Operational Leaders

This past season and in prior seasons, guests have graciously lent their industry expertise. Many have also mentioned some very important charitable causes. In this episode, we conclude Season Three by welcoming Sumudu Waas, the Acting Executive Director at Help for Children (HFC). HFC is a global foundation supporting the prevention and treatment of child abuse.

Sumudu joins this episode to talk about the mission of Help for Children and the foundation's deep roots within the alternative investment community. She highlights some of the key issues surrounding child abuse. Sumudu also discusses the origins of HFC, how the foundation is organized and distributes grants, and her personal motivation for joining the foundation.

Sylvain Forté is passionate about artificial intelligence. In 2014, he took that passion and co-founded SESΛMm, a company that applies natural language processing – a subfield of artificial intelligence – to extract billions of articles and messages from the web and turn them into relevant insights for investors.

In this episode, Sylvain explains the rise of artificial intelligence and big data and their use in the investment field. He discusses the various use cases for AI and his company's natural language processing, from insights on public and private companies to ESG assessments. He also discusses the extent of his company's data sets and how different types of clients make use of the information his company provides.

In addition, Sylvain talks about how he started his business, some of the advantages of his company's location in Paris and its expansion abroad, and the burgeoning FinTech community in France.

As the former Chief Architect at a leading private equity firm, Richard Change saw a gap in data standards, as well as limitations on how firms stored and tracked investment information. In 2012 he set out as co-founder to start PFA Solutions. The company now focuses on technology solutions for calculating GP carry allocations and tracking consolidated performance information across fund firms.

Richard joins this episode to talk about the ongoing gap in industry-wide data standards and how that creates challenges and opportunities. He also shares his observations about investor demand for insight and transparency into fund performance and how that trend is driving the adoption of technology. Richard also discusses the commoditization of IT and the impact of the Cloud. In addition, he notes some limitations on the use of Excel spreadsheets.

John Brennan spent nearly 25 years on the buy-side of the alternative investment management industry, include most recently 10 years as the Chief Technology Officer at Highfields Capital. He now serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at Eze Castle Integration.

John joined the podcast as our very first guest. He returns in this episode to talk about integrating new technologies and the importance of first understanding the underlying business environment. Along the way, John hits on a number of key topics, including the benefits of technology solutions and the advantage of using consulting firms to identify the best solutions, the importance of developing written technology plans that look to a firm's future growth, and the need for guardrails when allowing employees to engage in their own coding projects.