Faculty and Advisory Board
Work with wizards of financial innovation.
Our faculty and advisory board members are all leading practitioners and subject experts in the Digital Innovation for FinTech field. They structure a curriculum that draws on real-world expertise and connections that ultimately help you advance your career goals.
Meet Our Featured Faculty
Khadija Khartit has over 22 years of experience in management, consulting and capital markets in general, including 14 years in investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, private equity, venture capital and angel investing.
Since 2015, Khadija has set up IFS advisory through which she provides corporate finance and strategy advisory services. She coaches startups in technology about strategy and fundraising. The main sectors she has worked on recently are digital health, construction tech, FinTech, IoT, AI in retail, encryption, EdTech, VR and AR.
Khadija's services include the preparation of pitch decks, investor-oriented business plans, go to market strategy, market/competitors analysis, financial planning, investor offer evaluation, exit preparation, enterprise & equity valuation, acquirer negotiation support, entrepreneur CFO-assist, incubator admission, coaching for handling investors' questions, terminology and mindset, stages of investments (Angel, Seed, VC rounds A, B, C, D…), and dilution.
Between 2010-14, Khadija worked as an expatriate in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in investment banking starting from director, MD, then CEO at a renowned investment bank. In these roles, she worked on high profile M&A deals in manufacturing, industrial, health care, education and the food sectors.
Throughout her career, Khadija worked for and co-advised with leading investment banks such as UBS, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays and Banque Populaire. She supplied investment targets to Carlyle, KKR, InvestCorp and Standard Chartered.
Khadija is a Fulbright scholar and holds an MBA from Oklahoma State University and an MS in finance from Boston College. She passed CFA level 2 track, series 7 and 66. She is an accredited investment advisor with FINRA in the United States and CMA in KSA. Khadija speaks Arabic, French and English.
Most importantly, Khadija is passionate about growth, nurturing and inspiration of the next generations for a brighter and more positive world.
Sarah Biller is a senior level executive with experience building innovative technology platforms at pioneering start-ups and high-growth companies. She is the former head of Innovation Ventures at State Street. Sarah co-founded the FinTech Sandbox and sits on the Advisory Boards of multiple start-ups.
Aswin Pranam is a technologist, instructor, academic and writer. He has deep experience in product management, software engineering, human-computer interaction (HCI), business strategy and venture incubation. Previously, he’s held strategy, product and technology management roles at T-Mobile, McKinsey & Company, Google, Boeing, Disney and IBM. He’s also an instructor at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering, a lecturer of Integrated Design, Business & Technology and Entrepreneur-In-Residence at USC Iovine & Young Academy, a course facilitator at Cornell University, and a contributing writer at Forbes and Psychology Today. He wrote "Product Management Essentials," a getting-started textbook on the field of product management published through Apress/Springer Nature. Educationally, Aswin holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington, along with master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon.
Aswin’s teaching in the Master of Science in Digital Innovation program focuses on building new ventures, tracing the evolution of FinTech throughout history, and developing products that sit at the intersection of financial impact and social good.