Dr. Dan Schutzer

Senior VP System Architecture

Dr. Dan Schutzer is a globally respected authority on security, fraud, cybercrime, resilience, cyber warfare, and financial services technology, with a career spanning banking, defense, intelligence, standards bodies, and large-scale institutional innovation.

He has provided leadership and original thinking on the application of advanced technology to business, defense, and intelligence, bringing to fruition numerous influential innovations and products. Dr. Schutzer is the holder of multiple patents, the author of six books and hundreds of articles, and a frequent lecturer. His most recent book, Becoming Resilient: Staying Connected Under Adversity, was published in 2023.

Dr. Schutzer founded and served as President of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), where he led collaborative research and development initiatives across the financial services industry. Under his leadership, FSTC merged with the Financial Services Roundtable and the Bank Policy Institute (BPI), shaping industry-wide approaches to security, risk, and emerging technology. He has also served on numerous boards and standards organizations, including ANSI X9, contributing directly to the standards frameworks used throughout global financial services.

For more than twenty years, Dr. Schutzer was a Director and Senior Vice President at Citibank, where he developed and deployed technologies that kept Citi at the forefront of global banking. His work in e-banking, trading systems, risk management, advanced technology, payments, and security frequently established practices later adopted across the industry. During this period, he authored Application of Emerging Technologies in Business, a foundational work on translating technological innovation into business value.

Dr. Schutzer also served as Technical Director of U.S. Naval Intelligence, following his role as the first Technical Director of Navy Command, Control, and Communications. In these roles, he was responsible for advanced systems critical to national security. Earlier in his career at Bell Laboratories, he supervised the development of complex signal-processing systems for defense applications, including technologies used to discriminate between real warheads and decoys for the first Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system.

He has taught at Syracuse University, George Washington University, and Cooper Union.

At Aligned Trust, Dr. Schutzer brings this lifetime of experience to the architecture of a universal, external trust layer for digital interactions — with particular emphasis on regulatory alignment, institutional adoption, resilience under adversarial conditions, and the safe integration of new trust models into existing financial systems.

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