L. Allison Dukes has served as Senior Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of Invesco Ltd (NYSE: IVZ) since 2020. In this role, she leads all global corporate finance functions, including strategic and financial planning, investor relations, corporate development, accounting, corporate tax, treasury, procurement, corporate services and global public policy.
Prior to joining Invesco, Ms. Dukes served as Chief Financial Officer of SunTrust Banks (now Truist Financial Corporation). Prior to becoming Chief Financial Officer, Ms. Dukes served in a series of leadership roles throughout her 20 years of service with SunTrust, including Head of Commercial & Business Banking, which included delivery of SunTrust’s investment banking and capital markets capabilities, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlanta Division of SunTrust, Co-Head of Private Wealth Management, and Head of Syndicated Finance Originations for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.
Ms. Dukes currently serves on the board of Haverty Furniture Companies, Inc. (NYSE: HVT) where she chairs the nominating, compensation and governance committee. Ms. Dukes also serves on the Board of Trustees for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, where she chairs the finance committee, the Board of Trustees for Emory University, the board of Junior Achievement of Georgia where she previously served as Board Chair from 2019 to 2021, and as a trustee for the John and Mary Franklin Foundation. Prior civic board service includes the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce Executive Board, the Atlanta History Center, the Alliance Theater at the Woodruff Arts Center, trustee of the Camp-Younts Foundation, trustee of the Pitts Foundation, and Chair of the SunTrust Trusteed Foundations.
Ms. Dukes earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Business Administration from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Allison and her husband, Billy, are natives of Atlanta and have two sons.
Stephanie Richard is the chief risk officer of Ally Financial Inc. Appointed to the role in November 2024, Richard is responsible for overseeing the identification, assessment and management of risks across the organization and ensuring the company’s risk strategy supports business goals and objectives. She works closely with senior leadership to develop policies and frameworks to safeguard the company’s financial stability and reputation. Richard reports to the risk committee of the board of directors and to Ally’s CEO.
Since joining Ally in 1997, Richard has had a long and respected reputation with key stakeholders and helped design the company’s initial risk appetite framework and stress testing process. She has served in numerous roles with increasing levels of responsibility across finance, treasury and risk management. Since Ally became a bank holding company in 2008, she has played an integral part in many of the company’s transformation initiatives. Prior to her current role, Richard served as Ally’s chief audit executive where she led the internal audit function and had administrative oversight for the company’s loan review function. During that time, she established a strategic focus on the transformation of the internal audit function, with efforts on cultivating innovation and expanding the use of technology and data analytics.
Richard serves as a board member and treasurer for Dress for Success’s Charlotte chapter and as treasurer for Project Scientist, a leading STEAM education nonprofit organization. She is also a member of the advisory board for the Wake Forest University School of Professional Studies’ enterprise risk management program. Additionally, she previously served as president of Women Executives for Community Service (WECS), a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide support to women pursuing a degree through the Women Initiating and Nurturing Growth through Scholarships (WINGS) program.
In 2022, Richard was an honoree for Charlotte Business Journal’s Women in Business Achievement Awards. She holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Michigan State University and an MBA from Wayne State University.
Sandy Kaul is the Head of Digital Assets and Innovation at Franklin Templeton. Her team focuses on how disruptive technologies and innovation are reshaping the trajectory of asset and wealth management and how Franklin Templeton, our clients and our partners evolve their offerings to realize the benefits of new capabilities. Efforts span the enhancement of existing products and services, the creation of new offerings, and the deployment of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital assets.
Sandy and the team draw on a combination of proprietary industry surveys, a network of fintech investors and vendors, leading industry experts and regulators, and world-class technologists to create and deliver their industry views, advice and expertise. Her work covers the breadth of how investment portfolios, products, investment strategies, services, and customer engagement are evolving. Sandy is the co-chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission’s Digital Asset Subcommittee and is on the World Economic Forum Digital Assets Advisory Board and the DTCC’s Digital Asset Advisory Board. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, events, podcasts, and webinars and is a sought-after source of information and advice for senior industry leaders.
Prior to joining Franklin Templeton, Sandy had created and built out the Business Advisory Services team over a 12-year period with Citi Global Markets and within Citi Wealth Management. Earlier in her career, Sandy worked on the sell-side as a futures research analyst at Shearson Lehman Brothers, on the buy-side as a portfolio manager at Commodities Corporation/Goldman Sachs Asset Management and as a program manager at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Sandy additionally has a background in consulting, leading the introduction of web-based capabilities into the institutional financial services space via her work with the innovative technology start-up firm Scient during the Dot.Com era and then with capital markets niche specialty consulting firm m.a.partners in the mid-2000s.
Sandy graduated with a major in History and a minor in Political Science from Colgate University. She actively supports the STEM-focused Young Women’s Leadership School in the Bronx, NY that seeks to improve educational opportunities for women in underserved communities.
Markie Wagner is the founder and CEO of Poetic, an AI system that learns and executes complex processes with over 99% accuracy while using 10x fewer tokens than traditional agents. Poetic runs high-stakes processes for top-10 banks, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical firms.
Prior to Poetic, Markie dropped out of Standford to run Delphi Labs, an applied AI research and consulting firm. Previously, she was a researcher and engineer at Google, Waymo, and Standford. She is a Thiel Fellow and attended Stanford University.
Lisa McGeough is Head of Americas region and CEO of DBUSA at Deutsche Bank. In this role she is responsible for driving growth, managing risk, and engaging stakeholders in one of the bank’s most important regions.
Prior to joining Deutsche Bank, Lisa was President, Chief Executive Officer for HSBC US. In those roles, she had responsibility for all businesses in the US, including Corporate and Institutional Banking coverage. She previously served as Co-Head of Global Banking Coverage for HSBC Holdings plc, responsible for a multi-billion-dollar business across 60 markets.
Lisa has over 35 years of institutional sales and marketing experience. She joined HSBC in June 2021 from Wells Fargo, where she served as Executive Vice President and Head of International. Over a 15-year career at Wells, Lisa was also Co-Head of Corporate & Investment Banking, Head of both the Financial Institutions and Industrials groups, and the London-based CEO of Wells Fargo Securities International Limited, responsible for leading investment banking and capital markets activities in EMEA.
She has also held senior roles at Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers (now Citigroup).
Lisa earned her B.A. in economics magna cum laude from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine and participated in executive education programs at Harvard Business School.
Kausar has over 20 years of experience in globally managing programs focused on client experience, Data, AI and Analytics focused on business growth. She is with Citi for 18 years and grew across ranks in technology, operations, Sales and now in AI team responsible to deliver strategic results by connecting business challenges to Data & AI to derive insights and advise on commercialization actions.
Kausar built a progressive organization which partners across Banking, Sales, Client Executives and Products, generates use cases based on client needs, prioritize and execute successfully. Her team is responsible for driving design thinking to client problems, analyze data, develop AI and GEN AI driven solutions and drive global adoption of data tools amongst the client facing stakeholders. Some of her achievements include delivering an industry-first daily deposit forecasting to assist Citi’s treasury, payment outlier detection tool to manage risk and a conversational chatbot to assist clients with common queries. Kausar’ s capabilities include building partnerships, building a business analytics team, establishing a robust pipeline of business use cases, and streamlining the end-to-end development and implementation process by establishing a program structure and strong governance with focus on ROI. Her other mandates include mobilizing the Services organization with trainings and knowledge sharing on AI.
Kausar joined Citi in 2005 as a software engineer responsible for implementing General Ledger related applications globally. She is credited for her versatility in the business and technology, quickly understanding business needs and being a conduit to connecting the problem to data and technology.
Outside work, Kausar is passionate about photography and now learning acrylic painting. She is also passionate about mentoring young female talent to get into coding early on and increase female representation in AI industry.
Raj Seshadri is chief commercial payments officer at Mastercard, and a member of the company’s Executive Leadership Team and Management Committee. She is responsible for Commercial & New Payment Flows focused on bringing the same safe and seamless experience consumers have come to expect in retail carded payments to commercial and corporate customers.
With Raj’s leadership, the Commercial & New Payment Flows team delivers marketleading assets and rapid innovation across a dynamic innovative landscape that includes commercial cards (SME, T&E, Purchasing, Fleet, Virtual), B2B payables and receivables, bill payments, and domestic and cross-border money movement solutions.
Previously, Raj was president of Mastercard’s global Data & Services team, helping to enhance the value of payments and enable customers to make smarter decisions with better outcomes, using a unique range of data-driven platforms and capabilities. She joined Mastercard as president of U.S. Issuers, where she led the growth of payments and services with banks and credit unions in a very competitive market.
Earlier in her career, Raj led BlackRock’s US iShares business and was the global chief marketing officer for iShares. Prior to that, she had leadership roles at Citigroup, in global strategy, CitiBusiness Banking and Commercial Banking, as well as at U.S. Trust, McKinsey & Company, and Bell Laboratories.
Raj serves on the board of directors of Raymond James Financial Inc., the board of trustees of Mount Holyoke College, the board of the New York Philharmonic, and the global board of the American India Foundation. Raj received a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College in physics and mathematics, a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University.
Alyse Belavic is a partnerships and business development leader with extensive experience across the fintech and payments ecosystem. At Prove, she owns payments and product partnerships, working to bring identity to the core of digital payments. Alyse spent the first portion of her career at Synchrony Financial, holding roles in business development, strategy, and ventures while there. She later joined the digital wallet fintech Skipify, where she was responsible for forging key partnerships with major issuers and networks, including American Express, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover among others.