We are thrilled to announce two Ekata team members were recently honored with awards for their contributions to Ekata’s engineering team; specifically the areas of digital fraud prevention, identity verification and risk assessment. Varun Kumar has been named the gold winner in the “Executive of the Year | Artificial Intelligence” category at the IT World Awards and Jeff Wartes has secured bronze in the “Technical Professional of the Year ” category at the Stevies’ American Business Awards.
The prestigious IT World Awards honor information technology vendors with advanced, ground-breaking products, solutions and services that are helping set the bar for others in all areas of IT. Meanwhile, the Stevies’ American Business Awards honors the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and working professionals worldwide.
The honors are well-deserved. Varun’s leadership of the engineering and data science team, and his contribution to the global expansion of our North American machine learning (ML) model for digital fraud prevention solutions and identity insights software stood out to judges. Relying on his business acumen and technical knowledge, Varun deftly leads his team and provides them with the right infrastructure and tools to increase product velocity.
“With high emotional intelligence, empathy and humility, Varun is always thinking about his team’s learning and growth,” said Beth Shulkin, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Ekata. “Every day he leads by example, encouraging his people to go above and beyond in meeting every challenge and driving innovation.”
Jeff is instrumental in the design, architecture, and development of several of the components of Ekata’s core system. He has put several standards and practices into place and has been a vital partner in growing the worldwide Ekata engineering team.
“Jeff had been a key person in the success of Ekata,” said one of the Stevies’ judges. “He not only led the team to build a groundbreaking, innovative product, but also provided solutions that can be used as a blueprint in the tech industry to solve similar problems. Jeff is a great technical mind who has impacted the industry and the organization he has led.”
