• Meet the Team
A Unique Blend of Linguists, Scientists & Innovators
Our team brings together linguists, mathematicians and computer scientists, many with PhDs and strong academic affiliations. With computational expertise across multiple languages including non-Latin scripts, we apply deep semantic expertise to challenges like name matching, disambiguation and open-source intelligence that no other platform can match.
50+
PhD
100+
4
Research-Grade Expertise, Applied to Real-World Risk
What separates the smartKYC team from conventional software engineers is the calibre of underlying academic expertise, built through careers at leading universities and applied directly to the hardest problems in counterparty intelligence.
Advanced Degrees & Academic Affiliations
Many team members hold PhDs and maintain active research relationships with leading universities, bringing cutting-edge academic work directly into the platform’s development cycles.
Published Research Contributions
Our team regularly contributes to academic journals and international conferences in computational linguistics, NLP and AI, ensuring our solutions remain at the frontier of what is technically achievable.
Decades of Applied Industry Experience
Academic depth is matched with practical depth. Our leadership team brings over 100 years of experience in compliance intelligence, financial technology, and enterprise software, so academic rigour translates into real-world reliability.
Chief Scientist, smartKYC
“The linguistic and mathematical problems at the heart of KYC: name disambiguation, cross-script matching, semantic risk classification, are genuinely hard. Solving them at enterprise scale requires the kind of rigorous academic foundation that most software companies simply don’t have.”
MA Mathematics – Stanford
PhD Mathematics – UCLA
Former Professor of Mathematics
Visionary Leaders. Deep Domain Experts.
The smartKYC leadership team combines executive depth in financial technology, private banking and AI research, united by a shared conviction that counterparty due diligence deserved a fundamentally better answer.
Dermot Corrigan
Dermot has over 35 years’ experience in media and technology sectors, including leadership roles at Frost & Sullivan, PR Newswire, and LexisNexis (RELX plc) where he launched their first KYC offering. He has held senior executive and board positions with Exclusive Analysis (acquired by Standard & Poor’s) and Gorkana (acquired by Cision). He brings rare breadth across compliance intelligence, global media and enterprise technology, and the conviction that the KYC market was ready for a step change.
Guido Masieri
Guido holds a degree in Engineering from the University of Padua and has over 30 years in the software industry in executive and director roles. As one of the founders of private banking software specialists Finantix, he was involved in multiple investment rounds and successful exits, actively managing the due diligence process from both sides of the table. He brings deep operational and product delivery expertise to smartKYC’s scaling ambitions.
Hugo Chamberlain
As CCO, Hugo leads smartKYC’s commercial, pricing and marketing strategy. Previously he was a founding director of ClearView Financial Media, the publishers of WealthBriefing, and has over 20 years’ experience working with the wealth management and private banking industry. His deep understanding of how private banks think about client risk and regulatory obligation makes him uniquely positioned to translate smartKYC’s technical capabilities into commercial value.
Noa Goldring
Dr Noa Goldring leads a team of natural language, mathematical and machine learning professionals, many with PhDs in their fields. Noa received an MA in Mathematics from Stanford University and then a PhD in Mathematics from UCLA, where she subsequently taught as Professor of Mathematics. She brings rare academic authority to the hardest problems in the platform, from probabilistic name matching to multilingual semantic classification and generative AI summarisation.
michele penzo
Michele is a senior technology leader with 27 years of experience spanning software development, IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, and enterprise project management. He has built and led high-performing IT and business teams at international organisations including Finantix and the Permasteelisa Group, consistently translating complex client requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions. His areas of expertise include infrastructure architecture and management, NLP, process automation, environment monitoring, and end-to-end software life cycles, with a growing focus on data science and machine learning applications in enterprise environments.
Igor DaSacco
Igor is a full-stack Java software engineer with a focus on natural language processing, information retrieval, data mining and statistical and business rules engine techniques for the financial industry. Igor has an MS in software engineering and has an in-depth knowledge and extensive experience in designing, architecting and leading the development of complex software solutions and large-scale distributed systems.
Great Technology Comes from Great People
We believe the environment around our people matters as much as the talent they bring. These are the principles that shape how we work, hire, and grow.
Innovation First
We actively encourage bold thinking and create the space for it to happen. Ideas don’t need to come with a guaranteed outcome. We provide the resources, the intellectual environment, and the freedom to turn ambitious hypotheses into platform reality.
Continuous Learning
We invest meaningfully in our team’s growth: through access to conferences, academic journals, specialist training and peer learning. In a field moving as fast as AI and NLP, intellectual curiosity isn’t optional: it’s the job.
Work-Life Balance
We believe sustained performance requires sustainable working. We support flexible arrangements, respect personal boundaries, and judge our people by the quality of what they produce, not the number of hours they can be seen to be producing it.
Diversity & Inclusion
A team with computational expertise in 50+ languages and built from multiple continents doesn’t just talk about diversity, we are it. Different perspectives, backgrounds and disciplines aren’t a policy goal; they’re how we build a platform that works for the whole world.
Global Collaboration
Our distributed team works fluidly across time zones and cultures, something made natural by the very linguistic fluency that defines our product. Collaboration here is genuinely global, not aspirationally so.
Impact Driven
Our work has a clear and meaningful purpose: helping financial institutions and large corporates detect risk that would otherwise go unseen, and preventing the financial crime that causes real harm. That matters to the people who build here, and it shapes the standard we hold ourselves to.
Are You the Next Member of This Team?
We’re always looking for exceptional people who want to work on genuinely hard problems: the kind that sit at the intersection of language, mathematics, AI and compliance intelligence. If that describes you, we’d like to talk.
- Computational Linguists & NLP Researchers: particularly with expertise in non-Latin script processing and multilingual semantic analysis
- Machine Learning & AI Engineers: with a track record of applying LLMs and entity resolution to structured intelligence problems
- Compliance Domain Experts: from AML, KYC or financial crime backgrounds who want to build the tools they wish existed
- Data Scientists & Mathematicians: especially those with an interest in probabilistic modelling and large-scale information extraction
- All disciplines welcome: if you’re exceptional at what you do and passionate about the mission, we want to hear from you