THE FUTURE OF APPLIED AI
in Finance and Banking

New York | December 11, 2025

DSS NYC | Schedule

Thursday, December 11

 

8:00 – 9:30am ET

Registration Opens

9:30 – 9:40am ET

Introduction
Anna Anisin - Founder, Data Science Salon, Moody Hadi - Head of Credit Analytics, New Product Development at S&P Global

9:40 – 10:10am ET

AI in insurance
Lovedeep Saini - Chief Analytics Officer at Conner Strong & Buckelew
This session will explore how forward-thinking brokerages are leveraging AI to streamline operations, deliver smarter risk insights, and provide more personalized, value-added services to clients. From intelligent document processing and automated market placement to predictive analytics and proactive client engagement, AI is helping brokers become faster, more informed, and more client-centric. We’ll also examine the challenges of integrating AI into legacy workflows, maintaining data integrity, and navigating compliance in a fast-evolving regulatory landscape. Attendees will walk away with a practical understanding of how AI can empower brokers to evolve from transactional intermediaries to strategic advisors in the insurance ecosystem.

10:10 – 10:30am ET

Mainframe modernisation with GenAI: Why Nomain chose the human-centered approach
Henri Kasurinen - CEO & Co-Founder at Nomain
Mainframes remain the backbone of critical industries — yet modernising them has long been a slow, high-risk journey. Most AI advancements have focused on code generation, assuming the bottleneck lies in writing code. In reality, it’s the lack of context — the system knowledge, dependencies, and user knowledge that senior developers once absorbed over decades.

This session explores how Generative AI can close that context gap. Drawing on experience from Nomain, we’ll show how AI-driven understanding of legacy systems enables faster analysis, safer transformation, and improved traceability — all while keeping developers in control of their tools and decisions.

By combining GenAI’s analytical power with human expertise, organisations can finally modernise mainframes without doing a “”big bang”” and still modernise at unforeseen speed. Because the future of mainframe modernisation isn’t about replacing the human — it’s about amplifying their insight.

10:30 – 10:50am ET

Use of AI/ML in Anti Money Laundering in E-commerce
Bhavnish Walla - Senior Data Science Risk Manager at Amazon
As financial transactions become increasingly digital—with platforms like Amazon processing over 8.8 million transactions daily—the threat of fraud and money laundering continues to grow. This talk explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionizing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) practices across industries such as finance and e-commerce.

We’ll examine the limitations of traditional rule-based systems in today’s complex fraud landscape and how AI is improving detection accuracy, scalability, and efficiency. The session will also provide a glimpse into AI models developed using Amazon Bedrock, highlighting real-world applications.

Key focus areas include the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for suspicious activity detection, real-time monitoring to identify anomalies, and AI-driven decision-making to reduce manual review and intervention.

This session will offer practical insights into the evolving role of AI in fraud prevention, compliance automation, and risk management, while addressing both the opportunities and challenges of deploying intelligent systems in high-stakes environments.

10:50 – 11:20am ET

Session Title Coming Soon

Srini Srinivasan - Chief Technology Officer and Founder at Aerospike

Abstract coming soon

11:20 – 11:40am ET

Coffee Break

11:40 – 12:00am ET

The Hidden Cost of Data Work — and How Genesis Agents Eliminate It
Matthew Glickman - Co-founder and CEO at Genesis Computing

Abstract coming soon

12:00 – 12:30pm ET

Generative AI for Validating Unsupervised Segmentation in Banking: A Hybrid Semantic and Metric-Based Approach
Yash Mahendra - Data Science Manager at Valley Bank
Customer segmentation through unsupervised clustering is essential for modern banking, driving personalized marketing, risk strategies, and product design. However, validating these models is challenging because traditional metrics like Silhouette or Davies–Bouldin measure structural quality but fail to confirm business relevance.

This presentation introduces a novel framework that combines statistical rigor, business logic, and Generative AI to deliver segments that are both analytically sound and operationally meaningful. The process begins by encoding institutional segment definitions—such as product mix, behavioral patterns, and risk appetite—into structured rules. Generative AI, powered by large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), then acts as a semantic evaluator, assessing cluster alignment with these definitions and key KPIs like profitability, churn, and credit risk.

By integrating semantic evaluation, KPI alignment, and traditional metrics into a single composite score, and feeding this back into the modeling process, the framework ensures explainable, business-aligned segmentation that meets regulatory expectations and drives strategic value.

12:30 – 1:0pm ET

Session Title Coming Soon
Chris Latimer - Founder at Vectorize.io

Abstract coming soon

1:00 – 2:00pm ET

Lunch

2:00 – 2:20pm ET

Fraud Analytics with AI/ML: Building Adaptive, Scalable Defense Frameworks for Compliance
Aeshna Kapoor - Lead Data Scientist at Cognizant
Financial institutions face mounting pressure to detect—and report—fraud in real time while staying ahead of evolving regulations. In this forward-thinking session, Senior Data Scientist Aeshna Kapoor of Cognizant will unveil a unified AI/ML framework that operationalizes both fraud detection and compliance monitoring across transactional, identity, account–takeover, and synthetic-fraud vectors. You’ll learn how to:

  • Automate KYC/AML pipelines with dynamic risk-scoring and NLP-driven SAR triage
  • Embed audit-ready Explainable AI (XAI) into real-time scoring engines for full model transparency
  • Leverage federated learning to collaborate on cross-institutional risk without sharing PII
  • Deploy reinforcement-learning thresholding for adaptive alerting in line with new regulatory mandates
  • Simulate “digital-twin” regulatory stress tests to validate controls under hypothetical scenarios

2:20 – 3:05pm ET

Panel: Responsible Intelligence: Balancing Innovation, Compliance, and Risk in Financial AI

Akhil Khunger - VP, Quantitative Analytics at Barclays, Harry Mendell - Data Architect, AI Group at Federal Reserve Bank, NY, Nemo Dighe - Associate Director, Business Intelligence at group 1001, Moody Hadi - Head of Credit Analytics, New Product Development at S&P Global, Robert Bagley - Director, AI Governance at Perficient

3:05 – 3:35pm ET

AI-Powered Innovation in Secure Data Exchange
Raghava Chellu - Software Engineering | Support Engineer - Specialist at Equifax Inc.
In today’s hyper-connected digital economy, the secure and reliable exchange of sensitive data has become a mission-critical priority for enterprises. Traditional Managed File Transfer (MFT) platforms, while effective in ensuring compliance and encryption, are increasingly challenged by rising data volumes, real-time processing demands, and the sophistication of modern cyber threats. Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduces a paradigm shift—transforming file transfer systems from static, rule-based engines into adaptive, intelligent, and resilient ecosystems.

This talk explores how AI augments secure data exchange by embedding predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and self-healing automation into the MFT lifecycle. Through the use of machine learning models, federated learning architectures, and explainable AI (XAI), organizations can proactively identify risks, detect deviations from normative transfer behavior, and enforce dynamic policy-driven responses. Beyond security, AI enhances operational efficiency, routing optimization, and compliance assurance, enabling enterprises to manage high-volume transfers across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with unprecedented speed and trust.

By highlighting real-world use cases and future directions such as quantum-safe cryptography integration and AI-driven zero-trust frameworks, this session demonstrates how AI-powered innovation is redefining secure data exchange and setting the foundation for next-generation MFT solutions.

3:35 – 3:55pm ET

Coffee Break

3:55 – 4:25pm ET

Automated Evaluation with an LLM-as-a-Judge for Business Impact
Kaushik Holla - Senior Data Scientist at Red Ventures
LLM-as-a-Judge is rapidly becoming a practical default for evaluating LLM applications because it scales human-like judgments far beyond what manual QA can handle, while supporting both reference free and reference based scoring as well as pairwise comparisons. The rapid adoption of Large Language Models in enterprise applications has created a critical challenge for effective and efficient evaluation.

This session introduces and demystifies the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, a powerful and practical solution for automated LLM evaluation. I will discuss a production-ready path from rubrics to ROI by covering how to define criteria that matter for the product and choosing the right judging mode (single-output vs. pairwise). We will discuss how automated evaluation can accelerate iteration without losing fidelity to human expectations. Attendees will learn the foundational principles and practical steps for implementing this system, including constructing effective evaluation prompts, designing robust rubrics and scoring scales, and choosing the right “”judge”” model for the task.

The core focus of this presentation is to translate this technical capability into measurable business impact. The session will include demonstrating how implementing an LLM-as-a-Judge system drastically reduces evaluation time, enables faster product development cycles, and ensures the deployment of higher-quality, more reliable LLMs. The session will provide a clear framework for connecting evaluation scores to key business metrics like user satisfaction, customer support efficiency, or content generation quality, helping you to confidently demonstrate the return on investment of your LLM initiatives.
The talk will be grounded in recent community guidance on what works and what doesn’t, so teams can adopt judges confidently and avoid common traps. By the end of this talk, the attendees will have a clear understanding of the methodology and the confidence to implement it in their own organization to drive meaningful business results.

4:25 – 4:55pm ET

Harnessing AI and ML to revolutionize Insurance pricing models with catastrophe models
Jwalin Thaker - Sr Data Scientist at SageSure
The insurance industry is under immense pressure to modernize how it assesses and prices risk in an era where natural disasters are growing in frequency and severity. Traditional actuarial models, while historically effective, often fall short in capturing the complexity and unpredictability of today’s catastrophe scenarios. To meet these challenges, insurers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to develop more precise, data-driven catastrophe models.

The evolution is especially critical in catastrophe modeling and pricing strategies, where the frequency and severity of natural disasters have rendered conventional actuarial methods less effective. Leading this innovation is me, leveraging cutting-edge AI to improve insurance pricing, streamline claims processes, and enhance risk assessment.

4:55 – 5:25pm ET

Breaking the Bottleneck: Scaling GenAI Security from Weeks to Hours

Kaushik Ghosh - Staff Software Engineer at Intuit
The rapid adoption of GenAI creates a massive bottleneck for security teams, where manual reviews take weeks and slow innovation. This session introduces an autonomous multi-agent system that automates Responsible AI (RAI) security reviews, slashing our process from over 30 days to just 16 hours.
Explore our agentic architecture, built with LangChain and LangGraph, that orchestrates specialized agents to analyze diverse artifacts—from Git repositories and configuration files to architecture diagrams and prompts. This talk covers the end-to-end workflow: automated data extraction, vulnerability assessment via a dedicated risk engine, and the generation of actionable reports. You will leave with a practical blueprint for building your own automated security review agents, enabling your organization to scale GenAI securely and efficiently.

5:25 – 5:30pm ET

Closing Remarks
Anna Anisin - Founder, Data Science Salon, Moody Hadi - Head of Credit Analytics, New Product Development at S&P Global

5:30 – 8:00pm ET

Networking Reception

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