In-Person AI Event - Dublin City Centre

Dr Deirdre Bane

Deputy Dean IOB

Dr Deirdre Bane is Deputy Dean at the Institute of Bankers, a UCD college, with expertise spanning Financial Services, Economic Development, Governance, Strategy, Risk, and Higher Education. She holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and multiple postgraduate qualifications in accountancy, public administration, digital humanities, statistics, and financial services strategy and analytics.

A dual-designated accountant (CIPFA and FCCA), Deirdre has worked in both Ireland and the US, including roles at Sanford C. Bernstein, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Appleseed Inc., where she led economic impact analyses for major infrastructure projects (including the rebuild of the World Trade Centre) and academic institutions (Columbia, MIT, Harvard, etc.) In Ireland, she has held academic posts, lectured internationally, and served as Senior Finance and Governance Specialist at the Institute of Public Administration, advising public bodies and non-profits on financial management, governance, and strategic development

Fergus Gaughran

Director of Risk

Fergus has extensive experience in banking and has held roles developing capital models and credit strategies, provisioning models and risk analytics. Fergus is currently Director of Risk in Ulster Bank

Prof Cal Muckley

Chair in Operational Risk, Banking & Finance University College Dublin (UCD)

Cal is Professor of Operational Risk in the Banking and Finance area at the UCD College of Business and a Fellow at the UCD Geary Institute. His research is in applied AI in financial misconduct, customer vulnerability and mitigating financial fraud.

In particular, he tests if older persons' difficulty in managing money, e.g., interacting with a bank, paying bills and making pension decisions, can help identify individuals with early-stage dementia. He has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University Stern School of Business, Yale University, at Groningen and Tilburg Universities in the Netherlands, at ESC Rennes School of Business in France, at Freiburg University and at the London School of Economics.

He is a Fulbright Scholar and he has also received other awards and fellowships. These include a Thomas Moran Fellowship from the Mutual of America Life Insurance, and the Barrington Medal from the Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. Cal has published in scholarly journals including the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Journal of Econometrics and the Journal of Empirical Finance. His work has been widely reported in the media, including in the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Prag Sharma

Dr. Prag Sharma is an in-house innovation expert driving transformative change across startups, research centres and billion-dollar market cap multinationals in several industries, including Finance Services.

Over eighteen years in leadership roles in business consulting, corporate and academic environments with start-ups and multinationals, focusing mainly on cutting/ bleeding-edge technologies, most recently with Generative AI.

Dr. Sharma was born in New Delhi, India and moved to Ireland as a teenager. He completed his electronic engineering degree from University College Dublin (UCD) and followed it up with a PhD in Computer Vision, and then followed that up with an MBA (with a focus on innovation). After all that, I ended up in Banking!

Professor Tom Crick MBE

Professor Tom Crick MBE is Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Professor of Digital Policy at Swansea University. Whilst his disciplinary background is in computer science, his interests sit at the research-policy-practice interface, identifying and addressing domain problems with broad digital, data-driven and computational themes, and especially focusing on the impact on people, communities, heritage and culture.

Within DCMS, he provides advice to ministers, overseeing R&D and innovation alongside scientific/technical leadership of AI. Prior to his DCMS CSA role, Tom led the major science and technology curriculum reforms in Wales, and recently drove the development of Swansea University’s first civic mission strategy. Alongside his academic work, Tom has extensive independent expert advisory and board-level experience, across both the public and private sectors, including as an inaugural Commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales; Vice-President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT; and non-executive directorships across the utilities, engineering, and health & social care sectors.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Learned Society of Wales, and a Chartered Fellow of the BCS and the IET. Follow: X/Twitter @ProfTomCrick | Bluesky @proftomcrick.com.