Steve Benton

Founding Partner
Partner Alliance

Steve has an extensive history of exploration and travel. Born in Midwest America (Detroit), he spent the next 25 years of his life living in many urban and non-urban places throughout the U.S. - from the Midwest (Illinois, Michigan) to the South (North Carolina, Georgia, Texas), out West (northern California) and to the eastern seaboard (New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware) - and even spent 6 years growing up outside of the U.S. in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, St Thomas).

After studying European History and English Literature at a small liberal arts college, fueling an intense interest to learn about new cultures and to connect with people from all walks of life, Steve's professional career continued on where he left off. Taking extensive assignments throughout the world (Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan) and across the U.S. (New York, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois), he continued to build a hands-on, unique knowledge of cross-cultural networking for success.

Steve spent 21 highly accomplished years in the financial services vertical working for UBS, where he was an Executive Director of Information Technology. He has been in the I.T. field for nearly 30 years. Starting his career as a software engineer, Steve's responsibilities and successes evolved from development and deployment of front-office risk management and trading systems, to change program management, to department head of a 100+ strong global logistics team in data and content management, and finally as the global head of Knowledge Management.

Steve has worked in many logistics areas supporting various business units, building up an extensive knowledge in product and service development, sales and marketing, customer and financial services, particularly in the specialties of investment banking and prime brokerage. Developed throughout his career, he established an incredible diverse network of experts located all around the world. He has a history of developing and implementing innovative strategies of social and enterprise networking, interleaving judicious uses of the advances and convergences in technology to support them.

It is his hands-on experience in strategy development and change management, along with Steve's acumen in technology, networking, and leveraging diversity to attain cultural growth, which has crystallized into the evolving business strategy of wisdom networking, a label he created for his networking strategy for success, and which he describes more fully in the book he co-authored entitled "The Wisdom Network - An Eight Step Process for Identifying, Sharing, and Leveraging Individual Expertise" (American Management Association, June 2006).

Steve has spoken and lectured at such notable institutions as Institutional Investor’s Asset Management Forum, Kellogg School of Business, and Northwestern University’s Master’s Program in Organizational Learning and Change. He has also been an expert panel member and advisor for many different universities and non-profit enterprises.

Areas of Expertise:

Knowledge Management, Social and Organizational Networking, Social Media and Computing, Business Transformation, S.W.O.T. Research and Analysis, Change Management, Community Building and Facilitation, Information Technology, Software Engineering and Architecture, Technology Research and Analysis, Trends in Consumer Empowerment, Customer Relationship Management, Competitive Intelligence, Vendor Management, Partnering Strategies, Risk Management, Securities Pricing, Trade-Capture and Execution systems design and development.