The Leadership Team

Martina King

Martina King joined Featurespace in 2012. Formerly the Managing Director of augmented reality company Aurasma, she has an extensive career in media and technology, including MD of Yahoo! Europe and Capital Radio. Under King’s leadership, Featurespace has become the world’s leading provider of Enterprise Financial Crime prevention software, risk scoring events and preventing fraud and financial crime in more than 180 countries. The company has also raised more than £100 million in funding, supporting its ongoing expansion and ability to protect more than 30 major global financial institutions, including HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, NatWest Group, Danske Bank, BBVA and Barclays PLC. Since 2018, she’s been honored by PaymentsSource as one of its Most Influential Women in Payments and has previously been named “Top 40 Powerful Women in Tech” by Silicon Republic.

David Excell

Dave is Featurespace’s Founder, responsible for driving Featurespace’s innovation strategy, and working with our global client base to provide the industry with the very best machine learning technology. After studying at the Australian National University and the University of Cambridge, Featurespace began as a concept and has become the leading enterprise financial crime platform for financial institutions and technology providers. Dave is also a Board member of The Knoble, bringing together networks of financial crime specialists to prevent criminals from using the world’s financial systems to profit from the suffering of others.

Don Riddick

Don is Chief Legal Officer for Featurespace responsible worldwide for all legal, IP and regulatory affairs. He is the former Vice President of Legal at TSYS, leading their global vendor and third party legal teams. With an extensive career at IBM, including as a contract negotiator, he contributed to the exponential growth of several business units. Prior to law, Don has held technical, engineering, and operations roles, and holds multiple patents in the payment and technology space. Don received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Southern California.

John Shipsey

John was at Smiths Group from 2017 to 2022. As CFO, he played a key role in refocusing the Smiths portfolio, successfully navigating the challenges of the pandemic, and returning the group to good sustainable growth. From 2005 to 2017 John was CFO of Dyson, the global technology company, at a time of exceptional growth fueled by new products and new markets. Prior to joining Dyson, John worked at Diageo plc for 13 years in a number of senior finance and strategy roles in Africa, Europe and the USA. John is a qualified Chartered Accountant and has an MBA from INSEAD.

Tim Vanderham

Tim is Chief Operations Officer at Featurespace and is responsible for the successful execution of Featurespace’s growth strategy and day to day company operations. Tim’s focus will be on enhancing the market and client centric focus that Featurespace takes across product strategy, product engineering and deployment, and its delivery of professional services and support across all geographies.

Prior to Featurespace, Tim has spent over twenty years with companies in various executive leadership positions focusing on building, transforming technology businesses, and developing platforms that solve clients’ problems. Tim most recently served as EVP and CTO for NCR, a leading provider of financial and consumer transaction technologies. During his time at NCR, Tim helped transition the company from a hardware/software business to a SaaS subscription business model. Prior to NCR, Tim served as CTO for Thomson Reuters Tax and Accounting Division. Tim started his career at IBM as an intern while studying at South Dakota State University. Tim’s career at IBM across the IBM Software and Cloud divisions culminated as Vice President of Cloud Development, IBM Cloud.

Tim is based in Atlanta but will spend considerable time in Cambridge and London working with the team members to deliver on Featurespace’s mission: “To make the world a safer place to transact

Rowan Link

Rowan leads HR and Recruitment globally and is responsible for the continuous development of Featurespace’s HR strategy, culture, systems and process.  Rowan brings a relentless positive focus to quality, care and consideration of Featurespace greatest asset, its brilliant people.

Rowan has extensive experience in building and leading high achieving teams within world class innovative Media & Technology organisations, bringing very broad generalist skills from both the commercial space and the people space. Rowan joined Featurespace in 2016 (39 team members), she has magnetic positive problem-solving superpowers, which has enabled the attraction and onboarding of over 400 people in the last six years.

Pat Hinchin

Pat leads Featurespace’s Product & Engineering teams and is responsible for the strategy and execution of all product-related activities. Pat is an innovator who seeks to leverage existing product portfolios to create world class information solutions for global professionals. He has extensive Product Management experience in B2B organisations and has held Senior Commercial & Strategic positions in RELX and Thomson Reuters, with a focus on Financial Crime Compliance. His extensive professional accreditations include an MSc in Information System Design as well as an MBA from the Open University.

Carolyn Homberger

Carolyn is President of the Americas for Featurespace and is responsible for sales, implementations, and customer support in the region. Prior to that, Carolyn spent 15 years at ACI Worldwide where she served in several diverse, executive positions including business unit leadership, sales, operations, risk management and finance.

Carolyn has an MBA in Finance from Fordham University, and a B.S. in Business from Miami University. She is highly engaged in the payments industry having served on industry boards including ATPC (American Transaction Processor Coalition) and Women in Payments as well as active in her local community.

Juspal Manic

As the President of EMEA & APAC at Featurespace, Juspal leads these regions’ strategic growth, overseeing the commercial, partnerships, and customer success groups. With a track record spanning over 23 years in the financial sector, working with banks and FinTechs on building transformative technology in the payment space.
Prior to that, Juspal spent 22 years at TSYS in diverse executive roles, including relationship management, consulting, risk & fraud, and operations across North America and Europe. In addition, Juspal launched TSYS into several new markets in Europe and new payment verticals. Juspal’s achievements include spearheading the TSYS/Featurespace machine learning award-winning score Foresight, used by over 30 banks globally.
Juspal holds an Executive MBA in International Banking and an MSC in Information Systems and Technology from City University, London.

Dr David Sutton

David is responsible for Featurespace’s research and innovation program. Prior to joining the company in 2015, David was a Research Associate in observational cosmology at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in the University of Cambridge, where he developed algorithms to study the Cosmic Microwave Background.  

At Featurespace, David developed the company’s approach to card fraud prevention, built out the company’s expertise in deep learning, and led the team that won the 2022 UK-US PETs Prize Challenge. His models have been deployed to more than 30 banks worldwide. David holds a DPhil (PhD) in Astrophysics from the University of Oxford and a Masters from University College London. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Gruber Prize for Cosmology as a member of the Planck team and has an academic publishing h-index of 70. 

Mark Andrews

As CISO, Mark leads our information security and compliance functions.  Mark is a technology leader with over 30 years of experience leading enterprise information security and IT operations programmes supporting innovation and business growth.  Making Featurespace a safe place to do business enables our corporate mission to make the world a safer place to transact! 

During his 24 years at TSYS, Mark held leadership roles in Information Security (including as CISO), Account Governance, Legal, and E-Business.  He was also instrumental in company expansion and M&A activities.  While at the W.C. Bradley Co., Mark led enterprise IT modernization efforts including cloud migration, data center consolidation, SDWAN, and VoIP, along with company M&A efforts.  Mark has a B.S. from Auburn University, holds the CISSP, CISM, and CRISC certifications, and is engaged in cybersecurity and compliance strategy within the financial services industry. 

Kendra Rogers

Kendra Rogers (she/her) is CCMO for Featurespace, and is responsible for creating and accelerating our brand recognition and marketing presence across the globe. She is focused on driving the company vision of making the world a safer place to transact. Kendra has held a series of senior roles across agencies and consultancies covering brand & creative strategy, digital, social, PR and B2B, working with the likes of Fujitsu, Nutmeg, Bottomline, UCL and the BBC, to name a few.  

Kendra has a BA from University of Calgary and holds certifications from Stanford University and Harvard Business School. She has built brands and spearheaded creative campaigns globally, with clients across North America, the UK and Europe, and is a guest lecturer on Branding, Marketing and DEI at University of Bristol and University of East Anglia’s Norwich Business School. She also serves on the board of directors for Outvertising and Table 11.  

Dr Karthik Tadinada

Karthik is an adviser to Featurespace. He brings with him 9 years of expertise in delivering value to banks, payments processors and fintechs via deploying real-time machine learning and analytics systems. Karthik was a key member of the Featurespace team that led market entry into financial services and led a large phase of its hypergrowth. With his track record of consistently delivering the business case, he has built many valuable relationships across the banking and payments industries.

Karthik started his career in the London office of the Boston Consulting Group. He holds a PhD in engineering at Cambridge where Prof. Bill Fitzgerald, one of the founders of Featurespace, was his director of studies.