credit-risk
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Nguyen Nguyen Is Rewriting the Credit File
A Barclays credit-risk specialist saw what a missing credit history could cost. Thirteen years after coding a first score beside the Hudson, his company is trying to make lending see the people its paperwork misses.
Geoff Brown
Geoff Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Highline, a Dallas-based fintech that runs a payments network pulling bill payments and loan repayments directly from a worker's paycheck instead of a bank account. A self-described numbers geek with a math and physics degree from the University of Florida, he spent two decades in consumer banking and credit risk at Capital One, Santander and Salary Finance before starting Highline in 2020. The company raised $13 million in Series A funding in 2022 and pitches payroll-linked payments as a way to cut missed payments and expand access to lower-cost credit.
Michael Crumpler
Michael Crumpler is the Chief Executive Officer of Credit Benchmark, a London- and New York-based financial data firm that aggregates anonymized internal credit risk views from more than 40 global banks, including 17 Global Systemically Important Banks, into consensus ratings on over 80,000 entities. He was appointed CEO in June 2023 after seven years at the company, most recently as Chief Operating Officer and Head of Risk, where he oversaw a period of 25% revenue growth. Before Credit Benchmark, he spent roughly two decades in credit risk seats at Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Dexia, and Moody's, focused on energy, infrastructure, and U.S. public finance.
Michelle Katics
Michelle Katics is the co-founder and CEO of BankersLab and PortfolioQuest, SaaS simulation platforms she describes as flight simulators for bankers. After two decades inside the machinery of global finance - the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the IMF, Fair Isaac (FICO), and Standard Chartered - she decided the best way to teach risk was to let people lose fake money first. Her platforms run synthetic loan portfolios with more than a trillion possible outcomes, training bankers in over 45 countries. A fixture of the Singapore and Southeast Asian fintech scene, she has been named to the Women in FinTech Power List and recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Eli Chait
Eli Chait is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wholesail, a San Francisco-based B2B payment risk management platform modernizing accounts receivable for food and beverage distributors. His origin story is unusually grounded: at age 12, he was entering invoices for his father's restaurant in Los Angeles. That early hands-on encounter with the pain of paper-based B2B trade became the north star for his entire career - from co-founding Copilot (a restaurant analytics startup acquired by OpenTable) to leading Wholesail through a $22.6M Series A. With a team of repeat entrepreneurs forged at OpenTable, Wholesail is building the credit and payments network for the $1+ trillion US food distribution market.
Deniz A. Johnson
COO of Stratyfy, adjunct faculty at Northeastern University, and one of the most credible voices in the fight against algorithmic discrimination in financial services. Born in Istanbul, educated in engineering and business, Deniz has spent decades bridging the gap between AI technology and human consequences — building interpretable, bias-mitigating AI systems used by 20+ lenders through the Underwriting for Racial Justice programme. She is a serial board member, community convener, and published author who believes fairness and performance are not opposites but the same equation solved correctly.