Donal Carville, CEO

Donal has nearly twenty years’ experience in corporate and investment banking. From 2005 Donal was in Mizuho’s proprietary area, where he helped establish, build and run a business focused on longevity.

Throughout his banking career, Donal fostered his love of data using it to design oblique data harvesting methods, which, when coupled with pattern-matching research, led to many non-typical strategies, extending from origination, to risk, active management & systems design. That dataphilia was the genesis of Circadian.

Prior to Mizuho, Donal spent more than a decade at Citigroup. At the time of his leaving he was an MD and member of the Senior Management Team within its Capital Structuring group.

Donal holds a master’s degree in Engineering, Economics & Management from Oxford University. Amongst other outside interests Donal also holds a directorship in a medical research company.

Stefano Salvi, Lead Tech

Stefano has over 25 years’ experience in delivering systems having to deal with high volumes of data. He has implemented solutions for challenges faced by large companies in the mining, health, entertainment, oil, and financial industries.  Stefano's main interests are mathematics, computer science, human behaviour, and languages.

In his spare time Stef likes to keep himself entertained with machine learning and AI, cryptocurrencies, and trying to learn Japanese.

Stefano has a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics, BSc (Hons) in Psychology, MSc in mathematics, and Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF).

Keith MacDonald, Chairman

Keith has over 25 years of international experience in banking, accountancy and corporate finance. He started his career with one of the major accounting firms and subsequently held senior roles with Citigroup and Lloyds Banking Group up to 2013. Since then he has been engaged in a diverse range of consulting and directorship activities ranging across a broad spectrum of industries including public companies listed in NY, London and Dublin.

Having successfully led businesses through periods of complexity, change and challenge, Keith's interests don't rest solely with large corporates.

Keith's angel investing interests tend toward the technical & science-based spheres, and most notably include Ziylo, and NS Science. Ziylo was sold to Novo Nordisk in 2018 for a sum that could exceed $800 million.

In the public sphere, for more than 10 years Keith was chairperson of a high profile Irish Government-sponsored financial services sector grouping encompassing multiple (private and public) stakeholders.

Matt Sheridan, Brains

Matt joined Mizuho International in May 2005 where he also helped establish, build and run the life settlements and longevity business. His role was primarily to design and build policy pricing models, help design the infrastructure that enabled life settlements to be booked and managed as a tradable security within the bank, and to actively manage the risks of the book. At its peak, that business managed well in excess of a billion dollars of risk.

Prior to joining Mizuho, Matt worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland (formerly Natwest Markets / Greenwich Natwest) for over ten years, largely in Proprietary Credit Trading but also in Structured Solutions, Capital Structure Trading and Risk Management. He is FSA registered and has a degree in Business Information Technology from Kingston University.

Cliff Jackson, Tech

Cliff is a polyglot who enjoys implementing technology to solve difficult problems whether they are driven by data volume, complexity of processing and calculation, or user experience.

Cliff has 22 years' experience in delivering systems in the banking environment, including Risk Management (Market Risk, Counterparty Credit Risk), Front Office (Trade Capture, Pricing, Risk), or IPV (Product Control).

Languages include VB, VBA, C, C++, C#, Java, TSQL (Sybase and SQL Server), MongoDB, Excel Addins (C++, C#), Hibernate, NHibernate, WinForms, WPF, JBoss, JSP/Servlets, OS's (Windows and Linux)

In his free time Cliff likes to play with Scala, Algo Trading (Predictive Signals), Python.

Barry Brennan, Funds

Barry is a corporate financier with over 20 years' international experience at Citigroup in London and Rabobank International. Starting life as a derivative lawyer at Citibank, Barry moved into the Corporate Finance arena first at Citibank, then as Head of Structured Finance at Rabobank in Ireland and finally as Head of a Financial Innovation Team of 15 professionals across 5 countries as European Head of Client Solutions at Rabobank. Providing new solutions based on a client-focused approach across complex legal, tax, accounting, regulatory and credit situations, Barry and his team executed notable transactions across most of Europe with corporate as well as financial clients.

Barry is a Graduate of Law from Trinity College, Dublin and was admitted to the bar of England and Wales as well as the New York State Bar.

Sam Berwick, Business

Sam worked in the City of London for almost thirty years and is the former Chief Executive Officer of Mizuho International plc, the securities arm of Mizuho Financial Group.

More recently, he has dedicated much of his time towards assisting third sector organisations in becoming more effective in alleviating disadvantage through encouraging and implementing sustainable change in communities throughout England.

Currently, he is a Trustee Director of the Inspiration Trust MAT, a Trustee of the Kensington and Chelsea based Campden Charities, and a Trustee Director of The Power to Change. He has a wife and four children.