Candidates About

Nihar S

Successful Strategist, Big Data Evangelist, Data Scientist, Disruptive Thinker and Thought-leader leveraging business, technology, strategic leadership and management insights to transform business vision to business value.

A Hybrid of Technologies and Business delivering transformation, Business and IT strategy and PMO. Teach machine learning (part-time) at Columbia University. Am a practitioner on the field with a very hands-on approach. Built my own JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Mile wide and mile deep providing data monetization.

Various white papers and thesis can be shared on request. Well-known speaker at industry conferences like Strata-Hadoop, NAFIS, Tradetech, Cloud Foundry. Regular speaker at Columbia University and Harvard Business Club.

Key Achievements:

·         19+ years of IT experience strategizing and leading Global programs, jumpstarting global practices, optimizing operations, leading complex turnarounds teams with focus on outcomes and ROI.

·         Advisor to pharma companies, banks, retailer, insurance, one major Hadoop distro with productive results.

·         Working continually with C-level executives, very senior management and leading global teams.

·         Led engagements from $3-60 mm spearheading next generation technologies.

·         SEVEN LIVE BIG DATA IMPLEMENTATIONS PLUS MULTIPLE POCs.

·         Built 30-60-90 day action plans/roadmaps and executed/blueprinted them for multiple firms to help reduce TCO and achieve higher profitability.

·         Transformed and executed multiple asset classes risk management solutions – GRAIN, RICE, Insights for Valuation, MoLAN applications etc. Cross savings across multiple organizations exceeded 55 mm.

·         Achieved business savings > 40 mm leading big data Business strategy, ideation and managed Data Lakes, cloud initiatives for storage, cross-sell, risk measurement, regulatory reporting, valuation, analytics and fraud detection.

·         Manage global architecture teams, formulate business strategy and technology architecture, patterns, standards, and product services with savings extending millions through innovative solutions.

·         Youngest manager in the history of Citibank.

·         Authoring: Unlock the Potential by getting insights “Turning Data to Dollars in the Value Chain”.

Core competencies: Strategy planning and execution, Executive team leadership, Business technology integrated solutions, New program execution strategy, Captive and offshore CoEs, Best practices, Change management.

                PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

                Guardian Life Insurance, Enterprise Data Architecture                                                                              Mar 2016-current

·         Strategize, evaluate and build the integrated big data platform for risk management-LRM, Reinsurance management, loss control management. Policy account and plan management, Customer management, Product management.

·         Developed the strategy and roadmap for the Business Intelligence and Data Analytics platform consistent with business objectives, identifying opportunities and building innovative solutions with data science vendors.

·         Lead the big data go-live initiative with methodology, requirements, data integration, data quality, data lineage, sandbox models working with finance, insurance, actuaries and business teams.

·         Strategized the algorithm modeling-linear regression, MARS and SGBM algorithms implementation using R.

·         Led the design on Columnar datastore –Olympus and Optimus. Now building a correlation DB with algorithms defined, not just a columnar DB. Led the POC for 9 columnar databases Greenplum, Vertica, Cassandra, Teradata etc.

·         Spearhead the Map-Reduce Yarn functionality and sequence/chaining of MapReduce jobs.  Used HiveQL for queries and SerDe to read and write. Pig was used for mapreduce.

·         Spearhead the data integration process using REST APIs for Platfora and Pentaho for visualization and complex query analytics, interactive dashboards, using native MapReduce engine. Mahout and Lucene for trade analytics.

                GE Capital, Executive Director, Enterprise Data Management and Big Data Platform                             2014-Mar 2016

·         Led the development of GE Predix Engine – the industrial internet with Harel Kodesh for industry solutions in Analytics and Big Data. Link: https://www.gesoftware.com/solutions .

·         Member of the world recognized GE EMLP – Executive Management Leadership Program grooming new leaders.

·         Key management and thought leadership for Data Strategy with a result-oriented delivery focus, shaping and influencing outcomes, building business and partner relationships, a change and transformation leader delivering operational efficiency and implementing innovative data strategies while reducing TCO. Building the practice with key senior hires.

·         Accomplish the roadmap, framework, value-proposition, implementation strategy for data lake management, data governance, data quality, data integration, data replication, data lineage, data semantics, data security.

·         Spearhead the shared management platform for data quality management, master data management(MDM), metadata management, source, target and enterprise data dictionary streamlining data asks, and cross-BU customer analytics.

·         Strategize processing apps and calculation engines for Risk, Treasury, Finance, Commercial. Establish a data-driven culture with BI reporting, visualization and analytics.

·         Orchestrated big data framework for data governance, risk and regulatory reporting including CCAR, DFAST, regulatory capital, Basel, stress testing for completeness, timeliness, accuracy and adaptability for 300+ sub ledgers.

·         Accomplish the roadmap, framework, value-proposition, implementation strategy for data lake management, data governance, data architecture, data security, data taxonomy and semantics.

·         Spearhead the shared management platform for data quality management, master data management(MDM), metadata management, source, target and enterprise data dictionary streamlining data asks, and cross-BU customer analytics.

·         Strategize processing apps and calculation engines for Risk, Treasury, Finance, Commercial. Establish a data-driven culture with BI reporting, visualization and analytics.

·         Team with MDs, BU CIOs, EDLs, from business, risk, finance, operations bringing a change transformation and evangelizing technology acceptance. Integrate high speed low latency streaming data with deep predictive analytics for risk and valuations, surveillance, channelizing new strategies for development and regulatory reporting.

·         Provide data monetization and business value via managed data lake consumption, process, and analytics using modeling sandbox which evolves in locked-down model execution. Refine the enterprise data warehouse framework.

Morgan Stanley, Sr. Global Program Director, Lead Architect                                                                                 2011-2014

Reporting to the CFO and CIO of the firm, led strategic initiatives, PAGH-Program Area Group Heads. As senior leader, build future state transformation, trusted relationships, data strategy, enterprise data management across asset classes, grow talent and motivate data science teams, customer centricity and drive results.

·         Spearhead architecture and enterprise data management, champion big data strategy, execution, visualization, analytics team of 100+ global resources with 6 Senior Program Heads and 7 Lead Architects as direct reports.

·         Design & execute the US business data strategy by developing an IM Operating Model for data-as-a-service(DaaS).

·         Commerce Model: Pioneer the 40 mm+ program from Discovery-to-Decision Making using operational insights with minimal latency via visualization. This global program is a convergence of BIG data, data discovery, business intelligence and analytics for business trades, regulatory reporting and visualization integrating all 5 asset classes.

·         Strategized NoSQL and distributed databases via data lake model reducing 63 databases to 4 saving $28 mm+/year.

·         Worked with stakeholders on budget planning for 2013 and 2014(2014 ISGT budget was 1.4 bn), Led implementation of programs and delivery with Program Area Group Heads while reducing the TCO.

·         Mine insights from emerging data sets (social, mobile, machine, geospatial) and value from data analytics and monetization via various use cases in trading, investments, wealth management, DFAST, BCBS239.

·         Strategized a bi-temporal database, pioneer prime message bus, GRAIN, RICE risk and valuation engines with DSL.

·         Led continuous innovation by exploring, investigating, recommending, benchmarking and implementing data centric technologies with deep learning, NLP and text mining. Mapping of Hadoop, HDFS, MapReduce and related areas.

·         Define the architecture governance standards, blueprints and tools. Support strategic data programs across domains.

·         Orchestrated the SDLC and PLC implementation initiatives for all ISGT and CTS programs-a global rollout.

Big data processing and analytics for MSWIM: Big data framework for base model/common data infrastructure for Wealth Management –modeling, analytics, decision-making. Create an efficient shared services model.

·         Establish best-of-breed pricing and demand elasticity across multiple customer segments, product types and business models for wealth management resulting in 2% increase in generating new customers.

·         Principal accountability for overall data management strategy & business architecture, change management, operations and support for client 360 strategy resulting in 6% increase in yoy business revenue.

·         Transformed technology strategy/ roadmap for predictive and text analytics, data discovery, architecture, hadoop integration, large scale data visualization, semantic interfaces, machine learning, predictive and statistical analysis.

·         CFPS – Enhanced the customer fraud detection and risk protection system with 60+ global team members.

·         Defined the global implementation roadmap and built the end-to-end technology platform to support the business (including operations, finance, corporate risk and underlying infrastructure) using agile.

·         Manage the Global architecture team, formulate technology architecture, patterns, standards, and product services.

·         Socialize the solution, led the distributed database and NoSQL architecture, business intelligence and GUI dashboards, data governance, data aggregation, statistical analysis, text analytics, geospatial activity, visualization.

·         Led highly skilled quantitative team of data scientists, program managers, architects, business analysts for analysis of structured or unstructured data using predictive and optimization models. Focus included behavioral modeling, pricing, forecasting, online advertising and market segment design.

Bank of America, Sr. Program Manager -Business, Strategy and Big Data Analytics                                         2008-2011

·         Outstanding relationship builder, managed business expectations and gained the trust and respect of managing directors, strategic partners. Led high-impact change initiatives managing teams of 45-130+ with budget exceeding $28 mm.

·         Built trade capture system recording 2.3B+ option ticks in a single business day reducing TCO by 15 mm/year.

·         Responsible for program assessment, recommendations, suggestions, areas of improvement, audit and assurance.

·         Pioneer the multi-million $Cornerstone Program for transforming various asset classes using analytical modeling.

·         Accountable for corporate data governance model with processes, security, retention, reusability, data stewardship.

·         Spearhead framework, architecture and standards for a new data warehouse platform using agile and scrum methodology. Led regression analysis, predictive modeling including ML and Lucene and develop sentiment analysis.

Insights for valuation: Managed the program building an investment recommendation platform based on different sources (equity/bond researches, twitter, estimize, finviz, the street, stock charts, recommendations etc. and portfolio diagnostics). Major milestone reported by Wall Street Journal.

·         Leveraged several sources of customer data transforming them into new products, upsell models, cross-sell models and other predictive algorithms to hedge funds and pension funds. Additional revenue generated=300 mm.

Credit Suisse, Vice President, Lead Strategist and Chief Data Architect                                                            2005-2008

Serve as the tactical leader building the technology roadmap and ensuring global and local implementations of programs.

·         Responsible for the strategy, implementation of risk management and real-time market data systems.

·         Revamped the BIG Reference Data Model and reconciliation across asset classes at Credit Suisse- a 14 mm initiative.

·         Led the successful implementation of Molan-Mortgage and Loan analysis system. 

·         Mortgage credit risk model: Champion, design and develop mortgage loan level credit risk models.

·         Create new methodologies, reusable components and blueprints, best practices and delivery alliances for specific deliveries. Work seamlessly with counterparts in other regions to provide solutions to the global business.

·         Build a common data infrastructure and reference data architecture. Build BI strategy for risk metrics, dashboards.

·         Spearhead and implement future state trading architecture for equities and fixed income. Led development of MDM – resulting in shared services model savings of $22 mm+. Built an Enterprise Data warehouse.

·         Responsibilities included roadmap, development and implementation of real-time risk and pricing models, maintenance and development of analytical calculation framework.

Unisys Corporation, Vice President, Global Strategy and Advanced Technology                                           2002-2005

Instrumental in transforming Unisys from a product-led organization to a 92% services-led organization.

·         Built the Trade/Product Lifecycle system for trade capture, pricing, booking and structuring.

·         Transform the operations of a major bank using an inbuilt DW.

·         Establish Information Governance methodology, spearhead datawarehousing strategy with ETL, modeling and BI.

                Andersen Consulting, Sr. Technical Manager -Advanced Financial Technology group                                1999-2002

·         Built the Advanced Financial Practice at Andersen from 2 to 32 people.

·         Spearheaded the TSA-38 mm+ program for BSCH-largest bank in Spain saving 25mm+.

·         Delivered the $42 mm “netbenefits” program for Fidelity which featured on WSJ and is live even today.

EDUCATION

Ø  MBA - Specialization in Finance.

Ø  BE, DDE - Electronics and Telecom Engineering (6^th in Univ and 2^nd in Univ resp.)

BELOW DETAILS ARE FOR REFERENCE ONLYè

Technical Skills Summary

        Prominent Certifications include:

PMP from PMI, Certified Scrum Master, Six Sigma Green belt

UML 1.4, 2.0, Rational - RUP, Rose, XDE

Calypso 9.3, 10.0

Java Certified Senior Architect, Java Web Component Developer

EAI - Tibco, MQ Series (Websphere MQ)

Weblogic Developer Certification