Our 2025 speakers

Surinderjit Kaur Bhatti

Founder and CEO, Fathom4Sight

Surinderjit Kaur Bhatti, also known as Jeet, is a recognized leader in the FinTech industry and
the visionary CEO and Founder of Fathom4sight, Canada’s premier knowledge-as-a-service
platform. She has led the company to provide unparalleled strategic foresight and online
intelligence, positioning Fathom4sight at the forefront of financial product innovation. Jeet has
revolutionized the market research and intelligence space through her groundbreaking platform,
establishing herself as a subject matter expert sought after by organizations looking to navigate
the future of financial services.

Beyond her entrepreneurial ventures, Jeet is a prominent figure in academia and industry
forums. She serves as a guest lecturer at prestigious univiersities, sharing her extensive
expertise with the next generation of FinTech leaders. Her insights and experience are highly
valued globally, leading to her roles as an Innovation Circle Judge at BAI and a BankingTech
Awards Judge at FinTech Futures. As a frequent speaker at major industry events, Jeet is
known for her thought leadership and ability to drive meaningful conversations around FinTech
innovation and transformation.

In her previous career, Jeet built world-leading fintech products for large financial institutions
and developed cutting-edge strategies that enabled the transformation of incumbent
organizations. She led comprehensive consulting projects and helped prominent banks and VC
firms globally to understand and engage with fintech ecosystems in various regions. Her work
has been instrumental in driving innovation and transformation within the financial services
industry.

Paul Desmarais III

Chairman and CEO, Sagard

Paul Desmarais III is the Chairman and CEO of Sagard, an alternative asset management firm
active in venture capital, private equity, private credit, real estate, healthcare royalties and
private wealth.

Paul took the helm of Sagard in 2016, along with a handful of close partners bound by a
common vision: partnering with entrepreneurs to catalyze transformation in our investments and
communities. Sagard has experienced outstanding growth in six years, with assets under
management increasing to over $13B, more than 300 professionals joining its ranks, and some
125 companies added to the portfolio.

Sagard has built a global network of expertise that helps companies lead, embrace, and stay
ahead of disruptive trends in the financial services, technology, and healthcare spaces, amongst
others. The team is behind some of the largest technology success stories in Canada such as
Wealthsimple and Dialogue.

Within the Sagard ecosystem, Paul is the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Portage and
the Chairman and Co-Founder of Diagram. Within the investment portfolios, he is the Chairman
of Wealthsimple, Dialogue, Novisto, and Grayhawk, and a director of nesto.

Paul is dedicated to helping build a better business world. He is Co-Founder of the Black Wealth
Club and the Indigenous Leadership Circle, where emerging Black and Indigenous leaders go to
learn about creating wealth and networks giving them tools and resources that can be
reinvested in their communities. Under Paul’s leadership, Sagard has committed to a more
sustainable financial system by becoming a signatory of the United Nations Principles for
Responsible Investment, enlisting as a CREO participant, and embarking on its journey to
carbon neutrality. Paul was also co-chair of the Centraide (United Way) campaign in 2022 and
will chair the large donors campaign for the same organization in 2024-2027.

Paul is a board member of the Glenbow Museum and serves as Chair of the Next Canada
Emeritus board of advisors. He is a recipient of the Duke of Edinburgh Award for his work
chairing the fundraising campaign for the Kenojuak Culture Center. He was formerly a board
member of the Rideau Hall Foundation and Alpine Canada. Paul also co-founded Young
Canadians in Finance and co-chaired the True Patriot Love Expedition to the magnetic North
Pole.

Prior to his current role, Paul worked at Goldman Sachs in the Investment Banking Division,
Investment Strategy Group and Special Situations Group, Imerys S.A. in supply chain
management and strategy and Great-West Lifeco Inc. in risk management. He has earned a
B.A. in Economics from Harvard College and holds an MBA from INSEAD.

David Eberhard

Founder and CEO, KOHO

Laurent Ferreira

President and CEO, National Bank of Canada

Laurent Ferreira is President and Chief Executive Officer of National Bank, a position he has held 
since November 2021. He is responsible for the strategies, orientations and development of the 
Bank and its subsidiaries, with the support of the Senior Leadership Team. At the time of his 
appointment, Mr. Ferreira was Chief Operating Officer. 

Mr. Ferreira started his career at Bankers Trust where he worked for two years. He joined National 
Bank in 1998 and successively held the positions of Senior Manager, then Executive VicePresident and Managing Director of Derivatives and Equities within the Financial Markets group. 
From 2018 to 2021, Mr. Ferreira was Executive Vice-President and Co-Head, Financial Markets.

Mr. Ferreira was a member of the Hydro-Québec Board of Directors for several years. He currently 
serves on the Boards of Directors for Groupe CH and the Business Council of Canada. Mr. Ferreira 
is actively involved in the community and supports various causes. He has co-chaired fundraising 
campaigns for the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, the Montreal Women’s Y Foundation, and 
the Centraide United Way campaign for Greater Montreal. He currently co-chairs the Grow Beyond 
campaign for the CHU Sainte-Justine Foundation. 

Mr. Ferreira has a Master’s degree in Finance from HEC Montréal and a Bachelor's degree in 
Economics from Université du Québec à Montréal. 

Rahnama Hossein

Founder and CEO, Flybits

Michael Pelosi

Strategic Enterprise Lead, Cohere

Michael Pelosi is the Strategic Enterprise Lead at Cohere, where he partners with some of the world’s largest organizations to design and deploy secure, customized AI solutions at production scale. He focuses on operationalizing enterprise-grade language models to unlock tangible business value through responsible, scalable adoption of generative AI. 

At Cohere, Michael leads strategic partnerships that emphasize data privacy, domain-specific performance, and real-world impact—enabling enterprises to confidently integrate AI into their most critical workflows. 

Prior to Cohere, Michael led multiple finance portfolios at Google across fintech, payments, and enterprise banking, with a focus on digital transformation and emerging technology strategy. He holds an MBA from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and is a graduate of the Oxford Fintech Programme. 

Parinaz Sobhani

Managing Director & Head of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Sagard

Parinaz Sobhani is the Head of AI at Sagard. In this role, she helps portfolio companies adopt AI and gain a competitive edge. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa, where she focused on natural language understanding. With over ten years of experience, she's published more than 20 papers in top ML and NLP conferences.  

Before Sagard, she was the Head of AI at Georgian, where she led a team of engineers and scientists to help growth-stage companies build and scale machine learning products. Parinaz also worked at Microsoft Research, developing advanced neural machine translation models, and at the National Research Council of Canada, where she made significant contributions to deep neural network models for sentiment analysis." 

Patrick Surry

Chief Data Scientist, Hopper

He was one of the founders of Quadstone Inc, a predictive customer analytics company, since acquired by Pitney Bowes Software, where he developed high-performance parallel engines for generalized additive models. Patrick holds a PhD in mathematics and statistics from the University of Edinburgh, where he studied optimization based on evolutionary algorithms, following an HBSc in continuum mechanics from the University of Western Ontario.