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Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CFP®, CIPM, FDP leads CAIA Association’s global thought leadership and content development agenda, content marketing efforts, and industry events. He also oversees strategy for CAIA’s 20 chapters across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. Previously, Aaron founded UniFi by CAIA™, an online platform dedicated to educating the private wealth management industry on alternative investments. He has also sat in various other content development and educational programming roles at CAIA.

Aaron is a frequent speaker and writer on various topics of alternative investments and his work has been published in CAIA’s educational programs, numerous academic journals, books, and industry publications. Aaron’s industry experience lies in private wealth management, where he oversaw asset allocation, portfolio construction, and manager research efforts for an RIA focused on serving high-net-worth individuals and institutional retirement plans.

He earned a B.S. with distinction in Finance and a Master of Finance from Penn State University. He holds the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM), and Financial Data Professional (FDP) designations, and is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™. He is a Past President of CFA Society Columbus and serves as a board director and Programs Chair for CFA Society Philadelphia. Aaron is an adjunct professor and serves on multiple advisory boards for Penn State University.

Mr. Lerit is the Head of Portfolio Risk for Washington Crossing Advisors. He collaborates with advisors to help design and explain portfolio solutions that meet specific needs of private client, high net worth, and institutional investors for equity, fixed income, and multi-asset portfolios.

Masao Matsuda has over three decades of experience in the global financial services industry. He has acted as CEO of a US broker-dealer and CEO/CIO of investment management firms. Throughout his career, he has specialized in asset allocation, alternative and traditional investments, and in financial risk management. He has written papers that appeared in various CAIA publications, as well as in GARP’s Risk Intelligence. He is experienced as a corporate director for operating and holding companies, and as a fund director for offshore investment vehicles. He is a Partner at Alpha Governance Partners. Prior to founding Crossgates Investment and Risk Management, Masao spent 18 years with the Nikko group of companies of Japan. For the last seven years of his career at Nikko, he served as President/CEO of various Nikko entities in the US. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations from Claremont Graduate University. He holds CAIA and FRM designations.

Kristen Walters is a recognized Chief Risk Officer (CRO) and leader in the financial services sector across both buy-side firms (asset managers, hedge funds and asset owners) and large trading and commercial banks with breadth and depth in public and private markets.

She is currently Senior Advisor, Institutional Investor Risk at the Global Association of Risk Professionals, and a Lecturer at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. Previously, she was the first stand-alone CRO of Canadian Pension Plan Investments, the world’s 6th largest pension fund, where she enhanced governance, controls, transparency, and board reporting. Prior to CPP Investments, Kristen was the first stand-alone CRO of Natixis Investment Managers (with $1.4 trillion in AUM and ~25 global asset management subsidiaries) where she introduced risk oversight and built a supporting team “de novo” during COVID.

Prior roles included 11 years at BlackRock working directly for the CRO and founding partner to evolve BlackRock’s investment and enterprise risk frameworks, systems, analytics, and reporting. Kristen also worked for Goldman Sachs leading “firm-wide” market risk and provided daily analysis across the trading platform to senior management during the 2008 financial crisis. Earlier in her career she held risk roles at PIMCO, Barclays Capital and KPMG. She started her career in Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston during the 1990s banking crisis. Ms. Walters holds a BBA in Accounting with honors from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MBA with Distinction from Babson College, Wellesley, MA).