Mr. Kyle Asher is a Managing Director and Co-Head of Monroe Capital’s Opportunistic Private Credit investment vehicles, and also Head of Underwriting & Structuring. He is responsible for deal origination, structuring, and portfolio management, as well as managing the underwriting team. He joined the firm in 2009 and is a member of the Opportunistic Private Credit Fund’s Investment Committee. Mr. Asher has over 10 years of investment experience and has led the underwriting of over $2.5 billion of debt and equity transactions, across a variety of opportunistic private credit investments. Prior to Monroe, he was an Analyst with Chicago-based Calder Capital Partners, a direct and fund-of-funds private equity firm partly owned by Goldman Sachs and Ares Capital (formerly Allied Capital), where he performed due diligence on various direct and fund-of-fund investments, sourced transactions and assisted in capital raising. Mr. Asher began his career as an Equity Analyst for MindShare Capital, an institutional money-manager where he focused on the valuation and trading patterns of small-cap growth companies. Mr. Asher earned his M.B.A. in Finance and International Business from Northwestern University and his B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Northwestern University.

Ryan Barrett is VP of Credit Risk & Data Science and head of lease underwriting at Acima Credit, where he employs machine learning algorithms in SAS, R, and Python to large, structurally complex databases to determine customer credit worthiness using traditional (e.g. FICO, Vantage, non-prime consumer credit reports) and non-traditional data sources (e.g. online presence, magazine preferences, email footprint). He began his career in healthcare performing research for the small, Salt Lake City-based company the Institute for Clinical Outcomes Research (ICOR). His areas of focus included traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, geriatric care, and stroke where he has published several papers. He transitioned to the financial sector in late 2014 working briefly at Zion’s Bank on their small business loans team before being hired on as Acima Credit’s senior data scientist, and later Director of Credit Risk & Data Science. He is currently VP of Credit & Data Science. He has over 10 years of extensive experience in SAS and SQL, and multiple years of R and Python. He possesses intricate knowledge of a vast array of classical and modern machine learning techniques including logistic and linear regression, Cox proportional hazards models, Random Forest, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbors, and neural nets. Ryan received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and his masters degree in statistics from the University of Utah.

Karen Brown joined Lending Science DM as Senior Vice President, Analytics in May 2019. With over 30 years of Analytics expertise under her belt, Karen brings the knowledge and leadership to partner with clients to solve their business problems with analytic and data solutions.

Prior to joining LSDM, Karen was the Senior Vice President, Model Development for Synchrony where she had the responsibility for the development of all consumer and commercial models supporting Synchrony’s private label credit card, bankcard, and installment lending programs.

Karen joined the Synchrony/GE Capital’s Retail Sales Finance unit in 2003 as a part of GE’s acquisition of Conseco Finance. She worked in a variety of roles between 2003 and 2011 leading model development, acquisition and account strategy development, and credit risk infrastructure for the Retail Sales Finance business.  She then became the SVP, Model Development Leader for the consolidated GE Retail Finance business in November 2013 when her role expanded to include the responsibility for the development of all marketing, credit, fraud, collection, reserve, stress testing and economic capital models.

Prior to joining GE, Karen spent two years as Conseco Finance’s Vice President of Modeling and Analysis.  She also spent over nine years working as a consultant in financial services developing both credit models and strategies throughout the credit lifecycle while working for Management Decision Systems (MDS), Credit Strategy Management (CSM), and May & Speh/Acxiom.

Karen has Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer-Math from Furman University and a Master of Science in Statistics from Florida State University.

Larry Chiavaro is a dynamic sales and business development executive with an outstanding 30-year track record of identifying and developing growth in the consumer finance industry. In October 2020 after building the company from 6 employees to over 800, Larry Chiavaro retired as Executive Vice President and Principal of First Associates Loan Servicing/ Vervent, following the sale of the company to a private equity fund.

Currently Larry is advising fintech companies on strategic initiatives globally thru his Advisory Company, LPC Associates LLC.

Prior to joining First Associates, he developed the BPO Loan Servicing Business for CSC, working with banks, investment banks, finance companies and credit unions on a national level. Mr. Chiavaro also created and managed a national wholesale sales force for NovaStar Mortgage and held leadership positions at Household/HSBC Auto Finance and GE Capital, where Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, recognized him for his record-setting production. He has strong historical ties to the rating agencies built over years of experience in the consumer finance industry and was active in the many inaugural lending securitizations across many asset classes.

Mr. Chiavaro is the owner of the Consumer Finance Professionals Group on LinkedIn and is a graduate of the GE Management Institute and GE Six Sigma program.

George Coutros, Head of Product and Analytics at Clarity Services, a part of Experian, has more than 30 years of experience in consumer lending, risk management and analytics. He has served in various executive positions for a diverse set of companies including specialty and national credit reporting agencies, prepaid processing company, traditional national bank, internet bank and online small dollar lender.

For the past 15 years, George has been focused on serving the needs of the unbanked, underbanked and subprime consumer segments. Coutros earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematical Sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Science in Statistics from North Carolina State University.

Kevin is CEO of Creative Solutions International, a leading direct response advertising agency with offices in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The firm has a strong financial services practice and provides a wide range of marketing services including New Account Acquisition, Customer Experience (CX), Portfolio Development and Collections Marketing. Kevin has over 35 years of experience in financial services sector and has worked at companies such Mellon Bank, Allied Irish’s First Omni Bank, U S WEST Communications and NatWest Bank before co-founding Creative Solutions.

Jennifer Galloway’s practice is dedicated to helping financial services clients successfully navigate increasingly complex regulatory and business environments. She is co-chair of Bradley’s Small Dollar and Unsecured Consumer Lending team and focuses on consumer financial services laws and regulations affecting banks, non-depository banks, Fintech companies and other financial institutions. Jennifer provides skilled regulatory guidance and detailed knowledge of the laws impacting the alternative financial services market, such as online consumer lending. Her compliance work includes assisting clients with developing, implementing and maintaining compliance management systems, performing internal compliance audits for clients, preparing clients for outside audits as well as preparing related lending documents and disclosures. She also counsels financial services companies regarding CFPB preparedness, implementation and operational strategies for complying with the CFPB’s regulations.

Steve Hotz is the CEO of The Lead Group, a leading performance-based online marketing and lead generation firm focused on the financial services market. Prior to The Lead Group, Steve oversaw the Full Service Lead Program practice at MediaWhiz Holdings. He previously served as VP, Marketing at CompuCredit Corporation, a market leader of financial based products dedicated to the underserved market within the US & UK and at TRADEX Technologies assisting in the acquisition of the company to Ariba, now SAP Ariba, in 2000 for $5.6B.

Diana M. Martinez is Corporate Counsel at KMD Partners, LLC, a financial technology (FinTech) company founded in 2017 by veteran serial entrepreneurs who started and successfully exited previous FinTechs such as Enova (NYSE:ENVA). KMD uses a proprietary underwriting and origination platform for its own supervised loans, made under the CreditNinja® brand, and for a variety of other consumer loan programs.

Diana manages the company’s programs for vendor management, licensing, consumer-complaint management, and IP maintenance. She also supervises outside counsel and supports the company’s human resources and procurement functions.

Diana began her legal career in-house at Discover Financial Services (NYSE:DFS) in the transactional group. Diana is an active member of the Association of Corporate Counsel, and serves as Co-Chair of the In-House Counsel Committee of the Young Lawyers Section of the Chicago Bar Association. She earned a B.A. from Northwestern University and J.D. from Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

As CEO and Founder of Lending Science DM, Inc., Tim Olzer has helped Lending Science customers, no matter the industry, streamline their direct marketing and credit processes for over 10 years. His responsibilities include new business, managing the overall relationship with clients for analytics and other risk and marketing services. He has over 25 years of experience in consulting and analytics, specializing in risk management and marketing, particularly within bankcard, consumer lending, mortgage lending, and business lending sectors. In this time, he has worked with hundreds of lenders from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, growing billions of dollars of revenue in that time.

He has started the following companies in the financial services industry – Lending
Science 2014, acquired by O2 Consulting (founded by Olzer in 2006) in 2015, Acquired Scoring Solutions 2017; Sigma Analytics 1999, acquired by Merkle 2004. Also founded or involved from start-up – Leap credit (2017), L2C (2000, sold to TU in 2014), and Scoring Solutions 1994. Mr. Olzer’s philosophy is to be innovative and scientific with what his companies do – from some of the original generic credit scores, to the first segmentation systems, to tri-bureau attributes, to alternative data sources, to advanced underwriting systems, we have always used science and advanced statistics to solve some of the more complicated financial services problems. These days it’s more the successful application of these innovations, but he is constantly looking for new data and ways to improve marketing and risk management processes. Mr. Olzer holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, and a M.S. in Decision and Information Systems from Arizona State University.

Shawn Princell, President of Cash Flow Solutions, has spent the last 16 years modernizing financial technology. Shawn works closely with fintechs, lenders, and financial institutions to streamline customer experiences while improving profitability. As an active member of Nacha, he serves as an advisor to the Board and sits on the Emerging Payments Advisory Committee. Shawn, an expert in new payment and risk initiatives, is a frequent speaker at industry events, including: PAYMENTS, Payments Innovation Alliance, The Clearing House Association Payments Perspective, and LEND360. Shawn earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Denison University.

Eric M. Sprink serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Coastal Community Bank and Coastal Financial Corporation. Coastal prides itself on being “un-bankey” and has organically grown from less than $200 million in assets when Eric joined the bank in 2006, to more than $1.5 billion today in its Community Banking Division – CCB.

Community is the bank’s middle name and also a way of doing business. We are openly changing the rules of what Banking means. In addition to meeting the needs of local CCB business clients, Coastal is delivering Partner Banking or “Banking as a Service” to Fintechs, capitalizing on the strong relationship culture built on top of a robust compliance backbone through its wholesale banking division – CCBX.
Most recently, Coastal was selected as one of eight financial institutions collaborating with Google to launch Coastal’s new consumer digital platform, under Coastal’s newest division – CCBD.

Because of the relationships the bank has built with Fintechs, Eric is a frequent speaker and advocate for bank/Fintech partnerships. He has worked closely with a number of regulatory bodies as the banking industry evolves and faces disruption.

In spite of living in the Pacific Northwest, Eric is a Tarheel and will happily share his thoughts on North Carolina sports. Active in community affairs, Eric is a past-chair of the Community Bankers of Washington and is involved with numerous local non-profits.

Jimmy has spent his entire adult life as a client-facing payments geek. 18 years working at First Data (now Fiserv) on check, ACH, prepaid, and merchant products, and more recently on the Emerging Payments and Strategy Team at Bank of America. Today Jimmy leads the sales organization for Accelitas, which provides advanced identity verification and scoring solutions incorporating unique alternative data. Jimmy, his wife and 2 children live in the Philadelphia region.