Speakers

Liam Flanagan began his career in the technology start-up world fostering the earliest of business ideas as the facilitator of Genesis’ Evolution Program. After growing this program to support 60 new NL tech companies per year, Liam moved to Ottawa to pursue a Masters of Entrepreneurship, Technology Innovation Management, and work full-time for Invest Ottawa’s ScaleUp Program.
Supporting Ottawa’s top scale-up technology firms between $1M and $50M in annual revenue gain access to funding, resources, and mentoring eventually led Liam back to NL, where he joins techNL as Local Talent Lead. Currently, Liam supports NL tech jobseekers find their ideal career by connecting them with employers, educators, and resources.

Rajesh has over 20 years of experience and is passionate about technology and its applications. Starting his technology journey in building products and platforms, he was instrumental in institutionalizing technology adoption across teams, sold, priced, and built Intellectual Properties that can generate nonlinear revenue in the IT services industry. He has been the key architect in building platforms that brings different pieces together including the flexibility of the cloud, the restrictions of global compliance like PCI, HIPAA, and DPA, the low cost of open source technologies, the existing investments of enterprises in technology to transform and pivot business units of multiple Fortune 500 customers in different domains.

Rajesh has not only led several programs around technology transformations but participates in everyday design and coding, building products that make a difference in people’s lives. Rajesh is a first-generation entrepreneur with four patents in the product, platforms, and cloud under his belt. Rajesh is TOGAF Certified and is keenly interested in transformational programs of enterprises where multiple parts of the organization change and the enterprise architecture around transformations. He is also a certified AWS Architect and has spent nearly a decade understanding and architecting for the cloud and has spoken in public forums on the architecture of the cloud. He truly believes that the best of digital and analytics is yet to come in financial services.

The lending industry is still largely paper-based and most of the current systems are inward-focused rather than customer-focused. He is on a journey to be able to build the organization with these nuggets of wisdom, as one of the most customer-focused companies that make a difference to people. Rajesh loves to spend time with his daughter and is an avid traveler to embraces new cultures and living.

Experienced Founder with a demonstrated history of working in the Banking & Financial Services, Business Process Design & Consulting, and Financial Technology. Passionate about lending, with more than one and half decades of experience in Banking Sales, Credit Evaluation, Score Based Decisioning, and Digitisation. Have built a platform that will enhance the lending and borrowing experience.

Also addresses Financial Inclusion, New to Credit, Lending based on surrogates, and additional data Assisting Financial institutions with Direct Origination using our unique tech platform – where they can deploy capital by leveraging distribution and collection reach of smaller NBFC’s while having real-time access to lending decisions.

Joel Pollard has been a leader in the Calgary tech industry for 20 years, having worked in start-ups and enterprise organizations alike. Joel has built and led teams in the custom software and product development spaces, focusing on team dynamics, and reliable software processes. A firm believer that building the best environment and practices will attract the best people and result in the best outcomes, Joel has a proven track record of high performing teams delivering high quality software systems.

Joel is the Director of Talent Growth and Development at Arcurve, Inc., responsible for the strategy and systems behind building Arcurve’s team of technology professionals in Calgary and our technology hubs in Vancouver, Halifax, and Houston. Arcurve has delivered more than 800 projects for clients in a variety of industries and technology stacks.

Nimrit Anand is the Talent Coordinator with Calgary Economic Development, he is part of the Client Excellence team which is focused towards talent attraction and retention. Nimrit is originally from Delhi, India and holds a Bachelors degree in Hospitality as well as a Masters in Business Administration from University of Technology Sydney.

As a born and raised Albertan, diversifying the economy and creating a tech ecosystem here in the prairies is something that Katie is passionate about. As a Talent Acquisition Lead, she aims to bring top talent to technology-focused organizations. Katie leverages her background in executive search and currently specializes in engineering and technology roles. Katie’s mission is to create a long-lasting partnership between candidates and organizations based on values and skills.