Stevens Hosts Fall 2025 CRAFT Industry Advisory Board Meeting
The Stevens School of Business proudly hosted the 9th Center for Research Toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT) Industry Advisory Board Meeting on October 23-24, 2025, bringing together fintech leaders, academics and innovators for a comprehensive exploration of emerging technologies and their impact on financial services.
The gathering reinforced CRAFT's role as a catalyst for collaboration between academia and industry in advancing financial technologies.
The event featured prominent keynote addresses from Vall Herard, CEO and Co-Founder of Saifr, who discussed practical AI agent adoption for regulatory compliance, and Dr. Douglas Cumming, finance professor and Steven Shulman '62 Endowed Chair for Business Leadership at Stevens Institute of Technology, who examined fintech and regulation. These presentations highlighted the growing importance of responsible AI implementation and regulatory frameworks in the evolving fintech landscape.
The program included innovative project proposals covering leading-edge topics such as “Algorithmic Market Making for Tokenized Securities,” “Cascade-Adjusted Risk Analytics,” “Financial Multimodal LLMs via Novel Semantic GraphRAG,” “Quantum Resilience of Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrencies” and “Network Analysis for Crowdfunding Fraud Detection.”
A panel discussion on "The Future of Fintech,” moderated by Ian Mehok from Prudential Financial, brought together Arion Cheong and Zachary Feinstein from Stevens, and Thomas Ferguson and Oshani Seneviratne from RPI. This diverse group consisting of finance, accounting and philosophy professors examined emerging trends and challenges shaping the industry's trajectory.
Industry Advisory Board members also delivered use case presentations that illustrated real-world applications of fintech innovation.
The two-day format maintained CRAFT's tradition of combining open sessions for knowledge sharing with closed sessions for in-depth discussion of current projects and voting on new research proposals.
CRAFT is the first National Science Foundation Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) ever approved to focus on the emerging challenges of the high-tech financial services industry. CRAFT’s founding universities, Stevens Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Connecticut are premier universities, long-established and experienced in research programs, with a complete portfolio of relevant scientific disciplines appropriate for the fintech focus.
