Cutter Connect 2022

Cindy Castellano is the CEO of Cutter Associates and has over 30 years of experience in the investment management industry. She formerly led Cutter Associates’ Client-Facing and Wealth practices, advising asset and wealth management firms on their sales and distribution, marketing, product development, consultant relations, client service, and client reporting. Cindy has conducted system searches for CRM, marketing automation, portals, pitchbooks/client presentation, content management, client reporting, client onboarding, and RFP systems. Prior to joining Cutter, Cindy served as Vice President and Head of Operations for a division of Guggenheim Investments, where she led mutual fund accounting and administration; institutional accounting, billing, and client reporting; SMA operations, performance reporting (GIPS); and fixed income performance, attribution, and risk reporting. As Vice President and Head of Equities, Cindy led the firm’s investment team and supervised equity trading activities.

Cindy also spent 10 years as a Senior Portfolio Manager and Research Analyst, managing over USD 500 million in AUM for mutual funds and VITs using social awareness (ESG), large cap growth, and mid-cap growth investment strategies. She developed the investment process, directed research analysts’ day-to-day efforts, and created the firm’s social criteria and proxy voting guidelines. Cindy, a Chartered Financial Analyst, holds a bachelor’s of business administration from Washburn University. 

Angela Centeno has more than 25 years of experience in financial services. Prior to joining Cutter in 2015, Angela worked for The Northern Trust Company in multiple roles including sourcing and procuring enterprise market data, investment operations outsourcing, and vendor and custodian relationships. She previously held senior positions in operations management, project management, data management, and solutions implementation. Angela earned a bachelor of science in accounting and a bachelor of science in business administration from the University of Kansas, as well as an MBA in finance from DePaul University. She is a registered CPA.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

• AI Use Cases in Investment Management: Infinite Possibilities
• Alternative Investments
• Client Reporting Systems
• Cutter Benchmarking: Alternative Investments
• Cutter Benchmarking: Derivatives and Collateral Management
• Cutter Benchmarking: Firmwide ESG Capabilities
• Derivatives and Collateral Management Solutions
• ESG Data Management
• ESG: It’s a Jungle Out There ─ A Look at the Data Provider Landscape
• ESG Investing: One Vision, Many Lenses
• Market Data Administration
• Private Debt

Jon Chandler has 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. Prior to joining Cutter Associates in 2014, Jon was a senior business analyst for State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), where he was involved in a number of projects for the front and middle office, including UAT design and execution for an order management system (Fidessa IMS), the implementation of a web-based due diligence platform (FundInsight), and an enterprise solution to support blended benchmarks. Prior to his project roles, Jon was a principal in fixed income trade operations at SSGA. He has extensive experience with post-trade operations and applications, such as OASYS/CTM, PORTIA, MBSExpert, and FailStation. Jon earned a bachelor of arts in history from the University of Florida and an MBA from Northeastern University.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

• Alternative Investment Systems
• Cutter Benchmarking: Alternative Investments
• Cutter Benchmarking: Derivatives and Collateral Management
• Cutter Benchmarking: Investment Risk
• Cutter Benchmarking: Performance Measurement and Attribution
• Derivatives and Collateral Management Solutions
• Execution Management Systems
• Managed Data Services
• Order Management Systems
• Outsourcing Solutions
• Performance Measurement and Attribution Systems
• Portfolio Analytics Solutions
• Private Debt
• Risk Management Systems
• The Evolving Front Office Support Model

Arthur Fryar has over 25 years of experience in investment operations, technology, solution design, and outsourcing at leading global financial institutions. His work spans the front, middle, and back office, representing service providers, asset managers, and fintech companies. He has led the design of strategic operating models for outsourced investment functions, implemented scalable and repeatable onboarding standards, and held global product management roles across investment analytics, accounting, and data management functions. Arthur also has been actively involved in the investment performance community for many years.

Prior to Cutter, he led Product Management for all the front-, middle-, and back-office analytics services provided via State Street Corp.’s Middle Office Outsourcing and Alpha Front to Back solutions, playing a central role in defining State Street’s servicing standards for the Alpha solution and managing many early clients through their transition to outsourcing. He was a member of the due diligence and M&A team that led to State Street’s USD 2.6 billion acquisition of Charles River Development and managed the integration of many CRD front-office capabilities to legacy back- and middle-office services.

Arthur also spent 15 years in fintech overseeing product management, development, and implementation functions in performance measurement, data management, and investment accounting at DST Global Solutions, Eze Software Group, and Thomson Financial.

Stacia Graham has more than 25 years of experience in investment management, bringing a deep understanding of end-to-end asset management processing and project management to her role as Managing Director, Asset Management Research Lead at Cutter Associates.

Stacia also serves as a subject matter expert for targeted engagements in Enterprise Risk and Compliance.

Prior to joining Cutter in 2018, Stacia worked at Wellington Management Company LLP in Boston in various senior roles within compliance, investment administration, and operational risk, including leading and managing the global Investment Guideline Compliance team for eight years. She earned a bachelor of science in business administration from Bryant University and an MBA from Bentley University.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

• Client Portal Solutions
• Client Reporting Systems
• Cutter Benchmarking: Client Reporting
• Cutter Benchmarking: Modern Compliance in Investment Management
• Electronic Communications Surveillance Systems
• Hybrid Work Arrangements and Their Impact on Firm Culture
• Performance Measurement and Attribution Systems
• Portfolio Analytics Solutions
• Research Management Systems
• Using RPA to Automate Business Processes

Recent Consulting Engagements include:

• Assessment of business processes and systems to support regulatory reporting (shareholder disclosure reporting) for a large asset manager

• Assessment of requirements and vendor solutions for Electronic Communication Surveillance for a small asset manager, to rectify SEC findings

Dru Holmquist has over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. He has developed expertise across asset management distribution, investment management, and wealth management technology and operations. Dru is a successful senior leader with a deep track record of collaboration initiation, strategy design, team building, program management and process innovation. He has conducted strategy programs for CRM, client mastering, data architecture, client reporting, client onboarding, trading, research, and portfolio management capabilities. His knowledge spans the equities, fixed income, municipals, commodities, private debt, private equity, real estate, farmland, agri-business, and timber management sectors, as well as the following vehicle types: Mutual Funds, Closed-end Funds, ETFs, UCITs, UITs, Institutional Separate Accounts, SMAs (traditional, dual contract and models), LPs, 529 Plans and REITs.

Prior to joining Cutter Associates, Dru served as Managing Director of Technology for Nuveen Advisory Services, the business organization responsible for delivering the investment and asset management expertise of Nuveen. Dru was responsible for all business applications and technology that supported the Sales, Client Service, Marketing, Product and Fund Administration business teams. He oversaw the deployment of Salesforce as a CRM application, that unified multiple investment manager affiliates by redesigning the lead generation process, sales pipeline stages, sales reporting, distribution analytics, marketing analytics, and client engagement model. In addition, Dru implemented a product and account master, and initiated the business case to begin a client master effort. He was the technology leader that owned the business transformation efforts for the advisory services organization.

Laura Jesson has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry as a project manager, business analyst, and consultant. She joined Cutter Associates in 2013. Prior to Cutter, Laura spent eight years at Wells Capital Management and Evergreen Investments, where she managed investment operations projects, including those focused on outsourcing, client reporting, and trade management. She previously worked at Omgeo as a member of the Central Trade Manager (CTM) product design team. Laura started her career at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a process consultant supporting a variety of projects for clients in the financial services industry. Laura earned her bachelor of arts in economics and psychology from Amherst College. She holds the Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

• AI Use Cases in Investment Management: Infinite Possibilities 
• Business Intelligence Tools
• Cutter Benchmarking: Client Reporting
• Cutter Benchmarking: Firmwide ESG Capabilities
• Cutter Benchmarking: Managing Vendors and Service Providers 
• DataOps: In Theory and Practice
• Enabling Data Analytics
• ESG Data Management 
• ESG: It’s a Jungle Out There ─ A Look at the Data Provider Landscape
• ESG Investing: One Vision, Many Lenses 
• Execution Management Systems
• Hybrid Work Arrangements and Their Impact on Firm Culture
• Using RPA to Automate Business Processes
• The Role of the CRM for Asset Managers

Gina McCafferty has 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. She served at Cutter from 1999 to 2011 as Principal and Managing Director of CutterResearch, and she was instrumental in growing that business. Gina returned to Cutter in 2017, and established and ran the company’s Wealth Management research division. In 2019, she was appointed to Head of Research, responsible for Asset Management and Wealth Management product development and delivery to over 200 member firms around the globe. Gina was previously at Investit Ltd., where she served for six years as head of the company’s research service. Prior to that, she held senior positions at DST International with product responsibility for their global accounting and performance measurement systems, and at SunGard as Vice President of Client Services for their securities trading products.

Kathy McDermott has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. Kathy, who joined Cutter Associates in 2011, has authored multiple Cutter Research reports on a wide range of topics. She spent ten years as a consultant for a variety of asset management firms, with a focus on business analysis for front- and middle-office projects. Kathy was previously the senior business analyst, equity trading systems, at Wellington Management, specializing in the firm’s proprietary electronic and basket trading applications. Earlier in her career, Kathy worked for Thomson Financial Services (now Thomson Reuters), supporting FirstCall and PORTIA clients in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand, and later went on to manage PORTIA implementations. She also worked at LongView (now Linedata) as an account manager and then product manager of electronic trading. Kathy earned her bachelor of arts in mathematics from Hamilton College.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

• Alternative Data and the Expanding Universe of Investment Information
• Cutter Benchmarking: Data Management
• Cutter Benchmarking: Market Data Administration
• DataOps: In Theory and Practice
• Enabling Data Analytics
• The Evolving Front Office Support Model
• Evolving Data Governance: Building a Data Culture
• Making Snowflake Part of Your Modern Data Platform
• Managed Data Services
• Market Data Administration
• Order Management Systems
• Outsourced Trading: Has the Time Come?
• Reference Data Management Solutions

Onawa Promise Lacewell has a research focus on the impact of disruptive technologies on the financial services sector and on the client-facing technology that wealth managers use to support the digital experience of UHNW and HNW end clients. Specifically, she is interested in how wealth managers use digital portals and mobile apps to support the client experience of UHNW and HNW end clients. Onawa holds a PhD from the University of Missouri.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

• Behind the Login of Wealth Management Client Portals
• Benchmarking of Value-Added Services for UHNW clients
• The Rising Popularity of Family Offices
• AI Throughout the Wealth Management Lifecycle
• UHNW Benchmarking

Gaurav Aggarwal is the Chief Commercial Officer for Indus Valley Partners (IVP), responsible for overseeing product strategy and planning. During his time at IVP, he has worked closely with over 40+ buy-side asset managers in defining and delivering strategic transformations, including enterprise data platforms, reporting & analytics and process re-alignments.

Mr. Aggarwal began his career at SAP Labs, where he spearheaded the development of a strategic market risk offering for large-scale investment institutions. He also worked at Citi, developing their operations and transaction banking solution for Asian and Latin American markets.

Mr. Aggarwal graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in information technology.

Mark is a senior product manager at BNY Mellon. His responsibilities include ensuring the data management features BNY Mellon provides on the Data Vault multi-tenant platform meet the needs of our clients. Mark has decades of experience designing and implementing data management solutions for the buy-side spanning departmental, enterprise, up to industry scale across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions. He is specifically tasked with understanding how BNY Mellon can leverage new technology to re-imagine and simplify legacy paradigms to bring economies of scale to our client’s data management operations.

During this session hear from BNY Mellon experts on how they designed and delivered a cloud-native data platform to help clients transform to a data-centric operating model, keep pace with the relentless changes in the industry and use technology to drive challenging business transformation.

Working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, behavior, technology, and science, Nichol Bradford’s mission is to empower human transformation and wellbeing by catalyzing new visions, opportunities, and tech-enabled tools for all. She ignites new ways to use technology to expand beyond our perceived limits and reach our fullest potential through her global non-profit Transformative Tech.org, working with talented researchers, founders, and investors across the globe who build tech for human health and happiness that will redefine wellbeing for the next decade.

According to Bradford, “Anywhere there’s exponential tech, there’s a path to enhance human wellbeing.” Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities speakers bureau, she speaks extensively on human transformation, transformative tech, and the future of health, work, and human excellence. Weaving wellbeing, technology, and science into practical possibilities for us all, she lays out how we can successfully navigate the future of work and society with our humanity intact. Using real-life examples and use cases from the latest trends in wellness technologies, Bradford demonstrates to groups how these emerging advances can be applied to heal, upskill, and enhance human capability and benefit all of mankind.

Bradford co-founded and built Transformative Tech.org, a global ecosystem dedicated to educating, gathering, and activating wellbeing tech founders, investors, and innovators – with members in 72 countries and 450 cities and events that attract more than 1,000 attendees. The largest and most respected authority on welltech, Transformative Tech helps founders leveraging exponential tech for mental and emotional wellbeing, social and emotional wellness, and human potential and performance find feedback and funding, and helps investors find the best wellbeing tech founders and companies for their needs. As executive director, Bradford helps corporate innovators understand and apply these powerful tools to their businesses, as well as curates the Transformative Tech Conference – a leading event at the intersection of tech and wellbeing.

Prior to becoming a leader in transformative technology, Bradford served as a senior interactive entertainment executive responsible for strategy, operations, and marketing for major brands that include: Activision Blizzard, Disney, and Vivendi. In her role, she operated World of Warcraft and all of Blizzard Entertainment’s properties in China as well as held a key role on the Vivendi Games team responsible for the Activision-Blizzard merger – an $18B deal and an industry defining event. Bradford was also the CEO and founder of Willow Group, providing accessible and effective technologies to elevate psychological wellbeing.

Bradford is a lecturer at Stanford University, a graduate of Singularity University’s Global Solutions program, has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, and a BBA in Marketing from the University of Houston. She is a board trustee of the California Institute of Integral Studies, a fellow of the British American Project, served on the board of the Brandon Marshall Foundation for Mental Health, and is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Bradford is also a novelist and has written The Sisterhood, a work of transformative Afro-futuristic fiction.

Boris Bykhovsky is the Vice President of the Solutions Management & Consulting at SS&C Advent. Before this, Boris worked in a variety of roles after joining the firm in 2007.

Currently, Boris leads SS&C Advent’s asset management market strategy with a focus on Advent Genesis, the firm’s cloud native platform. Additionally, Boris oversees the US Solutions Consulting team which is primarily focused on advising asset management clients on ideal solutions for their firms’ business and technology needs.

Boris holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Charles DeLuca is responsible for Tier 1 Business Development for Bloomberg Buy-Side Solutions in the Americas. In his current role, Charles and his team lead the region’s most strategic Buy-Side engagements. This includes managing pre-sales engagement related to Bloomberg’s end-to-end investment workflow ranging from Research Management, Portfolio & Risk and Order & Execution Management.

Chris is the Head of US and Global Strategy at FINBOURNE. With global experience spanning North America, Japan, Singapore and the UK, Chris has a proven track record for driving operations and strategy within banks, consultancies and starts ups, in the financial services industry. In his previous roles, including Global Head of Markets Regulatory Change at Natwest Markets, Chris has been responsible for creating revenue and growth opportunities, while also eliminating cost and operational risk. With significant time spent at RBS and other firms in capital markets, Chris’s rich experience ranges from heading up regulatory change programs such as MiFID II, Dodd-Frank and EMIR reforms, through to overseeing technology operations and emerging markets integrations. In his current role Chris is focussed on driving adoption of FINBOURNE’s solutions across North America, as well as evolving the company’s global commercial strategy as it moves from start-up to scale-up.

Jeremy Katzeff, CFA, is Head of Buy Side Solutions at GoldenSource, where he is responsible for growing and supporting GoldenSource’s global investment management client base. Prior to joining GoldenSource, Jeremy was a Senior Director at Broadridge where he was responsible for the Traditional Asset Management segment within Broadridge Asset Management Solutions. Previously, Jeremy had various roles spanning his 18-year career including JPMorgan Asset Management, as well as in Blackrock’s iShares and Aladdin business.

As a Senior Product & Data Consultant, Nanda’s primary responsibility is to help North American financial institutions successfully implement SIX’s reference data, global corporate actions and tax and regulatory solutions. He also works with the SIX data acquisition and management teams to ensure the highest quality content and coverage.

Nanda has worked with back office securities data solutions for more than 20 years, and over the course of his career he has also managed a global security cross-reference product, and was instrumental in managing development and implementation of the ANNA Service Bureau, which is a central hub for consolidation and distribution of ISINs from over 60 global markets.

Born and raised in India, Nanda holds a degree in Applied Sciences from the Madras College of Engineering. He currently lives in Connecticut with his wife and children.

Marc Mallett is the Global Head of Whole Office Strategy at Northern Trust, where he is responsible for business strategy, corporate development and solutions consulting. He joined Northern Trust in 2010 as the Global Head of Client Conversions for Northern Trust’s middle office outsourcing product.

Prior to joining Northern Trust, Marc spent 15 years in numerous leadership positions for investment management, technology and consulting companies. Among these, he was Vice President of Technology at Fidelity Investments where he was responsible for developing and executing technology strategy for their equity portfolio managers and research analysts. Most recently Marc led sales and product management for SimCorp in North America.

Brad McGeown is the VP of Strategy, Financial Services at Smart Communications. In this role, Brad brings over 25 years of in-depth experience across many business functions of Financial Services. With roles leading large transformation efforts, Brad has broad insights into the challenges facing Financial Services organizations as they focus on enhancing their customer experiences and engagement. Over the past 12 years, Brad led a team as his banks executive sponsor on their enterprise CCM modernization efforts that led to improved customer engagement and annual savings.

Patrick oversees the commercial activities at Kurtosys, a leading solutions provider of client reporting, client portals and multi-region websites for the investment management industry. Having spent the last twenty years working on both the buy and sell side, Patrick has a wealth of experience in most areas of investment technology, ranging from client reporting and digital through to trading and risk. Pat stewarded the build out of the Kurtosys Cloud platform for almost 10 years and is a keen proponent of data centralization and the modernization of the IM tech stack via the cloud, topics he speaks about regularly at industry events.

Matt is Head of Asset Owner Strategy at SimCorp North America. Matt has spent the last 7 years at SimCorp, largely in a business development role across all of SimCorp verticals in North America until 2022 when he assumed responsibility for business development with a focus on SimCorp’s clients in the Insurance, Pension, Banking and GSE realms.

Prior to joining SimCorp, Matt spent the better part of two decades working at Northern Trust where he gained experience across all of the institutional business lines including fund accounting and administration, asset management and middle office outsourcing services, both as a business practitioner and in business development roles. Matt also has experience leading some significant global change projects on the back of strategic acquisitions for the bank and previously ran Consultant Relations for the Asset Servicing business in North America.

Michelle Swartzentruber, Director, joined Sterling Capital Management in 2018 and has investment experience since 2004. Michelle is a senior product and systems analyst with the Performance and Data Analytics team. Prior to joining Sterling, she worked at Morningstar, Inc. where she held several positions, most recently as a senior research analyst providing custom data analysis to the media and Morningstar’s editorial teams. Prior to this position, she was a research analyst supporting methodology development and a quality auditor responsible for improving data accuracy. Michelle received her B.S. in Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University and her M.B.A. from DePaul University.