Distilled Identity™

Predictive Identity Platform Brochure

Erik Brynjolfsson

Advisor

Erik Brynjolfsson is the Director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy. He also serves as the Schussel Family Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. At MIT, he teaches courses on the Economics of Information and the Analytics Lab. He has also taught at Harvard and Stanford.

Brynjolfsson’s research examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets. He was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. His research provided the first quantification of online product variety value, often known as the “Long Tail,” and developed pricing and bundling models for information goods. Appearing in leading economics, management, and science journals, his research has been recognized with ten Best Paper awards and five patents.

Author of several books including, with co-author Andrew McAfee, NYTimes best-seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014) and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (forthcoming, June 2017), Brynjolfsson is an editor of SSRN’s Information System Network and has served on editorial boards of numerous academic journals. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard and a PhD from MIT. His papers can be found at http://digital.mit.edu/erik.

Roberto Rigobon

Advisor

Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Together with Alberto Cavallo he founded the Billion Prices Project which is an initiative that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct research in macro and international economics.

He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.

Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Roberto focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.

Roberto joined the business school in 1997 and has won both the “Teacher of the Year” award and the “Excellence in Teaching” award at MIT three times.

He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is married with three kids.

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Head of Engineering

Ellis Wong leads Distilled Identity software development efforts. He is an entrepreneurial engineering director and product architect with proven track record in envisioning and developing market leading, data science driven SaaS and cloud-enabled hardware solutions, with annual revenues ranging from $20M to $200M. Ellis is passionate about blending hands-on creativity (16 patents) as technologist and results-oriented leadership as executive in building and leading cross-functional teams with diverse skills in fast-paced environments from startups to successful growth or exits. Ellis holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Boston University, both in Computer Science. He was also an Entrepreneurship Fellow with the Startup Leadership Program.

Founder & CEO

David Shrier is a globally recognized authority on digital identity and financial innovation. He is the founder and CEO of Distilled Identity, a machine learning company derived from MIT research that is the world’s leader in Predictive Identity.

He also leads the University of Oxford’s online programmes Oxford Fintech and Oxford Blockchain Strategy, as well as MIT’s Future Commerce (the first graduate fintech class in North America), all of which he created. He has published multiple books on fintech, blockchain and cybersecurity.

In addition to his role with Distilled, he is Vice Chairman of Endor, a blockchain-enabled crowd intelligence platform, and Chairman of Riff Learning, an AI-driven collaboration technology platform provider. David is an Associate Fellow with the Said Business School, University of Oxford; Lecturer at the MIT Media Lab; and Fellow with the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines.

David counsels the Government of Dubai on blockchain and digital identity; Millennium Advisors, a middle market credit liquidity provider, on technology trends; the OECD, on blockchain policy and standards; and Ripple, a blockchain cross-border payments company, on strategy. He previously advised the European Commission on commercializing innovation with a focus on digital technology.

David is on the advisory board of WorldQuant University, a program offering a totally-free, accredited, online Master’s degree in financial engineering. He is presently a member of the FinTech Industry Committee for FINRA, the U.S. securities industry’s self-regulatory body; and the Fintech Trade & Investment Steering Board for the UK Government’s Department of International Trade. David also informally consults with the European Parliament, European Commission, and OECD on digital identity, AML/KYC, blockchain, and AI.

He specializes in helping established organizations to build new revenue, having developed $8.5 billion of growth opportunities with C-suite executives for Dun & Bradstreet, Wolters Kluwer, Ernst & Young, GE, The Walt Disney Company, AOL Verizon, and Starwood, as well as private equity and VC funds. He has led a number of private equity and venture capital-backed companies as CEO, CFO or COO.

David and MIT Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland have published books including Frontiers of Financial Technology, New Solutions for Cybersecurity, and Trust::Data. He also co-edits, together with Professor Pentland, the Connection Science imprint of MIT Press. David Shrier was granted an Sc.B. from Brown University in Biology and Theatre, and worked professionally as a dramaturg and director after college.

Tom Fox

Chief Analytics Officer

Tom Fox is Chief Analytics Officer of Distilled Identity. He has over 20 years experience leading technology teams at some of the world’s top investment banks. He has a proven track record building solutions for complex business problems involving large scale data, complex analytics and real-time distributed computing. He has managed budgets in excess of $200M and has successfully led small agile teams to large scale divisions.

He was Managing Director for over 12 years at JP Morgan Chase where he held several senior roles. As head of global risk technology, he led the complete rewrite of JPM’s market risk system. He also ran derivatives trading technology and analytics across a wide array of products including commodities/energy, credit, rates and equities. He also spent several years building a high frequency proprietary trading platform. After JPM, he was global head of risk and prime brokerage technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. At BofA, he spearheaded the centralization of the firm’s entire risk profile which alleviated significant regulatory constraints.

Tom started his career at Centre Financial Products where he became head of model development in the pioneering areas of insurance derivatives and environmental trading. He also built the Capital Adequacy Model that allowed several large investment banks to set up AAA-rated derivatives product corporations. Tom graduated with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a M.A. in Mathematics from The Courant Institute, NYU.

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Advisor

Prof Ivan Martinovic is a Professor at Computer Science Department, University of Oxford, where he leads the System Security Lab. Prof Martinovic’s research is focused on authentication technologies, in particular on behavioural biometrics using physiological signals, intrusion detection using physical-layer information, and network traffic analysis. He also serves as an advisor for both private and public sectors on the topics of applied cryptography, authentication, and identity management. Before coming to Oxford Prof Martinovic was a postdoctoral researcher at the Security Research Lab, UC Berkeley, and at the Secure Computing and Networking Centre, UC Irvine; he obtained his PhD in Computer Science from TU Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Advisor

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) at Imperial College London, where he heads the Computational Privacy Group, and a research affiliate at MIT. His research aims at understanding how the unicity of human behavior impacts the privacy of individuals–through re-identification or inference–in rich high-dimensional datasets such as mobile phone, credit cards, or browsing data. Yves-Alexandre was recently named an Innovator under 35 for Belgium (TR35). His research has been published in Science and Nature SRep. and covered by the BBC, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Le Monde, Die Spiegel, Die Zeit, El Pais as well as in his TEDx talks. His work on the shortcomings of anonymization has appeared in reports of the World Economic Forum, United Nations, OECD, FTC, and the European Commission. Before coming to MIT, he was a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Yves-Alexandre worked for the Boston Consulting Group and acted as an expert for both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations. He is a member of the WEF network on AI, IoT and the Future of Trust; the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems; and the OECD Advisory Group on Health Data Governance. He received in PhD from MIT in 2016 and obtained, over a period of 6 years, an M.Sc. from Louvain in Applied Mathematics, a M.Sc. (Centralien) from Ecole Centrale Paris, a M.Sc. from KULeuven in Mathematical Engineering as well as his B.Sc. in engineering at Louvain.

Advisor

President and Chief Executive Officer, AST
Chairman, AST Trust Company (Canada)

Brian is President and Chief Executive Officer of AST and Chairman, AST Trust Company (Canada). In these roles, Brian leads an executive leadership team focused on the consistent delivery of excellent service to customers and the execution of strategic plans aimed at the continued growth of the company. AST is the leading provider of registry services and technology to financial market participants across North America, including stock transfer agency, employee plan solutions, corporate governance and advisory services, issuer and mutual fund proxy services, ownership intelligence, restructuring services, and class action and mission critical services.

Brian is an accomplished executive with more than 25 years of relevant experience. Prior to joining the AST Group, Brian was Chief Executive Officer of Wolters Kluwer Financial and Compliance Services, where he developed and implemented strategies that transformed the company into a leading global financial services information technology business. He has also served as President and Chief Executive Officer for Paragon Holdings/A.B. Dick Company and was President of Bell and Howell Imaging Companies.

Brian serves on the global board of Operation Hope and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee on Global Finance Policy.

Brian received his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from Albion College and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

Advisor

Chris Larsen is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of Ripple. Previously, Larsen served the company as its CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Prior to Ripple, Chris co-founded and served as CEO of Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, and E-LOAN, a publicly traded online lender.

During his tenure at E-LOAN, he pioneered the open access to credit scores movement by making E-LOAN the first company to show consumers their FICO scores. Chris serves at the Board and Advisory levels at numerous companies and organizations including: Betable, CreditKarma, and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

He has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS from San Francisco State University.

Advisor

John Joseph D’Agostino is an American business executive and entrepreneur. Currently, he is a Managing Director at the world’s largest fund governance firm DMS Offshore, where he also serves on the board of hedge, private equity and VC funds. He was previously a managing director at Alkeon Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar registered TMT investment adviser. Prior to this, John was known primarily for his driving the early development of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange.

His story was the focus of the book Rigged, the True Story of an Ivy League Kid who Changed the World of Oil by New York Times best-selling author Ben Mezrich.

John was featured in “The Startup of You” by Reid Hoffman in 2012. He has been a recurring guest lecturer at INSEAD and MIT Sloan, and is a frequent speaker at on topics ranging from fintech to capital markets. He attended Williams College, Oxford University and the Harvard Business School.

Board Director, Advisor

Vicki P. Raeburn has a broad background in global business and is an expert in statistics and in cognitive science. She is currently an independent consultant focusing on change management and operational excellence.

Vicki is on the boards or advisory boards of BizQualify, MDOnline and Customers First Now. She has previously held senior leadership positions at IHS, Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), Mergent, and Standard & Poor’s (S&P).

Vicki has taught at NYU’s Stern School of Business and at Vassar College. She has a Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from New College of Florida.

Board Director

Praveen Mandal is a veteran of five successful formative stage start-ups and a seasoned innovation executive whose teams have developed industry recognized, market leading technologies and solutions in telecom, clean-tech and high performance computing industries. Companies and organizations founded are Emerging Technologies Group at SGI (served as SVP & GM), ChargePoint (served as President) and Pipal Systems (served as CEO).

He has also held senior executive positions at Riverstone Networks (VP of R&D), Lucent Technologies (VP of R&D for Carrier Ethernet Solutions) and aforementioned SGI (SVP of Engineering and GM of Emerging Technologies Group).

Praveen currently serves on the Advisory Boards of MIT’s Connection Science Group, Illinois Institute of Technology’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and on the Board of Directors at various “hard tech” startups in Boston and Silicon Valley. He is co-inventor on 10 awarded patents and holds a BSCE from Santa Clara University.

Co-founder

Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States.

He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab, the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance and the Institute for Data Driven Design. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.

Interesting experiences include dining with British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space. Professor Pentland earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his BS from the University of Michigan.

Co-founder

Alexander Lipton is Founder and CEO of StrongHold Labs, Partner at Numeraire Financial, Co-Founder and Advisor of Distilled Identity, Connection Science Fellow at MIT Media Lab and Visiting Professor of Financial Engineering at EPFL. He is an Advisory Board Member at UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies, Clearmatics, Zilliqa, Endor, and Numerix.

In the end of May 2016, he left Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he served for ten years as a Managing Director. During this time, Alex worked in various senior managerial roles including Quantitative Solutions Executive and Co-Head of the Global Quantitative Group. Earlier, he was a Managing Director and Head of Capital Structure Quantitative Research at Citadel Investment Group in Chicago; he has also worked for Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Bankers Trust.

While working full time as a banker, Alex held several prestigious academic appointments, including Visiting Professor of Quantitative Finance and Advisory Board Member at Oxford-Man Institute, and Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London and the University of Illinois. Before switching to finance, Alex was a Full Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois and a Consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in pure mathematics from Moscow State University.

His current professional interests include FinTech, particularly, applications of distributed ledger technology to banking, digital currencies, especially asset-backed cryptocurrencies, and payment systems, robo advisors and automated investing, and industrial-strength risk management systems for large systemically important financial institutions. His scientific interests are centered on quantitative development of modern monetary circuit theory, mechanisms of money creation, interlinked banking networks, balance sheet optimization, and related topics.

In 2000 Alex was awarded the first Quant of the Year Award by Risk Magazine. Alex is the author of two books (“Magnetohydrodynamics and Spectral Theory” and “Mathematical Methods for Foreign Exchange”) and the editor of five more, including, most recently, “Quant of the Year 2000-2014, All Award-Winning Papers”. His next book “Financial Engineering – Selected Works of Alexander Lipton” will be published by WSPC in 2018. In addition, Alex has published more than a hundred papers on hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, astrophysics, chemical physics, and financial engineering. Alex is a frequent keynote speaker at Quantitative Finance and FinTech conferences and forums worldwide.

Chief Commercial Officer

Ed DiRocco is an accomplished entrepreneurial sales leader and business executive with a long track record of successfully mentoring and leading go-to-market teams. A strategic thinker who embraces the tactical with a hands-on roll up your sleeves mentality; Ed has hired, developed, trained and lead cross-functional teams to maximize company revenues and profitability. Ed has successfully scaled high performance enterprise sales and business development teams for companies such as Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, Dorado Corporation, and Sun Microsystems during his career.

Director of Operations

Alfie heads Operations for Distilled Identity. He has a background in management consulting and has worked across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors with companies ranging from start-ups to multinational organizations.

He started his career with the Resolve Group (acquired by Ernst & Young in 2012) where we worked with C-suite executives on strategic projects for organizations ranging from South Africa’s largest public sector instructions to various multinationals.

Alfie built a team of 35 as he scaled and ran the regional office of one of South Africa’s most successful and promising social enterprises as Regional Director at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. Over four years, the company placed 10,000 previously unemployed people in full-time jobs. He has also created a mobile app, Mindful365, an online program helping people live more mindfully.

More recently, after founding his consulting firm, New Frontiers Advisory, he helped launch and run the online Fintech courses for MIT and Oxford Said Business School. These have been attended by thousands of people in over 130 countries and have been the catalyst for the creation of hundreds of business globally. He then led the design and launch of the Venture Incubation Program, a successful start-up incubator for the Cape Town Business School. Alfie also coaches start-up founders on Redbull’s Amaphiko Academy for Social Entrepreneurs.

He has traveled extensively and has attended Wits University and Wits Business School, Johannesburg.

Business Development

Ruta is a business development executive at Distilled Identity. Prior to joining Distilled Identity, Ruta spent more than 20 years in institutional sales on Wall Street, covering the world’s largest and most sophisticated asset management firms for leveraged credit products. Ruta was most recently a Managing Director at Stifel Financial where she was responsible for managing and growing institutional client relationships to advance the firm’s franchise in the private credit market. Previously, Ruta was an Executive Director in the Fixed Income Division of Morgan Stanley, where she was a senior member of the leveraged credit team and was a significant contributor to the successful and rapid development of the firm’s franchise in the syndicated leveraged loan market. Ruta began her career as a Financial Analyst in the High Yield Group at The First Boston Corporation, where she structured and executed investment banking transactions for highly leveraged companies. Ruta earned an M.B.A. in Finance from The Wharton School and an A.B. in International Relations from Brown University.

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Welcome to Distilled Identity

Building Digital Identity to Unlock Financial Opportunity

Watch CEO & Founder David Shrier Introduce Distilled Identity™

A Distinguished Leadership & Advisory Team

Awards & Accelerators

We Are a Proud Sponsor of KNOW 2019