Howard is widely recognized within the FinTech industry as a visionary leader and innovator. He has turned start-ups into industry leaders, led successful turnarounds, and successfully managed large organizations over a diverse career as a CEO, Director and Investor spanning more than three decades. He has been the recipient of several “Industry Top 10 Innovator Awards” and in 2010 was named one of the “Legends” in the financial securities services industry over the prior 20 years. In 2015 he was the only private investor named to Institutional Investor’s list of the 35 most influential people in FinTech Finance. Howard combines an entrepreneur’s nose for opportunity with the quantitative mindset needed to successfully scale an organization and the “soft” skills required to lead, align and motivate people and develop successful partnerships.
Howard has served most recently as Investor, Chairman and CEO of BioCatch, the pioneering market leader in the field of Behavioral Biometrics technology used for Fraud and Scam protection with 100 of the world’s largest banks as clients. BioCatch protects bank customers utilizing behavioral-based cognitive biometrics as a next-generation authentication and fraud detection technique to enhance network security and identity protection.
Prior to BioCatch, Howard was Chairman of a Goldman Sachs spin-off, REDI Technologies. REDI connects Institutional Buyside/investors and Sellside/Brokers in a global collaborative trading community and information network for securities processing, acquired by Thomson Reuters. Previously, Howard was Chairman and CEO of BondDesk Group, the leading electronic bond trading venue for retail investors that was acquired by TradeWeb. Before that, he led a turnaround of NYFIX following its delisting by NASDAQ, ultimately resulting in the sale of the company to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Earlier, Howard was President and CEO of Radianz, which he repositioned and led into a leading global mission-critical market infrastructure provider that is now part of BT Group. In the late 1990s, as founder and CEO of Thomson Financial ESG, Howard led the creation of the first competitive market for U.S. trade confirmation services and engineered the merger of the company with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC) to form OMGEO, the industry standard for institutional equities post-trade processing.
In addition, Howard has served as Director on a number of public and private company boards, as well as served as Independent Board Director and (ultimately} Chairman of FinTech provider AcadiaSoft, a global industry (consortium) effort among c20 of the world’s largest banks and leading industry service providers, reinventing collateral management/processing and helping reduce capital requirements and risk for banks. Acadia was recently acquired by LSEG.
A graduate of the City University of New York, with a Bachelor of Engineering, Howard holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering/Information Sciences from Stanford University.
