Fusion Sessions

Pick up your badge, expand your network, and enjoy coffee, juices, and a light breakfast.

Speaker: Nuno Sebastião (Feedzai)

Financial safety is human safety. The two are inseparable. When money disappears, it’s not just a number. It’s someone’s stability, their confidence, their future. As the financial world evolves, so do the challenges. New opportunities for innovation, and new opportunities for fraud. Our industry needs to think differently. Not in silos, but as a connected system.

Speakers: Alissa “Dr. Jay” Abdullah (Mastercard) and Nuno Sebastião (Feedzai)

What does the next decade of fraud and cybercrime look like — and are we building for it? Few people are better placed to answer that question than Alissa “Dr. Jay” Abdullah. Former White House Deputy CIO, Mastercard’s Deputy Chief Security Officer, and one of the most forward-thinking voices in cyber and AI, she has spent her career operating at the leading edge of what’s possible and anticipating what happens next. Talking with Feedzai’s CEO, Nuno Sebastião, Dr. Jay opens the day with a look ahead. Agentic AI is both the greatest emerging threat and a potentially great human and business enabler. Is the convergence of cyber and financial crime a genuine foundational change, or is it a trend, and what will it take to build trust in a world where machines move faster than all of us?

Speakers: Dr. Sian Proctor (Chief Inspiration Astronaut) and Nuno Sebastião (Feedzai)

Dr. Sian Proctor is a geoscientist, astronaut, poet, and explorer who, in 2021, became the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft, winning her seat on SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission. Her session brings a perspective that is genuinely rare in any room: someone who has operated at the edge of human capability, trusted complex systems with her life, and returned with a fundamentally changed sense of what’s possible. For an audience navigating the uncertainty of AI adoption, the parallels are deliberate and direct – trust in systems you don’t fully control, decision-making under uncertainty, and the competitive advantage of a perspective others don’t have.

Speaker: Mike Steinbach (PwC)

A few years ago, the head of fraud at most banks reported into operations or risk, with a budget framed as a cost to be minimized. Today, that same role sits much closer to the CEO, with accountability that touches growth, customer trust, and the institution’s competitive position in the market. That shift didn’t happen because fraud got more interesting. The business changed. Continuous online journeys, deepfakes, real-time payments, and a customer base that judges banks on whether they feel safe — all of it pushed fraud out of the back office and onto the agenda where revenue and reputation are decided. Mike Steinbach has watched this shift from rare vantage points: inside Citi, inside the FBI before that, and now from PwC. He’ll share what he’s seeing as fraud moves up the org chart and into the C-suite conversation.

Speakers: Kristy Duncan (Women in Payments), Eralda Hasani (BNY), Jennifer Nicol (Feedzai), Matt Loos (Scotia Bank)

Payments are getting faster, more connected, and more creative about how value moves. Real-time rails, stablecoins, embedded finance, and AI — each opens up something new for customers and for fraudsters. Speed changes the risk appetite, and the teams holding the line on security, compliance, and trust are feeling it. Kristy Duncan, Founder & CEO of Women in Payments, sits down with Eralda Hasani (BNY) and Sumee Seetharaman (TD Bank) for a direct conversation about how to grow in this environment without handing fraudsters the keys; what’s working, what isn’t, and what they’d do differently.

Speakers: Donna Turner (Risk Insights Solutions), Ian Mitchell (The Knoble), Ken Westbrook (Stop Scams Alliance), and Lenny Gusel (Feedzai)

Cyber-enabled fraud is now a human crime economy — industrialized, cross-border, and growing faster than any single institution can respond to. Donna Turner sits down with Ian Mitchell (The Knoble) and Ken Westbrook (Stop Scams Alliance) to make the case for a whole-of-society response. Ian walks through The Knoble’s World Cup Human Trafficking & Scams Detection Guide, built to coordinate community response around a global event with serious financial crime implications. Ken previews a major new Gallup survey on the scale of scam harm in the US, designed to give lawmakers the data and urgency to fund a national-security-level response.

Speakers: Jeff Newman (Zions Bank), Kevin Thomsen (TB Bank), Professor Arthur Langer (Northeastern University), Charles Blauner (Crosspoint Capital), and Nick Collinger (Feedzai)

As fraud, identity, and security tools and processes converge, banks have worked to break down silos and organize these overlapping functions into operating models that rationalize technology investments, accelerate build velocity, and optimize business outcomes. This panel brings together technology leaders to discuss what convergence looks like in practice and how they deliver customer trust and security in their organizations.

Speakers: Michael D`Sa (ATB), and Ali Adib (Feedzai)

The traditional separation between authentication and fraud decisioning is rapidly evolving. New user enrollment at onboarding, login journeys, online account recovery, device intel, behavioral signals — all reveal intent behind digital customer interactions. Banks that converge the CIAM stack to bring these signals into their fraud decisioning improve significantly on every fraud and CX metric. This session unpacks what continuous, adaptive trust looks like in practice, from how to trigger the right authentication at the right moment, to how to close the gaps fraudsters exploit in your authentication customer journeys.

Speakers: Sean Hegarty (JPMC UK) and Dan Holmes (Feedzai)

What convergence looks like when you actually build it. Chase UK unified risk decisioning across inbound, outbound, and cards from day one — fusing transactional decisions with device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, and network scoring inside a single strategy. Sean Hegarty walks through what it took to build, where fraud strategy and authentication connect in practice, and why the result is both stronger fraud performance and a cleaner user experience.

Speakers: Ben Chance (Early Warning Services) and Phong Rock (Feedzai)

The US fraud landscape is changing. Social engineering has outpaced technical controls. The assumption that incoming money is clean money is no longer one any institution can afford to make. And for all the investment in technology, the human layer remains both the greatest vulnerability and – when it works – the most powerful defense. Ben Chance is GM at Early Warning Services Certos and one of the most experienced fraud practitioners in the US market, having led fraud strategy across several of the country’s largest banks before moving to the network level. In this conversation with Feedzai, Ben brings a ground-level view of what financial institutions are actually dealing with today – where controls are failing, where the industry is making progress, and what it will take to get ahead of a threat environment that shows no sign of slowing down.

Speakers: Dr. Manuela Veloso (Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita at CMU), Drew Propson (World Economic Forum), and Marc Corbett (Backbase), Dr. Pedro Bizarro (Feedzai)

For leaders who want to move beyond the hype and understand the practical implications of AI. Join Pedro Bizarro, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Feedzai, and his panelists for a deep dive on where AI stands today, where it is headed next, and what banks must prepare for after that. The discussion covers three horizons. Today — how AI is already being used to aid fraud investigators and accelerate response to emerging fraud typologies. Next — how foundation models are changing detection, delivering high accuracy across vast datasets and fraud scoring from day one. And future, a world of agentic banking, where the challenge shifts from stopping human fraudsters to distinguishing good agents from bad ones.

Speakers: Paul Chang (AWS), Urooj Burney (Mastercard), Anshul Arora (Matrix), Lenny Gusel (Feedzai)

Fraud lives in the gaps between products, institutions, and borders. Defense, mostly, doesn’t. Offline list sharing and traditional data consortiums are doing good work, but they can’t keep pace with rings that target multiple banks in parallel, or attack patterns that hit North America months after they showed up in Europe. This panel makes the case for going on offense: shifting to real-time, actionable risk intelligence, and from informal collaboration to formal, contribution-based networks that don’t stop at the border.

Nuno Sebastião, CEO of Feedzai, closes the day.

Unwind and enjoy an al fresco evening of fabulous food, drink, music, and conversation at The Perch, an urban oasis with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, and the Statue of Liberty.