UK’s flagship fintechs, including Starling Bank, IWOCA, Coconut and Trade Ledger.

Ange is responsible for Governance and Compliance for Lloyd Banking Group’s Cloud Enabled Business Transformation Programme. Before her current role, Ange was Head of Cloud and Technology Change Risk.
Prior to working at Lloyds, Ange led transformation teams and programmes at Deutsche Bank including: Cloud Security, Risk and Compliance, Anti-Financial Crime Analytics, Data Quality People Change and Money Markets Finance, Risk and Regulatory Reporting.
Before joining Deutsche Bank, Ange worked as a Senior Manager at EY across Asia Pacific and EMEIA within the Financial Services Organisation focusing on Corporate Banking and Capital Markets transformation and business, technology and programme advisory. Ange started her career at IBM in Australia working as a developer, tester, designer and then business analyst and project manager.
Ange has an honours degree in Mechanical Engineering (Mechatronics / Robotics) and Computer Science from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Ritesh is a Co-Founder at Infynit – Humanising Credit and Credit Cards, he is a Former COO at HSBC. He is an Entrepreneurial Technology Leader & Board Advisor with global experience across various sectors including Payments & Banking, He led the future of payments for VISA and introduced Apple Pay, built a wealth management company as a founder CTO. Presently, he is a member of a G20 Initiative for financial inclusion; Advisor to Open Banking in EU & Africa, Harvard Business Review (HBR), payment regulators and government bodies for the initiative in social and financial inclusion and a member of MIT Global Tech Panel. Past roles include mentor to the UK Parliament Digital Service & Startups.

Stanislav Turchenko is a risk manager with 16 years of experience and focused on integration between Risks, Business and IT. He is inspired by data science and modeling, innovations and digitization to bring excellence to business and customers.

Stanislav has worked on managerial positions for 10 years in 3 countries: both as a banker and IT delivery manager. He has a very good understanding of the banking market in Nordic countries due to his working experience in Swedbank and long onsite business activities in Stockholm.

Currently Stanislav works as a Group Head of Risk management (B-1) for Sberbank Europe Group located in Austria, implementing retail risk strategies and policies, ensuring efficient steering and controlling, and launching new innovative digital services.

Professional experience: Banking, Risk management, Retail business, IT, Data science, Digitalization.

Mary Alcantara is the Head of Startups at MKB Fintechlab, Hungary’s first fintech investor and innovation lab owned by MKB Bank. Fintechlab’s mission is to transform Budapest into the fintech capital of the CEE region. At Fintechlab, Mary leads the incubation program, manages a portfolio of 26 startups, organizes periodic meetups and hackathons, and brokers bank partnerships with startups and scaleups. She is passionate about open innovation, building ecosystems, and helping banks create superior experiences for their customers.

Agnija is responsible for interactions with third parties and developers, community engagement, API consumer’s and providers’ onboarding. Member of multiple developer communities and forums. Enthusiast for exploring opportunities towards developer community.

René Konings has been Program Manager Enterprise Services at Credit Suisse since 2016. In his current role, he is responsible for the Central RPA (Global responsible of Standards & Guidelines RPA, product management for RPA, Centre of Competence for RPA, Operations & Support and Solution Delivery), and Business Automation Solutions incl. BPM and Business Rule application. His responsibilities include the bank investment & execution governance change, end to end program management, PPM, PMO, PMO deployment, operation & enhancement, project review & recovery; lean quality management, business case and benefits management, as well as project consulting and pre-studies. Prior to starting at Credit Suisse, René Konings has been working for almost 20 years in different positions in several leading companies in the industry, including ABN AMRO, Rabobank, and ING.

Manuela is the Innovation Manager at Banco Santander. Based in London, she is responsible for driving new business models and implementing novel technologies for the Group. Prior to banking, Manuela was heavily involved in the fin-tech space running a blockchain start-up and closely working with regulators, investors, incumbent financial institutions to develop new more collaborative approaches to rethinking financial services.

Jenny works with digital sales and marketing in Swedbank. She works in a data-driven and customer-centric environment to promote and increase Swedbank’s sales and service in their digital channels, i.e swedbank.se – internet banking and the app. She believes that customer feedback, quantitative and qualitative data are keys to insights that lead to concrete actions to improve Swedbank’s digital service and customer offering. SEO, landing pages, conversion and frictionless customer journeys are common words at work. Her area of responsibility is Daily Banking – i.e everyday banking services that customers use every day. Her goal is to simplify and facilitate a customer’s life as much as possible.

She has a professional background in biomedicine and public health. She is also a passionate athlete in crosscountry skiing and ultratrailrunning.

Orest Dubay has more than 10 years of industrial experience in the development of risk management models and systems.
Currently he is a Head of AI Modelling, Nordea Bank Abp
Orest’s background is theoretical physics, he obtained a Ph.D. degree in Computational Materials Science. Orest spent most of his career designing and implementing mathematical models, analytical tools and methodology for risk management – covering areas like stress testing, scaling models for interest rate risk, historical and Monte Carlo VaR simulations, Incremental Risk Charge, idiosyncratic risk and machine-learning models for credit risk assessment and financial crime detection. Currently, Orest leads one of the teams introducing data science and machine learning technology in various parts of the organization, mainly focusing on credit area.
Orest has firsthand experience with designing and implementation of professional risk systems, expert knowledge in high-performance computing and a long-term passion for software development, machine learning and innovation

Vilhjálmur Alvar Halldórsson is the head of digital development and open banking at Arion bank. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and an executive MBA degree. Vilhjalmur has over 15 years of experience in the financial industry, including managerial experience in digital banking and transformation in both Arion bank, Íslandsbanki and Glitnir. Vilhjálmur has been deeply involved in pushing Arion Bank towards digital transformation and digital

He studied Business Administration in Karlsruhe, Germany. Then he worked 10 years for the Generali Group in Germany with responsibility for several huge distribution areas. In 2002 he joined Creditplus Bank AG in Stuttgart, a subsidiary of the Credit Agricole Group, as Chief Representative, responsible for the branch network, marketing and the digital activities. In 2011 he took on the responsibility for the strategic marketing department of Crédit Agricole Consumer Finance in Paris. In this time he was responsible, alongside others, for the digital transformation project of the Group. In November 2015 he joined Crédit Agricole Italy as Chief of Digital Transformation and steered the transformation process for 4 years. In August 2019 he returned to Creditplus Bank with the aim to restructure the back-office activities under consideration of modern technologies (chatbot, RPA, …).

Banking and insurance professional with experience in integration and transformation initiatives. Proven ability to implement strategic and theoretical theories into practice while strengthening stakeholders relationships. Used to working in high pressure and quality driven environments.

Anna is a Global Head of Anti-Financial Crime for the International Private Bank Division of Deutsche Bank. Anna is responsible for a portfolio of 3 million clients and covers all anti-financial crime related topics including KYC, optimisation of processes related to client on-boarding and transaction monitoring. Anna’s focus is on developing AI and machine learning tools to prevent and detect financial crime.

Anna spent almost her entire career at DB, joining as an analyst. She has held leadership positions in Group Strategy, focusing on Principal M&A as well as Integration and Transformation. Subsequently, Anna joined Group Audit as a Chief Auditor for Anti-Financial Crime, building out dedicated AML and Sanctions teams, and working closely with the key regulators.