Modern CISO Network: Board Book

With over 25 years of experience in the technology field, including more than a decade as CISO at various financial services organizations, Bala is currently the Global CISO at Tradeweb since 2019, a leading fixed-income trading company. Tradeweb, as a leading fixed-income trading platform, is constantly pushing electronification of fixed-income trading. Bala combines his experience with strong understanding of the business risks associated with the company’s technology-centric operations to create an effective and resilient security program. Bala reports to Tradeweb’s Chief Risk Officer, empowering him to steer the security program with an end-to-end risk-based approach. Before joining Tradeweb, Bala held CISO roles at ConvergEx Group and BlueMountain Capital Management. Prior to that, he served in various executive roles, including as a Senior Vice President of Information Security at Citi, where he and his team were responsible in information security of one of the largest electronic trading platforms. Serving on the advisory board for multiple vendors, Bala carefully selects companies that can benefit from his insights for driving innovation. He uses his expertise to help vendors more effectively develop and promote the right products for the market. In our current era of cloud-first thinking, Bala brings his valuable experience with cloud migrations to help companies adopt cloud technologies. He believes the future of the financial industry lies in the cloud, especially in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into platforms for smarter actions. Bala is passionate about giving back to, mentoring, and fostering the CISO community. He believes it’s important to enhance CISOs’ abilities to communicate security risks from a business perspective and address the prevailing gap in security skills and resources. He supports these causes in his role as a CISO Governing Body Member for Evanta, a Gartner company that brings together C-level executives to share ideas/strategies and solve critical leadership challenges. As a member of the Cyber Committees of industry organizations, Bala contributes to the creation of security rules by providing valuable feedback to global regulatory bodies. His proactive involvement in regulatory processes helps shape secure business landscapes.