Ms. Rugg is the Global Head of Insurance for R3 and leads the company's Insurance strategy to drive business growth. She is responsible for the strategic design, development and commercialization across the ecosystem of blockchain innovation within the Insurance Industry.

In 2017, she launched the Center of Excellence for Insurers and Reinsurers in partnership with ACORD which is redefining the foundations of insurance by harnessing the power of collaborative networks, through the deployment of DLT within the financial services industry. 

Since then Corda, R3's blockchain platform has been the platform of choice for the insurance industry. Corda integrates and secures the entire stream of disparate data sources, while simultaneously ensuring transparency across an interconnected network of clients, brokers, insurers and other third parties.

Prior to R3 Ms. Rugg worked for Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan where she gained extensive experience in financial services covering a broad range of institutions including; insurance, hedge funds, banks and asset managers. Ms. Rugg started her career in Technology at Lehman Brothers, experiencing first-hand the inefficiencies in the legacy infrastructure which she is now working to solve. She has a double major in Computer Science and Finance.

Much of the groundwork on which the Bitcoin blockchain and all the other blockchain concepts that have come after have been based on the foundational principles of Stuart Haber and his colleague W. Scott Stornetta’s work in 1991.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Haber has made significant contributions to the field of cryptography, distributed computing, and blockchain technology. He is the co-inventor of a number of Surety patents. Over the course of his career, Dr. Haber has lectured and published a number of scientific journals and articles on both theoretical and practical aspects of cryptography and distributed computing. He also contributed research materials in the field of electrical engineering.

Together with Stornetta, he has co-authored a number of important publications in the field of cryptography, some of which include: “How to Time-Stamp Document”, “Secure Names for Bit-Strings”, and “Improving the Efficiency and Reliability of Digital Time-Stamping” just to mention a few. Dr. Haber has also published research materials on the theory of computing, algorithms, and computer security.

Several aspects of the Bitcoin blockchain architecture are based on Dr. Haber’s work. The third, fourth, and fifth entries in the bibliography of the Bitcoin whitepaper are references to Dr. Haber’s work in cryptographic time-stamp protocols. From 2004 to 2011, Dr. Haber served as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Dr. Haber’s Erdös number is 2. Dr. Haber holds both M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.

Mr. Leston has extensive experience in technology and its applications in financial services and healthcare.  He formed Castlestone Advisors to provider the healthcare industry with information technology solutions, largely based on developments from the financial industry.   He has developed products for healthcare companies, including Johnson & Johnson, United Healthcare, Rite Aid, Walgreen’s and for health insurers, including MetLife and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Mr. Leston conceived and implemented an antifraud project with National Government Services for the Medicare Durable Medical Equipment program, which was completed in 100 days.  He has testified in front of the Delaware Joint Finance Committee, the Illinois State Senate Medicaid Reform Committee on technologies to prevent fraud and abuse, to the New Jersey State Senate Oversight Committee on fraud in Managed Medicaid, and consulted to members of Congress and the Illinois Healthcare Fraud Elimination Task Force spoken on the subject at the National Healthcare Antifraud Association, the Managed Medicaid Forum and the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health.  He has authored papers on prescription drug abuse and identity theft in healthcare, and been interviewed by Inc. Magazine on healthcare identity theft.  He is the driving force behind HR 6690 ‘Fighting Fraud and Protecting Seniors Care Act of 2018’, which passed the House of Representatives in September 2018.

In the early 1990’s Mr. Leston led the first implementation of pattern recognition systems to detect healthcare claims fraud, based on technology used in the credit card industry.   

Mr. Leston worked as an analyst and banker and investor in health care information systems and services companies, completing corporate finance, strategic and merger & acquisition assignments for software, medical delivery and services companies, including HBO & Company (now McKesson), Physicians Computer Network (now WebMD), Shared Medical Systems (purchased by Siemens), Mecon & Company (purchased by General Electric) and Express Scripts and Medco.  He has served on Boards of Directors of several early-stage companies, two of which were purchased by public companies. 

Prior to working on Wall Street, Mr. Leston was a principal in a technology and operations consulting firm specializing in automation of the financial services industry.  That firm was acquired by Ernst & Whinney (now Ernst & Young) in 1989, where Mr. Leston began developing solutions for the health first industry based on financial services practices.  He has authored articles on the use of information technology as a marketing tool.  Mr. Leston began his career with the IBM Corporation.

Mr. Haeberli has been on the cutting edge of technology innovation for 47 years. His early career began at Xerox PARC where he worked directly with Jim Clark, founder of SGI. Between 1982 and 1995, Mr. Haeberli worked for Apple where he was one of the founders of the Macintosh division (and also one of the early employees who signed the die for the inside of the Macintosh 128K), working on the Memory Manager and co-authoring MacTerminal. Towards the end of his tenure at Apple, Mr. Haeberli Directed an e-commerce pilot which pioneered selling software and collecting revenue electronically over the web, successfully integrating technology and business processes to prove viability and generate buy-in from senior management. He also architected, implemented, and operated a highly available, scalable, and reliable web server architecture to support the e-commerce pilot—which was the early prototype of the iTunes & the Apple Store.

Between 1996 and 2004, Mr. Haeberli held Directorship, CTO and Managing Director positions at Netscape, Oversea Systems and Marconi, respectively. Since the year 2000, Mr. Haeberli has acted as a specialist technology consultant and expert witness, working for Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and most recently, his own consultancy—Haeberli Associates.

Mr. Haeberli holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Science Studies from Charter Oak State College, and has attended graduate courses at numerous prestigious institutions including Caltech, MIT & Berkeley.