Bio:

Sam is an active mentor, thought leader, and sought-after speaker focusing on the human element of digital and banking innovation. He has over twenty-five years of experience working in the payments, mobile, and banking space across North America and Europe for both global banking and technology companies, and in the start-up community.

He was the Managing Partner at 11:FS, co-host of FinTechInsider podcast. and recurring host of Breaking Banks podcast. He has presented for such places as the Thailand Stock Exchange, FinTechStage Luxembourg, FinnoSummit Bogota, Money2020 US and Europe, SAMA Saudi Arabia, SIBOS Singapore, Seoul’s AI Conference, American Banker’s Conference, and CUNA.

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Speaking Topics:

Leadership Under Pressure

This session will focus on leadership lessons from a decade of serving aboard nuclear submarines. How you successfully lead an organization under tremendous external and internal pressure, an ever-changing regulatory environment, continuous new technology advances, growing competition, and a changing workforce. Oh yeah, we will talk about financial services too!

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It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

The banking and payments industry stands at the edge of a monumental transformation, driven by groundbreaking advancements in AI, quantum computing, IoT, and cloud technologies. In this keynote, we’ll explore how these innovations are not only redefining how money moves but also challenging the very frameworks of trust, security, and customer expectations.

Discover how AI is enabling hyper-personalization and fraud detection at scale, quantum computing is pushing the limits of encryption and problem-solving, IoT is integrating payments into everyday devices, and the cloud is revolutionizing agility and resilience for financial services.

Rather than fearing disruption, we’ll examine how these technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for growth, inclusivity, and efficiency. Join us to envision a future where banking and payments are faster, smarter, and seamlessly embedded in our lives-ushering in a new era of possibility for businesses and consumers alike.

Get ready to embrace the end of the old world, because the future feels fine.

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Run Silent, Run Deep: Leading the Mission Through 30 Years of Noise

For ten years, my office was a steel tube the length of two football fields, 400 feet below the surface, with a crew of 130 and a single mission. The motto of the Silent Service is Run Silent, Run Deep. It’s not poetry. It’s how you stay alive.

Thirty years and a half-dozen companies later — Google, 11:FS, NTT Data, Northern Trust, TSYS, Moov — I’ve watched the corporate world live through more disruption than any generation in business history. The internet. Mobile. Smartphones. Crypto. Blockchain. IoT. AI. Each one announced as the end of everything that came before it. Each one demanding leaders make decisions in real time with incomplete information.

This keynote brings the discipline of the Silent Service to the boardroom. How to filter the noise without going deaf. How to move with intent when everyone around you is reacting. How to lead a mission across decades — not headlines.

Audience walks away with: Three operating disciplines from submarine doctrine — depth control, contact management, mission execution — and how to apply each to running a modern enterprise through the next decade of change.

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What I Learned to Ignore: A 30-Year Career in Disruption

In 1995, the internet was going to kill banking. In 2007, mobile was going to kill banking. In 2014, blockchain was going to kill banking. In 2022, AI was going to kill banking. Banking is still here. So am I.
I spent a decade on nuclear submarines, where the entire job is listening — through layers of noise, false returns, and the occasional whale — for the one signal that actually matters. Then I spent the next 30 leading global teams at Google, 11:FS, NTT Data, Northern Trust, TSYS, and Moov. Same job. Different ocean.

This keynote isn’t about embracing change. Every leadership talk on Earth is about embracing change. This one is about what to ignore. How to tell signal from static. How to hold the line on strategy when every analyst, vendor, and LinkedIn influencer is screaming about the next thing.

Most of it is noise. The trick is knowing which part isn’t.

Audience walks away with: A practical sonar framework for separating signal from noise — what to invest in, what to monitor, and what to walk past — drawn from a 30-year track record of bets across payments, banking, AI, and platform.

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There Is No Cell Signal at 400 Feet: Building Teams That Trust Each Other

Spend 90 days underwater with the same 130 people and you learn something the modern workplace has forgotten: redundancy isn’t waste, silence isn’t disengagement, and command isn’t volume. The Silent Service builds the most trusted teams on Earth because it has no other option. There is no Slack. There is no escalation path. There is no cell signal at 400 feet.

I carried that lesson into 30 years of running globally distributed teams across Google, 11:FS, NTT Data, Northern Trust, TSYS, and Moov — across continents, time zones, and cultures that don’t share a vocabulary, let alone an org chart.

This keynote translates submarine doctrine into a practical playbook for the modern leader: how to build crews that move without instruction, communicate without shouting, and trust each other when the network goes down. Because eventually, the network always goes down.

The boat doesn’t run on the captain. It runs on the crew. The captain’s job is to make sure they’re ready.

Audience walks away with: A submarine-grade trust model for hybrid and global teams — how to design redundancy, train for autonomy, and lead through silence rather than constant signal.

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Unstuck: AI Agents and the Era of Financial Empowerment

In a world where financial complexity often leads to inertia, AI agents are poised to redefine how consumers and businesses make decisions-and in doing so, disrupt the very foundation of traditional banking. This keynote dives into the transformative power of AI agents, unpacking how they work and the profound impact they will have on consumer and business financial behavior.

We’ll explore the pervasive problem of decision inertia-why many consumers miss opportunities to refinance homes, consolidate debt, or optimize investments, and why businesses delay vital financial actions like accessing better credit or managing cash flow. Through real-world examples, we’ll demonstrate how AI agents, once granted permission, act proactively on behalf of users to make smarter, faster financial choices.

But this shift won’t just empower users; it will upend banking as we know it. Today’s banking model often relies on user inertia to drive revenue-whether through unused lines of credit, suboptimal rates, or overlooked fees. AI agents will challenge this status quo by optimizing financial decisions in real-time, continuously seeking out the best options for users. Banks will face immense pressure to adapt, shifting from inertia-driven profits to models that emphasize proactive, user-focused value.

Join us to discover how AI agents are not just tools of convenience but disruptive forces reshaping the financial landscape. This is the dawn of a new era in banking, where user empowerment and innovation leave inertia behind.

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Insights and Trends Empowering the Digital Consumer

One of the key outcomes in the post-Covid world is the clear emergence of the digitally empowered consumer. Every sector from media, to retail, to government, and even financial services has seen rapid acceleration and adoption of digital engagement and empowered consumers over the past two years. In this session we will review the key emerging consumer behaviors directly impacted by digital, discuss engagement strategies for digital natives, and review various industry case studies of how companies have competed in the evolving digital landscape.

Attendees will leave this workshop with:

• A deeper understanding of the emerging competitive landscape.
• Interactive exercises that can be used to help their financial institution be better at collaborating around innovation.
• Insight into how the best companies prepare themselves for future threats and opportunities.
• Strategies for keeping the member and their user experience front-and-center.
• Ways to future-proof how their bank or credit union adapts to changes of all kinds.
• A realistic view of where digital is really going in the next five years – separating the hype from the reality.

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AI and ML – What’s The Truth? What’s the Hype? What’s in Store for Banks and CUs? What Should You Do?

Every industrial revolution was (and is) dependent on the convergence of multiple new technologies. The 4th Industrial Revolution, which is currently taking place, is no different. And AI is a key technology driving this revolution. While it is true that AI will replace many of the traditional banking jobs; it will also greatly enhance and augment other banking roles, improve the personalization of banking products and services, and provide your members with the next wave of financial products. AI and ML are both transformative technologies that are part of a evolving ecosystem of net new financial products. Embrace this new wave.