COGNATIV is a global provider of technology consulting and services based in the USA with offices in Spain, Serbia, India and the UK. We work as a strategic partner to build products and improve processes that enable tremendous growth and massively increased valuation. Our clients are investment firms and family offices and their portfolio companies, pure startups (especially EdTech) and other companies seeking high-growth and scale. Our goal is to always deliver solutions quickly, with high quality and with an excellent ROI – all founded on trust and transparency between us and the client. Our strengths are in our engineering teams spanning many diverse technology stacks, and our thought leadership around complex and data-focused software products. We work across many industries and offer services that include technical due diligence, UI/UX design, strategic projects and product development, data and analytics, client staffing, and helping startups to realize their product vision and get to market. And most importantly we strive to look after our people and build a culture that is focused on trust, respect and commitment to each other and to our clients.

Invited to be one of 250 Leadership Fellows at St George's House, Windsor Castle, and my privilege to be one of the few International Fellows.St George’s House, Windsor Castle was founded by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in 1966 as a place where people of influence and responsibility in every area of society can come together to explore and communicate their views and analysis of contemporary issues. Exemplary leadership is central to the wellbeing of any modern society and the mission of the Society of Leadership Fellows is to nurture such leadership and wisdom.

Strategic Products and Services (SPS) is a global, multivendor communication and networking managed services provider with over $300M in revenue. Was recruited by Private Equity owners of SPS to be part of a new leadership team and resolve key issues and improve processes and technology. The goal was to help prepare the company for sale in 2017 which was accomplished within six months of joining. SPS was bought by ConvergeOne as a strategic acquisition by a much larger competitor. The following months were spent on a massive project around integration and migration of all systems, personnel, data and processes to the new parent company.

Scivantage is a Global FinTech 100 technology provider of information-enabled software with expertise in online brokerage, tax and portfolio reporting and wealth management applications with over $8T in assets being processed and reported on to many of the top brokerage firms and banks in the USA.Was hired to lead new processes and solutions for a large parts of the company across business and technology to improve productivity, quality and company value. Created new Professional Services and Delivery division with full P&L responsibility for all one-time revenues and goals of better project estimation and pricing, faster and better quality delivery and significantly higher margins. Teams include Sales Engagement, Estimation and Design, Business Analysis and PMO. Was also in charge of all technology (network, systems, infrastructure, database etc) and all software development activities globally (USA, India, Eastern Europe) where I reorganized technology teams to break up silos and improved communication and interaction model with offshore resources.

Procurian (acquired by Accenture in 2013) is the leading specialist in comprehensive procurement outsourcing solutions targeting Fortune 500 companies. The company is high-growth with offices in 14 countries and clients around the world including Goodyear, Hertz, Kimberly-Clark, Whirlpool, Zurich Insurance, Harley Davidson and others. As CIO responsible for transformation from a services to a technology-driven company to increase valuation for investors. Led strategy and process change around product development and technology to support our complex business needs and future growth. Systems being built and supported handle almost $30B of annual client spend data at the individual transaction level, and the associated workflow, compliance and savings reporting tools. Technologies include Oracle, Apex, Talend (ETL), Blaze (rules engine), Adobe Flex, Java and QlikView (BI) using Scrum methodology. Was part of management team that helped with due diligence and eventual acquisition of Procurian by Accenture in late 2013 for almost $400M, with many of the technology products I was responsible for being rolled out to newly integrated business unit at Accenture.

InvestorForce (acquired by MSCI) is the leader in institutional investment performance management providing an integrated solution for automated data collection across dozens of custodians and reference data sources and a SaaS platform for daily monitoring, analysis and reporting on institutional assets. InvestorForce’s technology serves 4 of the top 5 global institutional investment consultants and processes and reports on over 3,000 plans (client companies) and $4 Trillion in assets.• Responsible for architecture roadmap, all technology platforms, operations, escalated support, database systems and all application development, analysis and testing. Applications are complex (1.5M lines of code), on Microsoft platforms (.NET, SQL Server) using Scrum (Agile methodology) in a multi-tenant environment.• Demonstrated SDLC was driven by throughput over quality with dramatically increasing defects in the platform and rapidly declining client satisfaction. Instilled quality focus across organization and reduced defects in new releases by over 60% within one year, with each quarterly release being measurably better than the one before. • Actively managed external data providers (data feeds from over 25 custodians) to improve quality and timeliness. Implemented Thomson Reuters DataScope to replace internal security master and RIMES to consolidate benchmark data. Automated dozens of manual daily and monthly jobs to improve speed/consistency. Executed 18 month modernization strategy for infrastructure, technology and software tools.

After Albridge Solutions was acquired by PNC I was put in charge of a new division for Enterprise Data Services with a $5.5M budget to build a data warehouse. Goals were to build a single large analytical data store (Data Hub) to feed other PNC divisions with Albridge's vast operational data store, and to create separate data marts that allowed Albridge's broker dealer clients more flexible access to their specific data than existing reports provided.• Gathered industry expertise (external consultants), relevant tools (reviewed various ETL and DB products and selected Informatica and Oracle) and created team to design and build the warehouse. Key goals were to improve performance of large complex queries from days to minutes by pre-calculating/storing assets under management (AUM) information and creating a time-series history of every fact within system.• Created real-time mirrors of production data to feed the ETL process so current production environments were unaffected. Created a proof-of-concept on subset of data with simple tools to understand data complexity issues, then purchased and built full-scale development, QA, integration and production systems. • For the first time brought all of Albridge data together across the 10 production environments into the Data Hub (resolved many data collision, quality and timing issues). Brought project in on-time and under-budget (returned $1.5M to company).

Moved into this new role after proposing need for an isolated group to handle all custom client development needs in order to remove their impact on our strategic development roadmap. Created a new line of business for the company with full P&L responsibility. • Built an organization with 25 people within a few months spanning sales, business analysts, project management, all layers of development and testing to deliver over 100 client projects in 2007 with 34% gross margins and deals ranging from $10k to $2.2M.• Types of projects included building custom data interfaces for clients, creating new scheduled and real-time reports, constructing web services calls to feed data and reports into client portals, branding etc.

Helped build processes and organization structure for a more mature and scalable product management/development group that resulted in higher quality and quicker-to-market products for a highly demanding client base. • Key participant in strategic 3-5 year plan for company with goal of increasing profitable revenue by 400% through extending product features for current market and creating new products to gain access to other markets. • Created monthly Albridge steering group sessions with senior representatives of firm’s most important clients to help provide strategic direction for Albridge.• Dramatically improved product development quality and time-to-market through hands-on management, move to iterative development model and implementing more efficient workflow/communication across company.• Architected product roadmap that included major new modules (insurance data, tax lots, asset classification, self-service tools) and upgrades including an aesthetic update of all reports within application.

BISYS (later acquired by Citi) was a leading provider of outsourced business process solutions and the only single-source integrator of banking, investment, and insurance solutions with 20,000 financial institutions and corporate clients. Worked with Banking Solutions Division at the development and operations center in Houston where we serviced all the processing needs for 300 banks in the USA. • Turned around the release of critical software products which had been significantly delayed. Required rapidly learning products and market needs, getting familiar with internal organizational processes, identifying bottlenecks and unseen issues and quickly putting together resources and projects to push things forward. Defined solid timeline to successfully bring all four products to market in 15 months. • Created a product deployment process with milestones and checkpoints for all new products that encompassed everything from initial business case for build vs buy through development/integration, testing, implementation, operations and support. • Re-engineered the customer support and escalation process for all departments (helpdesk, customer services, operations, implementations, conversions, development, R&D, external vendors etc). Mapped out the existing, chaotic system and replaced with a streamlined 3-tier support process that necessitated organizational and accountability changes.• One of 25 associates out of 5000 invited to join the Executive Development Growth Council for strategic planning for the overall future of the company. Visited key clients to understand their needs.

The company is a global leader in integrated IT solutions and processing for financial services. I worked for a software development and consulting division (Microbank) responsible for enterprise report management and report-mining solutions with 1400 client sites across 55 countries. Other products included tools for reconciliation and exception handling for straight-through-processing. Clients included most of the large international banks and securities firms such as JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Credit Lyonnais, ANZ etc.he compnay

Joined startup company Microbank (later acquired by SunGard) in London in 1993 and worked for clients throughout Europe for a year as implementations and technology consultant. Was given the opportunity of setting up operations and services for new regional headquarters in Singapore covering all of Asia Pacific. Responsible for technical sales, architectural design and project management for all implementations in region.