The Team

Built by people who’ve done the work

Section 2 brings together financial crime specialists from across banking,
intelligence, law enforcement, AML technology, and academic research.  Practitioners who have operated inside the systems they’re now building to replace.

Founder and CEO

Debra Geister, Founder and CEO of Section 2
Debra Geister

Section 2 exists because of a number that has haunted Debra for most of her career: less than 1%. After 25 years inside the financial crime industry, Debra watched a $200B compliance regime built around anomaly detection and transaction monitoring catch less than one percent of illicit activity — while the people behind that activity kept operating, and the victims of their work kept paying the cost.

Her path to a different answer started in data: a decade at LexisNexis Risk Solutions leading product strategy for AML and fraud, followed by senior roles at NICE Actimize, Socure, Treliant, and Matrix-IFS. But the thesis crystallized at MetaBank, where as SVP she led the combined Fraud and BSA unit through a cease-and-desist order to satisfactory status. Her team’s false-positive rate on Actimize sat at 94%, and investigators were surfacing human trafficking cases the alerts had only tangentially flagged. Drawing on her data background, Debra led the team to a more precise detection approach. In 90 days, it produced 750 alerts of which 612 were confirmed cases resulting in false positives of 18%.

The takeaway was bigger than one bank. Transaction monitoring sees noise; what she had built saw behavior — the financial DNA of a specific kind of criminal. Over the next 12 years, in collaboration with the intelligence community and law enforcement, Debra developed that insight into Hybrid Threat FinanceTM: a patent-pending methodology that turns illicit financial behavior into intelligence on the actors behind it.

Section 2 is the operational expression of that framework, building data-driven products that let financial institutions, law enforcement, and government partners move from chasing alerts to identifying the threat actors.

Decades of operational experience in the rooms where financial crime is actually fought

Our team includes former senior leaders from Tier-1 banks, federal law enforcement, U.S. military intelligence, AML and identity technology providers, and the regulatory community. Several members have led financial intelligence units through cease-and-desist remediation. Others have built the AML and fraud products used by the world’s largest financial institutions. Still others have run counter-threat-finance operations against transnational criminal networks in the field.

We’ve come together with a common mission: to close the gap that legacy transaction monitoring can’t — finding the illicit finance activity that traditional systems are structurally built to miss. We’ve seen this problem from every angle: as regulators, as operators, as investigators, and as the people who built the tools the industry relies on today. That’s why we didn’t set out to build another monitoring system. We built Section 2 to target the threats already moving undetected through the financial system.

Corporate

Brigitte Engle, Corporate team, Section 2
Brigitte Engle
Rah Chalmers, Corporate team, Section 2
Rah Chalmers
Robin Hobday, Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Section 2
Robin Hobday
Pete Van de Voorde, Corporate team, Section 2
Pete Van de Voorde

Product and Engineering

Tim Rollins, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Tim Rollins
Shastri Vishnuvajhala, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Shastri Vishnuvajhala
Ganesh Kumar, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Ganesh Kumar
Matt Pickard, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Matt Pickard
Kevin Pamilagas, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Kevin Pamilagas
Rob Groome, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Rob Groome
Zac Jones, Product and Engineering, Section 2
Zac Jones

Special Investigation Unit

Robert Bacon, Special Investigation Unit, Section 2
Robert Bacon
Dr. Donna J. Broussard, Special Investigation Unit, Section 2
Dr. Donna J. Broussard
Maria Carillo, Special Investigation Unit, Section 2
Maria Carillo

Training and Tradecraft

Claudia Haberland, Training and Tradecraft, Section 2
Claudia Haberland
Suzanne Lynch, Training and Tradecraft, Section 2
Suzanne Lynch