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Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
1000 Peachtree Street N.E.
Atlanta, GA 30309

February 29, 2024

Speaker Biographies

Daniel Baum is a senior vice president and head of payments product management for the Federal Reserve System's FedNow Service. Baum is responsible for the definition of all attributes of the FedNow Service and future roadmap service features. He previously served as vice president in the Fed's Retail Payments Office with responsibility for check and ACH product development and pricing. Baum holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, a master of business administration from Johns Hopkins University, and attended banking school at Vanderbilt University.

Jessie Bitetti is assistant vice president of FedNow Industry Readiness. She led the FedNow pilot program and has responsibility for various customer engagement programs for the FedNow Service. Prior to joining FedNow Service, she was assistant vice president with the Federal Reserve's Retail Payments Office with responsibility over check and FedACH customer service, and industry relations. Bitetti earned a bachelor of science degree in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a master of business administration degree from Case Western Reserve University.

Raphael W. Bostic is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. From 2012 to 2017, Bostic was the Judith and John Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC), where he was director of the master's of real estate development degree program and founding director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast. Bostic also served USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate as the interim associate director from 2007 to 2009 and as the interim director from 2015 to 2016. From 2016 to 2017, he was the chair of the center's Governance, Management, and Policy Process Department. From 2009 to 2012, Bostic was the assistant secretary for policy development and research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Bostic worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1995 to 2001, first as an economist and then a senior. He served as special assistant to HUD's assistant secretary of policy development and research in 1999. He was also a professional lecturer at American University in 1998. He graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a combined major in economics and psychology. He earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1995.

Jennifer J. Burns is a deputy director in the Supervision & Regulation Division at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She is responsible for oversight of the Fed's supervisory programs and supervisory stress testing, specialty supervision, and risk identification activities. She began her career as an assistant examiner in the Bank Supervision and Regulation department at the Richmond Fed, where she held various roles within the department and led the Bank's large bank supervision function. She was named senior vice president for Supervision, Regulation, and Credit in 2010 and promoted to executive vice president in 2015. She moved to the Board in September 2017 as deputy director with responsibility for overseeing the Fed's supervisory program for systemically important financial institutions and supervisory stress testing activities. She assumed her current responsibilities in March 2019. She holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business.

Tony Curtis is a director of examinations for the Consumer Affairs Division of Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is responsible supervisory oversight of state member community and foreign banking organizations below $10 billion in assets. His career as a compliance bank examiner began at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in 1999. Curtis received a BS degree in business administration with a minor in economics at Virginia Commonwealth University. He holds a certified regulatory compliance management (CRCM) certification.

Stephen David is Capital Region market president of Synergy Bank in New Roads, Louisiana. He is a graduate of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and completed the Graduate School of Banking at Louisiana State University (GSBLSU) in 1990. Stephen is past president and chairman of the Louisiana Bankers Association and is its current state chairman of governmental affairs. He has served the American Bankers Association through the governmental affairs council and membership council. He is a past chairman of Parish Chamber of Commerce, past president of Parish Catholic School System, and an active volunteer in coaching various sports. He was a member of the GSBLSU Board of Trustees from 2000–2004 and was GSBLSU president and executive committee member from 2005–2011. He has served as an instructor for the GSBLSU BankSim program for over 22 years.

Joe Davidson, as senior vice president over the Atlanta Fed's Supervision and Regulation (S&R) Division, oversees the Bank's supervision of state member banks, bank and financial holding companies, and US branches and agencies of foreign banking operations. He is a member of the Atlanta Fed's executive leadership committee and serves on the Federal Reserve System's Supervision Committee. Davidson came to the Atlanta Fed in February 2023 from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where he had served as senior vice president of the Seventh District's S&R Division since 2018. In that role, he reported to S&R's executive vice president and oversaw the division's talent management, finance, business operations and analytics, quality management, conflicts of interest, applications and enforcement, and technology and records management functions. He joined the Federal Reserve in 1999 as a retail payments analyst in Chicago and later served as a compliance and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) examiner and managing examiner. He was promoted to assistant vice president of consumer compliance and CRA in 2010, and then to vice president in 2012. Davidson holds a bachelor's degree in in economics from Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Ryan Earnest is president and chief executive officer of First National Community Bank. He was named president and CEO of First Chatsworth Bankshares Inc. and First National Community Bank in July 2021 when First National Community Bank and Heritage First Bank merged. His banking career began in 1995 and he was elected Heritage First Bank's president in May 2008. In December 2017, Earnest was named Heritage First Bank's CEO and in March 2019 was named CEO of Heritage First Bancshares Inc. Earnest has been a member of the board of directors of Heritage First Bank since May 2008 and served on the Heritage First Bancshares Inc.'s board of directors. Earnest earned a bachelor of arts degree from West Georgia College in 1990 and completed the requirements of a diploma from GSBLSU in 2008. He is the chairman of the Development Authority of Floyd County and immediate past chairman of the board of trustees for the Rome/Floyd County YMCA. He is on the board of trustees for the GSBLSU and on the board of directors for the Georgia Bankers Association Insurance Trust Inc. and the Rome/Floyd Chamber of Commerce.

Jessica Farr is a Supervision and Regulation Subject Matter Expert on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. With the Atlanta Fed since 2001, she spent the first 10 years in Community and Economic Development and joined the CRA/Fair Lending team in 2011. She is a commissioned examiner who works primarily on large bank CRA examinations and is currently working with the CRA policy team at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She assisted with drafting the CRA rule adopted in October 2023. Farr graduated from University of California San Diego with a degree in urban studies and planning and received her master's degree in urban and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She serves on the board for directors for The Housing Fund, a community development financial institution based in Nashville, Tennessee, and serves as the vice chair for the Metropolitan Planning Commission for Nashville/Davidson County.

Lorenzo Garza is vice president in Banking Supervision at the Dallas Fed, where he oversees teams responsible for supervisory risk, policy, and bank surveillance. His teams contribute to important national initiatives including bank early-warning models, bank stress testing, energy finance, and fintech. Garza joined the Dallas Fed in 2009, earning his bank examiner commission before serving in management. He also worked five years at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. For his contributions, Fed chair Jerome Powell honored Garza with the William Taylor Award, the Fed's most prestigious honor for banking supervision. Garza previously worked at three large banks in commercial lending, mortgage underwriting, risk management, and capital management. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at San Antonio, New York University, the Southwestern Graduate School of Banking, and Harvard Business School's Program for Leadership Development.

Emily Greenwald leads the Banking Supervision & Regulation and Credit, Risk, and Reserves Management departments at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Emily joined the Dallas Fed in 2023 after more than 17 years in banking supervision at the Chicago Fed. She oversees a growing portfolio of supervised financial institutions and holding companies in the 11th District and contributes to policy and risk leadership on the Bank's executive leadership team. She is a commissioned bank examiner and has been an active thought leader throughout her supervisory career, including contributions to community and regional banking, large financial institution supervision, and risk analysis. Emily holds an MBA and bachelor of science degree from Southeast Missouri State University.

Mike Highfield is the provost and executive vice president at Mississippi College in Clinton, Mississippi. He received his BBA and MBA from Mississippi State University before earning an MS in economics and PhD in finance from the University of Kentucky. He holds the chartered financial analyst (CFA) designation from the CFA Institute, the certified treasury professional (CTP) designation from the Association for Financial Professionals, and the chartered banking professional (ChBP) designation from GSBLSU. A former faculty member at Louisiana Tech University (2002–2005), Mike later served on the faculty at Mississippi State University (2005–2023) as the department head of finance and economics, faculty representative on MSU Foundation's investment committee, chair of the university's department head executive committee, and chair of the university's financial conflict of interest committee. He is a past president of the American Real Estate Society (ARES), a member of the ARES Foundation board of directors, treasurer for the Mississippi College Foundation, a volunteer and consultant for the CFA Institute, and a faculty member and vice president for curriculum at GSBLSU.

Nathan Hilt is Protiviti's managing director for payments and fintech solutions. He has more than 25 years' experience with traditional and emerging electronic payments and money movement systems and has leveraged product development and new technology to achieve product growth, M&A integration, security and controls, risk management, fraud reduction and dispute resolution. Before joining Protiviti, he was a leader within PwC's Financial Services Advisory practice, where he was responsible for leading and growing its electronic payments, digital, and fintech business and client base. He also spent more than a decade at Visa International working on a range of financial services initiatives within IT, marketing, and product divisions as vice president of global brand management, and as director of consumer product platforms, where he focused on innovation, product platform development and emerging consumer environments.

Terry Hughes has over 30 years' experience in the financial industry as a banker and a consultant. During her time as a banker, she worked in operations, consumer and commercial lending, and management. As a consultant, she worked in various areas of banking with an emphasis on lending and asset quality. She joined the Office of Financial Regulation in 2015 and was promoted to her current position, bureau chief of bank regulation, in August 2017. In this role, she has regulatory responsibility for Florida-chartered banks, nondepository trust companies, international offices of foreign banking organizations, family trust companies, and qualified limited service affiliates. She has a bachelor's degree in finance and a master's of business administration from Florida State University.

Karen Leone de Nie is vice president and community affairs officer in the community and economic development (CED) group at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She is responsible for building partnerships and leading research efforts related to community and economic development issues with the objective of improving the policy environment and facilitating sustainable community development practices. She works with colleagues in the Sixth District (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) and throughout the Fed system to study a variety of community and economic development issues, including foreclosure, small business development, and unemployment. Before joining the Atlanta Fed, she was a researcher at Georgia Tech's Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, which does applied research to help communities achieve sound and equitable development through planning and policy. Leone de Nie also worked for the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan planning organization, focusing on real estate development and environmental resource management. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master's degree in city and regional planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Christopher Marks is a senior consumer compliance examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He has over 17 years of experience in banking, with over a decade specifically dedicated to consumer compliance and fair and responsible banking. In his role, he participates in the planning, coordinating, and monitoring of fair lending supervisory activities and leads internal training initiatives locally and at the systemwide level for hundreds of participants and attendees at Reserve Banks.

Bob Moran is a portfolio senior examiner in the Consumer Compliance/Consumer Affairs department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In his role, he has responsibility for overseeing eight community banking organizations ranging in asset size from $100 million to $4.1 billon and one regional $25 billion bank holding company. He also is an instructor for the Federal Reserve System and facilitates various consumer compliance courses for examiners in the consumer affairs commissioning program. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed, he worked with several regional midsize banks in trust operations and retail banking. He earned a BS in engineering from the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and a master's of international business administration from Baldwin Wallace University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Scott Nathan is the global head of financial crime detection and customer insights at Citi. He leads a team of data science professionals, money laundering risk analysts, and intelligence specialists leveraging contextual driven insights to understand customer behavior and ensure Citi effectively detects financial crime across its global footprint and lines of business. Prior to Citi, Nathan was a managing director and head of anti-money laundering technology and innovation for global compliance at State Street. He was also a managing director, head of financial intelligence at Accenture and has held various leadership roles at Deloitte and Bank of America, where he engineered programs that help reduce the cost of compliance, strengthen relationships with regulatory agencies, and better support the end-user intelligence community to protect national security.

Hema Parekh is a risk specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond focusing on supervision of large and complex financial institutions. Her primary focus areas include operational risk, operational resiliency, third-party risk, cyber risk, merger integration risk, CCAR, climate risk, governance, model risk, reputational risk, and compliance risk. She has been involved in domestic and international policy and guidance initiatives with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and represents the Fed on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision's Operational Resilience Group. Prior to joining the Fed, Parekh worked as a consultant adviser to large financial institutions. She has extensive experience in the financial industry, including treasury and balance sheet management, strategic alliances and investments, technology risk strategy, risk management, and finance. Parekh has been a frequent speaker and panelist at industry groups events and conferences. In 2014, she contributed a chapter called "Reputational Risk in the Universe of Risks: Boundary Issues" for a book, Reputational Risk Management for Financial Institutions, written by bankers, regulators, and academics from the United States and Europe. Parekh is a certified CPA, CMA, and Six Sigma Greenbelt. She earned her MBA from Emory University.

Sherri Sackett is chief executive officer of Select Bank in Lynchburg, Virginia. She leads the bank's cultural engagement efforts and its deposit incentive program and is the bank's FinTech adoption enthusiast. Her management of subordinated debt and preferred stock offerings has been critical in the overall vitality of Select Bank. Her financial career began in commercial real estate. As an organizer of Select Bank, she has a broad scope of experience in all areas of banking, including commercial lending and retail. With over 20 years of experience, Sherri organized and formed two de novo banks. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina, the Virginia School of Bank Management at the University of Virginia, and the GSBLSU. She serves as a director of the Richmond chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Board of Trustees and is the board chair for Fight Against Leukemia. She also serves on the board of the Virginia Bankers Association MSI, the Virginia Bankers Association MSI executive committee, and is a member of the board of trustees for GSBLSU.

Chad Tagtow is the senior vice president and chief innovation officer for Citizens Bank and Trust in Polk County, Florida. His areas of responsibility include technology, risk management, and operations. Before joining Citizens Bank and Trust, Chad worked for Raytheon NCS on multiple government projects in the areas of information assurance architectural design, risk management, security testing and evaluation, and security certification and accreditation. He began his career in the information security field developing and implementing network security policy for Boeing Aerospace at Kennedy Space Center in the late 1990s. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Central Florida. He graduated from the GSBLSU in 2009. He has been an (ISC)2 certified information systems security professional (CISSP) since 2002. He teaches the risk management and cybersecurity course at the GSBLSU.

Tom Walker is a partner in Jones Walker LLP's corporate practice group. He focuses on commercial and regulatory matters in the financial services industry, with a depth of experience representing financial institutions. Prior to joining Jones Walker, he served as executive vice president and director of a community bank. His experience as general counsel, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, and chief investments officer in the financial services sector enhances his ability to provide legal services to his clients. Walker is a licensed certified public accountant with a bachelor's in accountancy and master of professional accountancy from Mississippi State University. He serves as vice chairman of the Mississippi Society of Certified Public Accountants. He received his juris doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law and is a 2014 graduate from the Graduate School of Banking at Louisiana State University.

Jessica Washington is assistant vice president and director of payments research and outreach with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She is a recognized thought leader through her collaboration with industry participants such as financial institutions, fintechs, regulators, law enforcement, the legal community, and others in the Federal Reserve System. She regularly convenes payments industry stakeholders to discuss trends in payments and inclusion initiatives, promotes the mitigation of payments risks, and shares her research through blogs, papers, presentations, and forums. Washington currently serves as deputy chair to the Special Committee on Payments Inclusion, sits on the board of ePay Resources, and is on the Florida State Alumni Association's board of directors. She has served as deputy chair of the Diversity Advisory Council of the Atlanta Fed, adviser to NACHA's payments risk accreditation oversight panel, member of The Payments Institute board of regents, adviser to Accredited ACH Certification Board, and member of Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center's payments risk and fraud group. Before joining the Federal Reserve, Jessica served as senior vice president for PaymentsFirst, a not-for-profit trade association. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from FSU in 2004 with a major in creative writing and minor in childhood development.