Michael Francis is a Managing Director at BlackRock and Head of Platform Engineering within BlackRock's Aladdin Product Group. The Platform Engineering team architects and builds the platform that underpins Aladdin, an operating system for investment managers that seeks to connect the information, people and technology needed to manage money in real time. The Aladdin platform combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive portfolio management, trading and operations tools on a single platform to power informed decision-making, effective risk management, efficient trading and operational scale.The team focuses on defining a highly integrated data and tools strategy helping BlackRock lead the industry in using data and technology to drive decision making across our core asset management and technology businesses. The technologies include our high scale service mesh, our scalable Kubernetes based compute for investors, our large scale Cassandra based NoSQL environment, our automated build and testing infrastructure, and the core libraries underpinning our applications and products. Michael oversees the team that actively contributes to a broad range of Open Source projects ranging from the Julia programming language to the Argo Events framework.

Strategic Risk Program - focusing on front to back risk processing, large data and risk aggregation. Responsible for the design and development of a massively scalable, temporal, hybrid object-graph data store for risk analysis, aggregation and reporting. This innovative database touches every part of Credit Suisse from front office through to the central risk organization.

Head of Goldman Sachs Data Strats Group, a global team of 25 professionals located in New York, London, Bangalore and Hong Kong. - Manage front office pricing, index, reference and economic data. Instrumental to trading decisions, across all business sectors: Fixed Income, Currencies, Commodities, Equities, Credit, Mortgages.- Develop custom C++ analysis, databases and visualization tools used across Goldman Sachs. - Evaluate, recommend and integrate new software and systems.