“Is Your Financial Brand Relatable?”

For more than 30 years, David has served clients across a diverse array of industries and has lectured and written extensively on key subjects including; leveraging brand to manage demand, the new “relationship” brand, the role of the “source” brand, brand portfolio rationalization, new trends in branding, brand delivery, employee engagement, customer experience and brand valuation as an ROI tool. David Is the Founder and President of Catalyst Branding and U.S. Chairman of BrandCap.  He personally serves a highly select client list in financial services, technology, professional services, consumer, and sports.  He is focused on innovation and continual enhancement of the branding profession and is driven to help clients enhance their success by securitizing and growing existing customer relationships, driving new demand and commanding a premium in competitive markets.  Previously, David served in a number of leadership roles for Interbrand, including President of North America, from 1989 until he founded Catalyst in 2011. David’s work in the financial services industry spans the full range of service offerings from Fintech to Capital Markets.  He has served leading financial services firms in the US, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Great Britain and Europe, including JP Morgan Chase, RBC, Banco Santander, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America.

Beth is the Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Guardian’s Individual Markets Businesses. In this role, Beth leads the Marketing Strategy, Communications and Operations teams, focused on Marketing digital transformation, client acquisition and client engagement. The team leads the development of digital, product, content and thought leadership marketing strategies and stories to engender consumer preference for Guardian and its network of general agencies and their agents. With 25 years of brand management and marketing experience, Beth began her career in brand management with Frito-Lay and expanded her industry experience when she became a Marketing Director with Johnson & Johnson. One of Beth’s most memorable moments in brand management was her participation in the development and launch of Doritos Cool Ranch. With this experience, Beth led the national expansion of Smartfood Popcorn from a small Boston brand into a national brand with first year sales in excess of $100 million. She led new product development in the area of Women’s Health Care at Johnson and Johnson, and prior to joining Guardian, headed small business marketing for MassMutual. Beth graduated with a degree in Marketing and Communications from Babson College and holds a Digital Marketing Certificate from Cornell University and a Certificate in Digital Transformation from The Berkeley Haas School of Business. Beth lives on the shoreline in Connecticut with her husband, Bill and her yellow Lab, Cooper. She has two grown daughters; Allie is a graduate student at the University of Southern California studying Behavior Analysis with aspirations of working in the field of Organizational Behavior Management and Madie, is a sophomore at Middlebury College, majoring in Economics and playing ice hockey.

Ryan Arshad is an agency leader who is responsible for growing and scaling BrandCap’s North American business.  For over 15 years he has specialized in the financial and technology sectors working with clients such as Barclays, HSBC, Citi Group, Old Mutual, Cognizant, King Digital Entertainment and Samsung.  Today he works with senior leaders and their teams to leverage consumer, commercial and creative insight to build and execute brand and business strategies which support the performance of their organizations.  Previously, he grew Interbrand’s analytics and valuation offer in the UK as well as spending 7 years at KPMG in financial services audit and financial and operation restructuring.

Dr. Jon Roberts oversees the finance media properties at Dotdash (Investopedia and The Balance). He has been with Dotdash since 2013 and previously held roles as Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Data Science, where he derived insights from more than 20 years of Internet data across thousands of topics. Prior to joining Dotdash, Jon spent 10 years as a theoretical physicist focused on making dark matter predictions for the hadron collider at CERN, and cosmic ray predictions for the AMS detector on the International Space Station. He also worked on the Pierre Auger telescope in Argentina. Dr. Roberts received his Ph.D. at the University of Southampton and his M.A. from the University of Oxford.

Julia Pawling has spent her career focused on global advertising and communications. As a core member of the Global Advertising team at AIG, she is responsible for the development of integrated marketing communication plans and creative production for corporate advertising programs. She manages strategic brand partnerships, corporate advertising agencies, and media relationships. Prior to joining AIG, Julia held account management roles at BBDO Worldwide. She led the global adaptation team for P&G shave care brands, Gillette and Venus, localizing advertising campaigns for global markets. She also held a strategic global brand role for Visa, coordinating the global roll out and implementation of a new positioning and brand guidelines for advertising campaigns worldwide. Julia graduated Magna Cum Laude with a M.A. in Global Marketing Communications and Advertising from Emerson College in Boston, where she studied abroad at the Communication University of China in Beijing.  She earned dual degrees in Advertising and Music Performance from the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Julia holds a Global Marketing Communications certificate from the International Advertising Association.