Last Thursday, we hosted our first Silverline Innovation Summit for our Capital Markets and FinTech community. My sincerest gratitude to all who participated and attended; your insights are invaluable! My hope is to continue growing this community so we can all help each other rise the tides of digital transformation and social progress. 

What’s next? We look forward to sharing our favorite highlights after the holidays so you can see what we’re most looking forward to in the months to come. Don’t worry: we recorded everything and it will be available in early 2021! In the meantime, it is my wish that everyone can spend time with family and loved ones over the holidays, take a moment to reflect on all we’ve learned this year, and recharge so we can all face the year ahead with a renewed spirit.

I did want to take a moment to share some of my personal highlights from the event, including the following newsworthy moments.

Here’s what you missed

Nasdaq’s Kaley Karaffa joined Equilar’s Belen Gomez to discuss Nasdaq’s proposal to the SEC last week, which seeks to drive greater transparency on corporate governance and ultimately greater board diversity. The two women walked us through data about the current state of diversity in leadership, challenges faced, and the data-driven partnership they’ve built to power change. This conversation sparked immense joy for me and gave hope for near-term progress on a greater scale. News outlets from the WSJ to the New York Times covered this proposal, and I was thrilled our event could host a long form discussion. Even Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon weighed in last week to support the proposal!

Salesforce’s Yakaira Nunez joined Plant-for-the-Planet CTO Sagar Aryal to explore the role of ethics and diversity in building AI-powered products that reduce bias, and the ways the two firms are partnering together to power the Trillion Trees campaign. Salesforce employees have already planted more than 3 million trees through their partnership via trees.salesforce.com! Tessera Partners managing partner Xavier Segura joined the dialogue to share how a diversity-first mindset has created >3x returns through their first fund and minted several new unicorn companies! The panel shared great, pragmatic examples of how we can all apply a FinTech mindset for transaction and scale to aid social impact and environmental sustainability.

Other highlights included

• A fantastic discussion about the intersection of Finance and Technology with CEO Kison Patel, who runs the world’s leading M&A Science podcast. Heads up that he and his team are also hosting a virtual holiday summit today! 
• A deep dive into the emerging domains of Security Operations & Compliance with Salesforce security principal Babar Khan and our partners at RevCult. I learned so much about how firms are reevaluating their security postures to innovate faster and faster!
• Tier1 President Jiro Okochi led an engaging discussion with senior capital markets leaders from Refinitiv, ATB Capital Markets and RBC about fine-tuning CRM strategies and the data that powers their insights to focus on top line growth and next best actions. 

And finally, I had a BLAST during our Founders Happy Hour with DotAlign, Equilar, EasyAPI, and Quarrio. Seeing all this new technology first hand with their respective CEOs was a joy, and our discussion about the future of data was so stimulating. 

A huge congratulations to Quarrio CEO KG Charles-Harris, who won our audience-voted competition! His work with conversational analytics and AI is nothing short of mind-blowing, and we are so excited to make a holiday donation to his non-profit of choice, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Silverline’s Innovation Summit. I can’t wait to share more in the new year. Happy holidays!