OpenID Foundation Leadership

Executive Director

Gail Hodges

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Gail Hodges joined the OpenID Foundation as Executive Director in May 2021. She is also the Founder of the Future Identity Council, a global non-profit that seeks to empower citizens with mobile identity credentials that are private, secure, and easy to use.
The council is government-led and partners closely with the private sector to ensure that this “public good” reaches its full potential. Gail previously worked at Apple for 5 years, where she led Business Development for a range of new Identity and Payment services, setting up new ecosystems and business models to achieve scale. She led the government roll out of Core NFC, which allows Apple devices to read chip-based ID cards. She also led Latin American markets for Apple Pay, and developed the platform for domestic payment networks to join Apple Pay. Prior to joining Apple, Gail was SVP and Global Head of Digital Payments for HSBC Holdings based in London, and previously Head of HSBC’s Premier and Advance Card portfolios. Prior to HSBC, Gail ran the UK Centurion and Platform Card Portfolios, and was part of the Strategic Planning group at American Express. Gail holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. in Public Policy from Princeton University.
Counsel

Tom Smedinghoff

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Tom Smedinghoff
has been practicing technology law for over four decades, including as a partner in the global law firms of Baker & McKenzie LLP and Locke Lord LLP and now as a consultant. 

He is internationally recognized for his work in developing digital legal policy both in the U.S. and internationally, most notably regarding e-commerce and identity management.  As a member of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), he helped to negotiate the 2022 UNCITRAL Model Law on the Use and Cross Border Recognition of Identity Management and Trust Services, the 2005 United Nations Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts, and the 2001 UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures. A longstanding leader in the American Bar Association (ABA), Tom founded and chairs its Identity Management Legal Task Force (in the ABA Business Law Section) and previously served as Co-Chair of the ABA Cybersecurity Legal Task Force and Chair of the ABA Science & Technology Law Section. Tom has authored and co-authored numerous books and articles on e-commerce, identity management, privacy, and cybersecurity topics, including serving as editor and lead contributing author of the first book on Internet law titled ONLINE LAW: THE LEGAL GUIDE TO DOING BUSINESS ON THE INTERNET (Addison Wesley, 1996).

Operations Director

Mike Leszcz

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Mike Leszcz is the Operations Director at the OpenID Foundation where he is responsible for the Foundation’s operations working in close coordination with the board of directors and the Executive Director.

Mike was the part of the OpenID Foundation team that launched the award-winning certification program in 2015. He also works closely with global ecosystems adopting OpenID specifications and certification to operationalize these relationships. Prior, Mike was Program Manager at the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) as well as held senior strategic business development positions with leading organizations focused on data analytics and business intelligence solutions. Mike has a B.S. from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
Technical Director

Mark Haine

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Mark Haine is an engineer and entrepreneur who has focussed his career on building solutions that enable business and mitigate risk in financial services.

Through Considrd.Consulting Ltd. Mark and his team are providing strategic security consultancy to a range of clients. He has also taken on a leadership role in the OpenID Foundation as Co-Chair of the eKYC & Identity Assurance Working Group and co-author of OpenID Connect for Identity Assurance. Mark also contributes to other communities including the W3C and OpenAPI, serves as a board member of the Open Identity Exchange and is board advisor to two technology startups.
Mark was close to developments in Open Banking and has been directly involved in Open Banking UK as senior security architect, member of the standards team, and identity product owner. He has also helped a number of other organisations navigate the complexities of opening up access to their data and services via APIs. Mark holds a B.Eng. from the University of Southampton in Electronic Engineering. Mark’s goal is to help organisations succeed by influencing projects in a ways that improve outcomes for people.

Standards Specialist & Certification Director

Joseph Heenan

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Joseph Heenan is the CTO at FinTechLabs.io, a growing identity & security startup based at level39 (London).
Joseph is an active member/contributor to many OpenID Foundation working groups, including the FAPI group that defined the security profile used in the UK OpenBanking specifications and a member of the OpenID Foundation Certification Team. He led the team at FintechLabs through the development & successful deployment of the conformance suite for the UK OpenBanking security profile and assisted many of the largest UK (CMA9) banks with achieving compliance to the UK specification, and now has a focus on doing the same with the CIBA decoupled authentication standard. He’s a seasoned software engineer & architect with over 25 years’ experience, who started writing mobile apps before mobile apps existed and went on to co-found a successful mobile software development consultancy based in Glasgow (UK) in 2010. Joseph lives in Glasgow with his wife, they love traveling to Japan and between them, they’ve fostered over 100 cats for the Cats Protection charity.
Marketing Director

Elizabeth Garber

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Membership Director

Paul Briault

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PauI is a Cybersecurity veteran of over 30 years. 

He was responsible for Digital Identity Policy for the UK when he was in the UK Government’s Cabinet Office in the early 2000’s as well as holding key security advisory roles across public sector. He then went on to work in sales and senior leadership roles in enterprise companies such as HP, EMC (for RSA Security), Entrust and CA Technologies. Since 2017 he has run his own companies offering a range of advisory and delivery services to his clients. His core skills lie in business development and strategic revenue growth and more recently he has helped and advised startups and scale ups in the Cyber and AI space developing their go-to-market models. 

Certification Team

Marcus Almgren

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Marcus Almgren is an engineering manager and software developer at Signicat, one of the major providers of digital identity solutions in Europe.
He is a long-time professional within the domains of electronic identity, digital signature, identity assurance and KYC, with many years of experience working with authentication and authorization protocols.

Domingos Creado

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Domingos Creado is a identity and access management professional with 10 years acting as consultant and advisor roles.
He has more than 20 years on software development industry as software architect on different domains from logistics, telecom, manufacturing, intelligent cities, and financial.

Thomas Darimont

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Thomas Darimont is a digital identity consultant with ten years of experience in consulting and open-source.

He has over 20 years of experience in the software development industry, working as a software engineer and architect across different domains, including retail, automotive, telecom, manufacturing, finance, and insurance, with a focus on flexible and secure authentication and authorization systems.

Edmund Jay

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Edmund Jay is an experienced software developer with over 20 years experience in information security, digital rights management, and standards development.
He has been involved identity and privacy standards for over 10 years and is a contributor to the OpenID Connect, FAPI and dependent specifications. He was an early implementer of OpenID Connect and participated in interoperability tests that were critical for the initial OpenID conformance tests.

Alan Smillie

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Alan Smillie is a software developer at Emobix, a software consultancy in Europe with a focus on mobile. 

He has more than 30 years experience in many areas ranging from embedded systems to mobile application development.