SPAC's (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) have moved from speculative and potentially overhyped financial products to a smart mainstream investment approach to access the public capital market in the USA, especially for high tech companies. This year alone, 500+ SPAC's have raised more than $140 billion in capital so far. This lecture will offer insights and perspectives from the CFO of a SPAC and why he considers SPAC's as a smart instrument to take high growth, global companies public.

Rajeev Nair is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of McLaren Technology Acquisition Corp, a SPAC focused on companies in FinTech, AI and Financial Services sector, globally. In the past, he worked in the CFO’s role at UST Global and provided strategic direction to the management team, building UST Global to over $1 billion+ in valuation and leading the company’s technology footprint expansion with investments in AI, Analytics and Digital companies. Mr. Nair has also led the Predictive Modeling and AI team for CreditOne Bank, a large credit card issuer in the USA with 16 million accounts. He formulated their enterprise level AI/ML strategy and created the AI/ML roadmap for the company. In addition to his corporate roles, Mr. Nair has advised many CEOs and large fortune 500 companies and has established close relationships with leading private equity and venture capital firms, family offices and marque investors. He was a consultant to GE Capital, Prudential Investment Management and other Fortune 500 companies, focusing on Finance/Risk Management and Technology. Recently he served as an advisor to Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, a think tank created by the US Government, New York City and Harvard/MIT/Columbia to apply AI/ML technologies to solve business problems in Finance and Healthcare. Mr. Nair earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and completed his executive education from MIT on AI for Business Strategy. He also has a post-graduate diploma in Management from IIM Bangalore and Bachelor of Technology (Hons) from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.