The fast track to the C-Suite or the innovation petting zoo?
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Kareem Saleh, Founder & CEO, FairPlay (Moderator)
Kareem Saleh is the founder and CEO of FairPlay, the world's first Fairness-as-a-Service company. Financial Institutions use FairPlay’s APIs to embed fairness considerations into their marketing, underwriting, pricing, and collections algorithms as well as to automate their fair lending compliance. Previously Kareem served as Executive Vice President at Zest.ai, where he led business development for the company’s machine learning-powered credit underwriting platform. Prior to Zest.ai, Kareem served as an executive at SoftCard, a mobile payments startup that was acquired by Google. Kareem also served in the Obama Administration, first as Chief of Staff to the State Department’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, where he helped manage the 50-person team that negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement, then as Senior Advisor to the CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) where he helped direct the U.S. Government’s $30B portfolio of emerging market investments with responsibility for transaction teams in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Kareem is a Forbes contributor and a frequent speaker on the application of AI to financial services. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and an honors graduate of the University of Chicago.
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Craig Schedler Vice President, Venture & Corporate Development, Northwestern Mutual
Craig Schedler currently serves as the Vice President of Venture and Corporate Development for Northwestern Mutual. In his role, Craig is responsible for leading the company’s venture capital investments in financial technology, wealthtech and client experience. Craig’s venture capital experience includes investments in leading fintech companies including Betterment, Chime, Trust & Will and Gabi (acquired by Experian). He currently serves as a board member or board observer for several portfolio companies including Splash Financial and Paceline. Craig is also responsible to Northwestern Mutual’s corporate development efforts focused on acquisitions and strategic partnerships which advance Northwestern Mutual’s strategic priorities. He was also instrumental in creating the Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator which is focused on increasing access to venture capital for Black founders. Previously, Craig was a Senior Director in the Corporate Strategy function at Northwestern Mutual. His team provided analysis on current competitive threats and opportunities and how the strategic actions of those competitors affect Northwestern Mutual. Prior to joining Northwestern Mutual, Craig was a member of the healthcare investment banking team at B.C. Ziegler and Company. His work there focused on advising healthcare systems and other healthcare providers on merger and acquisition and capital markets transactions. Craig has an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BBA in Accounting from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
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Selina Troesch, Principal, Intuit Ventures
Selina is a Principal at Intuit Ventures focused on consumer fintech and commerce. She began her career at Touchdown Ventures where she managed funds in partnership with Scotts Miracle-Gro, 20th Century Fox, and other large corporations. Selina has a BA in Math and Econ from NYU and an MBA
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Ben Belec, Senior Investor, Intact Ventures.
I co-lead our early and growth-stage investments across several thematic areas like fintech, insurtech and enterprise AI enablement. Intact Ventures is a single-LP fund with over $700m in AUM. We are financial-returns focused but do offer access to our corporate partners. We’ve been around since 2016 and are currently deploying out of our third vehicle (2025 vintage).