Edgar Osuna, Ph.D.

Edgar is a founding partner of Continental Risk Advisors and leads the firm's quantitative risk and analytics practice. He works with banks, lenders, payments platforms, and insurers on the work that lives where the math meets the regulator — model risk management, BSA/AML programs, fraud risk, and the analytics functions that sit inside the second line of defense.

His career spans twenty-five years across the United States, Switzerland, and Latin America. At Mercantil Banco in Caracas, he co-led the creation of the Global Risk Management Function and supervised more than forty risk models — PD, LGD, EAD, economic capital, collections, stress testing — across multiple jurisdictions and business lines. In 2004, his research on US real estate historical data flagged a speculative bubble; the limits he recommended to the US subsidiary's board materially reduced losses when the crisis arrived two years later.

He led Mercantil Bank Schweiz in Zürich as Risk Manager, reporting to the Group CRO and to the Bank's Chairman of the Board. In Miami, he served as SVP Risk Analytics Manager and as SVP BSA Project Manager — rebuilding the BSA department to 80+ FTEs and authoring a multi-tiered action plan that satisfied regulators on-time, on-scope, and on-budget.

Most recently, as Chief Data & Analytics Officer at iuvity, Edgar designed the IT and ML architecture for a real-time anti-fraud platform handling 3.5 billion transactions a year for 15 million customers, recognized with the 2021 Graphie Award for AI in fraud detection. He serves on the board of the Florida International Bankers Association as Chairman of the Innovation Committee.

Edgar holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Engineering, Summa Cum Laude, from Universidad Simón Bolívar. His MIT work on Support Vector Machines received the IEEE Longuet-Higgins Prize for fundamental research contribution.

• Model Validation
• AML & Sanctions
• Fraud Risk