Marissa Allison

I am the Regional Head of Technology for HSBC’s Financial Intelligence Unit in Dubai, an in-house intelligence function for detecting financial crime risk. In this role, I drive technical solutions to our intelligence challenges – ranging from data acquisition to user experience. As a leader and mentor for the wider FIU team, I serve as interim head of Governance, contributing to training initiatives and helping to ensure casework quality. Our biggest success was transforming our transactions analysis capability from manual review of PDFs to analyzing millions of rows of data using a product suite of ETL, pattern detection, and network analysis tools. Previously, I served in a hybrid role across sales, marketing, and product at Zignal Labs, a media intelligence and data analytics startup. My experience also spans into strategy and intelligence consulting in emerging markets. Above all, I excel in roles blending business acumen with technical skills. I am passionate about solving complex problems through collaboration. My greatest satisfaction comes from promoting teamwork between technical teams and end users to get everyone to think creatively about how to reach a common goal. My skills include problem-solving, collaboration, effective communications, digital literacy, project management, intelligence analysis, financial crime, social media analysis, geopolitics, Arabic and Spanish.