CutterCast: Data Preparation Tools

Gina McCafferty has 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. She served at Cutter from 1999 to 2011 as Principal and Managing Director of CutterResearch, and she was instrumental in growing that business. Gina returned to Cutter in 2017, and established and ran the company’s Wealth Management research division. In 2019, she was appointed to Head of Research, responsible for Asset Management and Wealth Management product development and delivery to over 200 member firms around the globe. Gina was previously at Investit Ltd., where she served for six years as head of the company’s research service. Prior to that, she held senior positions at DST International with product responsibility for their global accounting and performance measurement systems, and at SunGard as Vice President of Client Services for their securities trading products.

Arnie Wachs, Head of Consulting at Cutter Associates, brings extensive business and technical knowledge to the role, with over 30 years of investment management industry experience. Arnie advises clients on their strategic technology direction, data governance practices, trading platforms and practices, portfolio management tools, and operational organization, as well as data management architecture, tools, and practices. He has extensive experience working for investment management firms, financial software vendors, and consulting firms, in roles that included business analyst, developer, system architect, development management, project management, product management, sales, and executive positions. He has a deep understanding of investment management system use and design. He also leads the firm’s Technology and Architecture practice.

Prior to joining Cutter, Arnie worked for ITG, where he led the product management efforts for the development of the next-generation OEMS platform. Prior roles include Head of Equity Systems at BlackRock Solutions, Senior Product Manager at Charles River Development, and Vice President at Fidelity Investments, where he designed and developed the firm’s global trading platforms. Arnie also led efforts at State Street Global Advisors to create an enterprise-wide, cross-asset class security and benchmark master. He holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from Clarkson University.

Dora is a Product Analyst within the Information Technology Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) at Western Asset, where she is responsible for the end-to-end planning and execution of the product lifecycles for BI tools and chairs the Western Asset Data Analytics Community group. She joined the firm in 2018, and has now notched 20 years in the asset management industry.

The Business Enablement group traverses a wide swath to source governed data from data architects for enterprise business users, simplifying access to data with BI tools and data catalogs, sharing strategies for analyzing data to integrate business knowledge with technical solutions, and keeping users engaged and effective. Dora is also responsible for BI tool server administration, security roles, and production support. Dora earned her B.A. in Economics from UCLA.

Vivin Suchitra joined Baillie Gifford in 2016 and her teams are responsible for implementing the data governance framework within BG as well as driving reporting and analytics of client related information within the Firm. Vivin is also product owner of the strategic data platform within BG to support BI, and chair of the Data Governance Group. Prior to joining BG, Vivin worked in data and analytics management for several public and private sector organisations in the US and UK delivering enterprise wide software and analytics solutions. She holds an MS in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University and an MBA from the University of Edinburgh.