Customized Strategies for Your Unique Needs

Amber D. Miller

Amber D. Miller is President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She oversees the $13 billion charitable foundation, which invests in creative thinkers and problem solvers in more than 1,000 grantee organizations working to ensure meaningful opportunities to thrive for people, communities, and the planet. She leads the foundation in collaborating with partners to address our toughest problems – from the existential threat of climate change to the future of our democratic, economic, and educational systems.

Before joining the foundation, Amber served as dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, the largest school at USC, where she was responsible for managing a multidisciplinary institution with nearly 2,000 faculty and staff. In this role, she oversaw over 100 departments, programs, institutes, and centers ranging from art history to economics to environmental and physical sciences. During her tenure, Amber launched several signature initiatives including Public Exchange, a new way to bring academic expertise into partnership with civic and business leaders to tackle complex societal challenges such as climate and health; and the Center for the Political Future, which aims to create a healthier, more robust, and more bipartisan dialogue. She also created innovative training and mentoring programs to support and increase the leadership pipeline for women and people of color at all levels.

Previously, she served as the inaugural dean of science at Columbia University, where she enhanced connections across science, engineering, medicine, and other specialties. Amber’s academic research has focused primarily on experimental cosmology.

Amber’s honors and awards include a National Science Foundation Career Award and an Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, and a Hubble Fellowship. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a board member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

A California native, Amber received her B.A. in astronomy and physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University.

Pierre P. Habis

With more than 30 years of consumer banking experience, Pierre P. Habis has been anything but a traditional banker in the financial industry. Throughout his career, Mr. Habis has been focused on the evolution of banking in the United States by leveraging technology, changing consumer behaviors, and changing economic times to create better ways to serve. He was one of the early pioneers assigned to teams in the early 1990s to help build out supermarket banking and bank-by-mail as distribution channels with better efficiencies. In the early 2000s, he helped build an alternative bank model leveraging technology and a growing online banking consumer segment to create one of the largest savings banks.

In February 2017 Mr. Habis’s vision to reimagine the way people save by creating a bank that seamlessly harnessed the power, efficiency, and convenience of technology-based banking by building PurePoint Financial, a mobile-first digital savings bank with the simplicity of opening an account via a smartphone within five min. As the founder and President, he led a team that created a revolutionary front end and the first of its kind to help drive the five-minute account opening while creating an unprecedented customer experience. PurePoint Financial was later acquired by US Bank.

In 2020 Mr. Habis joined Santander Bank. As the Chief Consumer and Digital Transformation Officer he was tasked to lead the transformation of Santander in the US from a physical regional bank to becoming a mobile-first national digital bank working with US and Madrid-based technology teams. Openbank, the named digital bank, will be introduced to the United States in 2024.

Mr. Habis currently serves on the Board of Advisors for Sky Systems.AI, a cybersecurity software firm, and the Board of Councilors at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. He has been a frequent speaker in the industry including Money 2020, American Banker/Digital Banking, and Retail International Banker (Europe’s version of American Banker). Also, a former board member of the Consumer Bankers Association, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, and trustee at the California Science Center.

Mr. Habis lives in Los Angeles married to Rubina for 24 years with their two children, Joseph 20 and Angelina 15.

Mr. Habis earned his B.A. in economics from the University of Southern California and his MBA in finance from Chapman University.