Wealth Tech Awards - meet the judges

Mario A Bassi
Senior adviser business development, private wealth management, based in Sydney, Australia

Mario brings extensive experience to the industry as senior advisor driving sales and business initiatives in Asia Pacific for HNWI/FO/EAM service providers. He draws upon his detailed understanding from roles such as global head of business management for ANZ Private Bank in Australasia, where he defined and delivered the strategic and operational needs for the business.
Previously, Mario worked for leading wealth managers such as Vontobel, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, holding positions across a variety of disciplines including relationship management, business and financial planning, training and development, strategy, business development and marketing communications in both Europe and Asia. He was also managing director and head Asia for Synpulse Management Consulting, leading its growth in Asia Pacific, specifically Singapore.

Yuri Bender,
Editor-in-Chief, Professional Wealth Management, based in London, UK

Yuri Bender is a journalist covering banking, asset management and capital markets. He has launched and edited several magazines and websites at the Financial Times group and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Professional Wealth Management global magazine, website and events hub. He moderates panel discussions on financial, business and cultural issues in Europe, the US, Middle East and Asia. He has reported from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine for the FT Wealth magazine and writes regularly for FTfm, the fund management section of the FT newspaper. He studied Investment Management at the London Business School and International Relations at Cambridge University, writing his thesis on the economics of armed conflict.

Urs Bolt
WealthTech adviser, based in Switzerland

Urs has 30 plus years’ experience in the financial services industry, mainly in wealth management, investment banking and banking technology business. His core expertise is to develop and roll out new digital business platforms. Successful projects include a B2B social business platform for financial intermediaries, establishing prime services for ultra-wealthy clients, and post-trade services for FX and OTC products.
Urs’ current focus is to help fintech and regtech companies and financial service providers review/refocus business strategies, develop products and markets, execute sales, scout for fintech solutions, build business partnerships, manage projects and implement corporate structures and processes. Urs is active as a speaker, panelist, moderator, interviewee, microblogger and author. In addition he advocates for social and political causes and is an ecomodernist/pragmatist in favour of new energy policies balancing economy and ecology. He believes in a sustainable environment based on scientific research not ideology. 

Sebastian Dovey
Independent wealth management consultant, based in London, UK

Seb has 25 years of experience in the commercial evolution of global private banking and wealth management. He is an independent advisor to various businesses and families across the globe alongside being an early stage investor. He is chairman of F2 Strategy in San Francisco and a non-executive director of FiComm in Los Angeles, Entrepreneurs Investment Office in Dubai and Milamber PLC in London. He is also on the advisory board, specialising in data insight and consumer marketing for Moneyhub, Silver Lane and Align17.

In addition to this, Seb has since 2018 been on the board of the London School of Economics Generate program for Entrepreneurship as well as thought leader in residence for Fitch Learning, while he continues to be a judge on various global wealth industry award programs for publishers including the Financial Times Professional Wealth Management Global Private Banking Awards and Wealth Tech awards.

Seb was co-founder of Scorpio Partnership, a multiple award winning global wealth management strategic insight consultancy, which was acquired by Aon PLC in 2014. His body of work was recognised by the industry in 2018 with the award of Industry Thought Leader (Wealth Briefing).

Douglas Fritz
Founder of F2 Strategy, based in San Francisco, US

The founder of F2 Strategy and former wealth management CTO, Doug is an industry thought-leader and frequent speaker at major industry events. His team of experienced wealth management executives address a widening gap between the expectations of ultra-high net worth clients and their family office experience. The F2 Strategy perspective and experience come from a long history of innovations and transformative technical projects at firms serving ultra-high net worth families and institutions. Doug has led teams through transformative initiatives such frictionless client engagement and operations, digital client engagement, performance and accounting systems selection/implementation and many other areas currently challenging our industry.

Keith MacDonald
Head of Wealth Management, EY, based in London, UK

Keith is a partner in EY’s global financial services practice where his responsibilities include their services to wealth managers and private banks. He has led a wide range of strategic and transformational programmes across the industry, UK and internationally. He leads EY’s development and thought leadership in the wealth management and private banking sector, and is a regular contributor to conferences and publications.  

Sharmil Patwa
Founder, Opus Una Financial Services Consulting, based in London, UK

Sharmil has more than 20 years of experience as both a practitioner and consultant in wealth management and global markets. In 2011, he set up Opus Una to help participants in the wealth management ecosystem build better products and services and to manage business change more effectively. During his career he has led/overseen the launch of over 500 products/services in the wealth management ecosystem and held key roles in some of the largest business transformation programmes in Financial Services.  

Prior to founding Opus Una, he held senior business transformation and risk roles at Barclays Wealth and Deutsche Bank. Sharmil started his career at Accenture where he worked across equities, fixed income, FX and money markets businesses, leading large scale business process engineering, strategy and business architecture programmes.

Sharmil is highly active in the fintech space and is particularly passionate about supporting early stage companies. He is a mentor/advisor to a number of high potential start-up and early stage firms including strategic adviser to The Wealth Mosaic, the Global Digital Marketplace and Intelligence Resource for the Wealth Management Sector.  He is currently advising Startupbootcamp on their investtech initiatives, having previously been a mentor on their fintech programmes. He has also mentored on the Barclays Techstars Programme and at Allia’s Future Business Centre an independent not for profit dedicated to supporting impact entrepreneurs.

Sharmil has an MBA with specialisations in Entrepreneurship and Corporate Finance from Imperial College Business School.  

Alois Pirker
Research director wealth management, AITE Group, based in Boston, US

Alois is a research director at Aite Group, LLC, specialising in trends in the wealth management market. He has published extensively on topics including the registered investment advisor space, financial planning, separately managed accounts, and adviser-focused platforms and tools.

Before joining Aite Group, Alois was an analyst within Celent's Securities & Investments Group, where he published several studies and advised clients on new strategic technologies in the financial services marketplace.

Prior to working for Celent, Alois was an associate director of investment solutions at UBS Wealth Management in London. In this role he developed business requirements and managed the delivery of various initiatives targeted at the launch of UBS’ separately managed accounts business within the five largest European wealth management markets (the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain). Before assuming this role, he led a team of business analysts responsible for all data warehousing/reporting requirements for the implementation of UBS’ European wealth management platform.

Before moving to London, Alois was a data architect within UBS’ enterprise data warehouse programme in Switzerland.

He holds BS and MS degrees (Diplom-Ingenieur) in applied computer science from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. He also studied at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where he wrote his master's thesis on data management. He is fluent in English and German and proficient in French.

April Rudin,

Founder and president of The Rudin Group based in New York City, US

April is a leading  financial services marketing strategist and digital media expert distinguished by her ability to forecast, analyse, and illuminate critical trends in the industry to drive new client acquisition and brand awareness. A wealth management/UHNW sector specialist and digital/social media authority, April has partnered with many of the most revered financial institutions in the world to design and execute forward-looking marketing and communications programmes that are designed to engage their HNW and affluent investors. April is on the board of advisers for NexChange, a global financial services social network based in Hong Kong.
April is a regularly featured source of expert commentary on wealth management and financial technology for international news and business outlets, trade publications, and broadcast media. She has been a frequent contributor to Huffington Post, CFA Institute, American Banker, and many other HNW publications. A well-known global speaker on wealth, Nextgen and fintech, April has spoken to a variety of audiences around the world in Asia, Europe, South Africa and other locations. April is known for bringing her “joie de vivre” to wealth management, next gen and fintech conversations.

Stephen Wall,

Co-founder, Head of Marketplace & Content, The Wealth Mosaic, based in London, UK

Stephen is a research analyst focused on the global wealth management sector. With 12 years’ experience in the sector, he has recently co-founded a new global digital market network dedicated to bringing wealth managers and solution providers closer together based on transparency and knowledge, called The Wealth Mosaic.

With a specialist focus on wealth management, Stephen has been involved in morew than 70 different research projects covering a board variety of wealth manager types, a broad range of different service providers to the sector including technology, consulting, accounting, philanthropy, trust, investment managers and government, and covering a wide array of geographies international jurisdictions covering North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

In terms of project experience, Stephen has led or supported projects focusing on: market analysis, sizing and gap analysis; competitive intelligence and benchmarking; market entry strategy; client, adviser and intermediary insight; partnership identification and strategy, sector overview reports and more specific work looking at a range of relevant technology areas such as portfolio management, digital tools and client onboarding.

In Stephen's current role, his interest is focused on broadly understanding the evolving business needs of wealth managers and, to support those needs, has built a platform that supports the discovery, understanding, engagement and tracking of the deep and changing marketplace of solutions and solution providers that seek to service this market and those needs.