In a dialog with Mirror Review, Mark Gazit, the CEO of ThetaRay, explains what it takes to successfully run a company that fights financial cybercrime in a wide range of areas. Bringing more than 20 years of experience, Mark is an expert authority on cyber security, IT, big data analytics, telecommunications, and FinTech. The following excerpts dwell on how the inspiring leader and his team at ThetaRay are empowering financial institutions to fight yet-to-be encountered threats posed by bad actors.
Great Leaders Create Problem-solving Teams
What is your definition of an ideal leader?
An ideal leader is one who is able to mentor and develop additional leaders that help to grow the organization. A leader’s focus should always be to produce results not only for their department but for the entire company. They should have the ability and willingness to listen. Having high IQs and EQs is critical., Having Emotional Intelligence can sometimes be more important than IQ as it helps leaders understand and connect with their team members to enhance not only their performance but job satisfaction as well. Understanding employees and clients and sharing a vision coupled with effective communication makes a leader successful. They empower teams to solve problems and execute on a shared vision.
Leading with Passion while Setting Ambitious Goals
As a leader what are the challenges you have to face and how do you conquer them?
I have two primary challenges—1st is to achieve results and 2nd is to ensure that my team retains their passion for their work and the company.
To conquer these challenges, I consistently lead with passion while setting audacious goals that my team members don’t think they can accomplish and then help them to believe they can achieve them. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
A team is crucial because most goals cannot be achieved by a single person. That is why I hire the most talented and knowledgeable people I can. Every individual in my team is far superior to me in their area of focus. Thus, ThetaRay is a team of highly talented individuals who are ready to achieve some of the most difficult tasks that at first blush seem next to impossible. Every employee in the company dares to be both a team member and a leader.
Detecting Blind spots and Uncovering Financial Crimes with ThetaRay
How do you define ThetaRay?
ThetaRay is dedicated to helping financial organizations, detect and prevent financial cybercrime. The world is threatened by bad actors that launder money, traffic in human beings, finance terrorism and other malicious acts. We help to secure the world c. We do this with next generation AI-based big data analytics, which do this at scale and with unprecedented accuracy. And although generateing revenue is important, its not our only priority, We aim to detect the ‘unknown unknown” activities which threaten the world’s financial networks. We believe that technology can solve problems, but only in the service of humans.
Superior Finanical Cybercrime Prevention with Artificial Intuition What is the biggest difference between ThetaRay and its competitors?
Human intuition is one of the most powerful decision-making tools that human beings posess. It enables us to make decisions with a high degree of accuracy. Higher than even our conscious selves. Think of it this way; when you see someone walking over a hill and are trying to decide if you know them or not, you don’t measure the RGB color of their eyes or the precise distance between the tip of their nose to their chin. You look at the general relationships of various aspects of their body and then you decide if you know them or not. That’s what our solution, IntuitiveAI does.
The platform mimics human intuition, analyzing massive amounts of data, and discovering relationships between seemingly unrelated events. This enables banks to pinpoint activity that suggests money laundering, terrorist financing, human, and drug trafficking, and other financial crimes.
Our competitors can’t increase the accurate detection of malicious behavior or reduce the amount of false alerts because they lack this powerful solution.
Because of the team, our philosophy and technology ThetaRay is on a significant growth trajectory, with revenue doubling every year. We believe that we will be the industry leader in financial cybercrime prevention and a major player in anomalous behavior detection for other industries as well.
Dare to Lead and Drive towards your Dreams
What advice you would like to offer to the young leaders?
Follow your dreams. At ThetaRay, we call it “daring to lead”. To lead a company towards success, make sure that it has great technology, confirm that there is a market need, and hire great people to support and drive the effort. It’s not just about talent; you should build a team of individuals who improve with sheer efforts and help your company achieve the best.
