Gerald’s Professional Experience

I began my career working for myself building websites and digital solutions for local businesses when I was 15. Since then, my career has taken me through a variety of industries, roles, and business functions, including: digital advertising, e-commerce, banking, fraud, analytics, strategy, policy, and consulting.

I’ve led teams at companies of less than 10 employees to more than 50,000. More than anything else, I am a learner, abstracter, and problem solver.

I’m also very concerned with our current paradigm of digital identity in the US, and am a passionate advocate for the advancement of “Self Sovereign Identity” concepts which leverage technology and open standards like Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials.

Policy and Strategy

I worked at a sponsor bank for 2.5 years that provided banking access to several top-10 US-based cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as the largest companies in online gaming. I oversaw their fraud and identity risk programs, ensuring that they understood the relevant risks and had the right controls, strategies, and monitoring in place to satisfy federal regulators. I also authored and maintained important enterprise documents like our FinTech Risk Assessment, CIP Policy, and Identity Theft & Red Flags Policy. I was the second-line fraud and identity risk lead for several business verticals, including acquiring, banking as a service, payments, cryptocurrency, and gaming.

Product Management

I was a Product leader on a team that built an in-house authoritzations platform for Capital One’s credit card business, saving the enterprise more than $100MM a year. We built the data pipelines, modeling infrastructure, rules engines, and overall architecture and capabilities to make approve / decline decisions on hundreds of transactions a second in less than 100 milliseconds. I later used what I’d learned as a platform Product Owner to mentor others in the business on best-practices for enabling federated development more broadly.

Fraud Team Leadership

I led the fraud team at ID.me during the height of Covid, where we were the front door for the IRS, Social Security Administration, Veterans Affairs, and 3 dozen state unemployment agencies which were responsible for verifying the identities of US citizens. During the peak, we were verifying over 200,000 citizens a day while defending the country from scaled and coordinated fraud attacks. I derived and operationalized foundational terms, practices, engagement models, internal tools, and analytical frameworks. I partnered directly with engineers, analyts, and data scientists to build, deploy, and operationalize machine-learning fraud models to scale the business.

P&L Ownership

I led 2 business units for a vertically-integrated designer, manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer of home, gift, and garden products. During my time there, I worked directly with executive leadership, Product, IT, Warehouse, Importing, and Logistics teams to deliver consistent and effective tools and experiences for our internal sales force and wholesale customers. In 2015, my team won an IBM Beacon Award for “Smarter Commerce” which helped our sales teams more effectively manage and grow their territories. Additionally, I was also charged with starting and running a B2C business, which I grew to $10MM in annual sales.

Banking Commissioner

I was appointed by the Catawba Digital Economic Zone as a Banking Commissioner to charter and regulate banks under the CDEZ's legal framework.

The Catawba Nation’s regulations, through the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, allow financial services companies and banks to receive charters and operate under the laws of the Catawba Indian Nation, and the regulations of the Zone Authority, including its Banking and Financial Services Regulation, approved in April 2023.


Analytics and Strategy

I led the Fraud Strategy and Analytics team for Capital One’s Small Business Bank. In this capacity, I worked with my colleagues in Policy, Product, Engineering, and Operations to care for the Fraud P&L for the business. I was responsible for the controls, analysis, strategies, and overall costs of building and executing the fraud risk mitigation capabilities necessary for the Bank to achieve it’s business goals.