Asia-Pacific FinTech Month 2022 - Deployment of AI in the Financial Services and Investment Industry

Larry Cao, CFA, is senior director of industry research at CFA Institute. He conducts original research with a focus on investment industry trends and investment expertise. Mr. Cao’s current research interests include multi-asset strategies and fintech. He frequently speaks at industry conferences on these topics and has more than 20 years of experience in the investment industry. Mr. Cao started his career at the People’s Bank of China as a US dollar fixed-income portfolio manager. He has worked at HSBC as senior manager for the Asia-Pacific region; Munder Capital Management, managing US and international equity portfolios; and Morningstar/Ibbotson Associates, managing multi-asset investment programs for a global financial institution clientele. Mr. Cao has been interviewed by a wide range of business media, including Bloomberg, CNN, the Financial Times, South China Morning Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard University and was a visiting scholar at MIT.

Dr Lok is responsible for nurturing ethics trainers, producing ethics bite-size media as well as facilitating member societies to promote ethical behavior in their local capital markets. In his role, Dr Lok works with member societies to advance awareness and adoption of CFA Institute ethics and standards, as well as policy positions on ethical conduct and culture related issues. This involves outreach to local stakeholders, including the industry, financial regulator, and the public across the APAC markets. Dr Lok also manages ethics related content and events together with societies leaders as well as facilitating their outreach activities on the Asia-Pacific Research Exchange (ARX) post publication.
Dr Lok joined CFA Institute in February 2014 as the Director of Capital Markets Policy in the Standards & Advocacy Division (APAC) before moving to the role of Director, Society Advocacy Engagement (APAC) in January 2017. In that role, Dr Lok has built up close relationships with society leaders and volunteers in the APAC region. Dr Lok was also responsible for directing the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Research Exchange (ARX). Over the years, he co-authored two monographs on portfolio pumping and market manipulation, submitted numerous regulatory consultation papers, written many blogs & articles and supported the Singapore Society in their Industry Research series in the Singapore Business Times.
During the decade prior to joining CFA Institute, Dr Lok was the senior investment manager of a Chinese solar-energy conglomerate and worked as both a buy and sell-side research analyst in Singapore. Dr Lok also served as the Adjunct head of two modules in Nanyang Technological University (南阳理工学院) as well as the module leaders for various universities in Hong Kong SAR, Mainland China, and Singapore.
Dr Lok graduated with a degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2003. Subsequently, he went on to read his MBA at the University of Manchester in 2013. He obtained the FRM certification from the Global Association of Risk Professionals in 2007 and was subsequently awarded the CFA certification from the CFA Institute in 2008. Dr Lok was recently awarded a doctorate degree from the University of Middlesex, London in 2021. His latest publication was a co-authorship with ACCA entitled “21 Sector Analysis: A Questioning Framework for Investors”.

Aaron is CEO of LUMIQ, and Principal of Lumen Advisors.
Prior to that, Aaron was Head of Portfolio Management at PIMCO managing global and emerging markets funds and overseeing Asia investment strategies. Before joining PIMCO, he was Head of Fixed Income (Portfolio Management) for Allianz Dresdner Asset Management (Asia) and Rosenberg Capital Management (RCM) Global Investors (San Francisco), managing global balanced and fixed income portfolios. He started his career in IBM.
He currently serves on the board of directors of Triumph Capital International (Singapore), Guotai Junan Asset Management (Hong Kong), Vice-Chair, Board of Trustees of the Research Foundation (US) and board editor on the Journal of Futures Markets (US). He also is senior advisor to Hashkey Capital.
Previously, Aaron was the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the CFA Institute (US), and on boards of the Singapore Foreign Exchange Markets Committee (SFEMC), Government of Singapore Pension Fund, Investment Management Association of Singapore (iMAS), Wealth Management Institute (WMI), BNP Paribas Bank Hedge Fund Center (SMU). He has been Senior Advisor to the Harvest Fund Management (Beijing), Bosera Asset Management (Shenzhen) and Minsheng Tonghui Asset Management (Shanghai).
Aaron graduated with a PhD in International Financial Economics from Anderson School, UCLA, and other graduate programs at Stanford University, MIT and University of Chicago and an engineering degree from NUS. He is a CFA charterholder.

Dr. Carlos Queiroz is currently the head of data management for CCIB, where he is responsible for Data Management, Machine Learning Engineering and Data Assets. He has accumulated more than twenty years building critical systems applications, from legacy, client/server applications to enterprise data platforms. In his previous organisation, he was responsible to build and run their enterprise data platform. He comes from Academia where his expertise was around streaming data applications. He’s got a PhD in Computer Science from RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia.

Laurel Teo, Ph.D., CFA, is a behavioural scientist who studies how new technologies such as artificial intelligence influence the way people think, feel, and behave in organizational settings. Her research interests include the impact of technological changes on privacy issues and the future of work. Dr. Teo is currently a senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Teo was previously Director, Society Advocacy Engagement, at CFA Institute, where she supported CFA member societies in Asia Pacific in regulatory outreach, market integrity research, and investor protection programs. Before joining CFA Institute, she was a consultant in investor relations. Dr. Teo began her career as a political and business journalist reporting in Singapore and Indonesia with leading newspapers. She earned her Chartered Financial Analyst® designation in 2011 and has been elected to the board of CFA Society Singapore since 2018. She is currently the honorary secretary of CFA Society Singapore. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) double majoring in Anthropology and Chinese from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in Business (Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources) from Singapore Management University.

Ming Zheng, Senior Financial Business Architect, Alibaba Cloud, is currently working on the digital transformation of China’s financial enterprises, e.g. banks, insurance companies and securities companies. In addition, Ming is the Shanghai representative for CFA Institute Asia-Pacific Research Exchange (ARX). Ming used to be a big data and AI expert of Ant Group, where he was in charge of the data science and algorithms for the Ant’s core business such as recommendation systems, risk management and financial knowledge graphs. Before joining Alibaba, Ming worked for a quant investment company where he managed an equity long short fund in China’s A-share market.