Alberto Danese

Alberto Danese

Leading Data and AI teams for real-world business impact.

Milan, Italy · Nexi
Bio · Professional Career · Education · Talks & Interviews · Lecturing & Teaching · Side projects & Miscellanea
LinkedIn Blog Kaggle
For talks, lectures or exchanges on Data and AI, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

Bio
Alberto Danese is a Data and AI leader with extensive experience in financial services and payments. He leads 4 international teams across Italy, Denmark and Germany, delivering data products, AI solutions and strategic insights that generate measurable business value for Nexi. With a background in Credit Information and 8 years in consulting for major banks and financial institutions, he has developed a strong understanding of the financial ecosystem.

A natural “bilingual” between business and technology, Alberto understands the language of strategy, economics and operations, while retaining a strong engineering DNA. This dual perspective enables him to align technical excellence with business value and to lead talented technical teams with clarity and purpose.

Main areas of activity

Professional Career
2019-present
Nexi logo
Head of Data Science & Advanced Analytics · Nexi · Milan, Italy

Alberto joined Nexi in 2019 to build the Data Science team from the ground up. This evolved into an organized corporate function that is currently made of 4 teams, beyond the "conventional" definition of Data Science:
  • Data Platform & Data Intelligence
  • Business Insights & Modeling
  • Innovation & Financial Crime
  • Business Intelligence & Analytics Engineering
The organization includes more than 30 professionals across data science, data engineering and analytics, split across Italy, Denmark and Germany.
2016 - 2019
Cerved logo
Senior Data Scientist · Cerved Group · Milan, Italy

Alberto worked in the Innovation and Data Sources area of one of the largest credit information and credit scoring providers in Italy.
In this experience, he developed a deep understanding of the data-provider business, from traditional Chamber of Commerce data to alternative data sources, working extensively on both paid and free data sources. He worked on several projects leveraging traditional SQL-based systems, as well as (then) innovative NoSQL technology.
2014 - 2016
EY logo
Manager · EY · Milan, Italy

Alberto joined EY after the acquisition of Between by EY itself.
He was part of the Data and Analytics team, leveraging his experience in banking and leading projects mostly focused on Fraud Prevention, Security and Anti‑Money Laundering.
2008 - 2014
Between logo
Senior Consultant · Between · Milan, Italy

First job as an IT consultant, working mostly for major Italian banks.
Alberto focused initially on IT Security and its implications at the organizational level, dedicating most of his efforts to IAM-related projects (Identity and Access Management).
Education
2015 - 2016
University of Milan-Bicocca logo
Università degli Studi di Milano‑Bicocca
Master in Business Intelligence & Big Data Analytics

Master's program in Business Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Data Mining, Project Management and Statistics.
Attended while working at EY, thanks to its executive format (9 months, on Fridays/Saturdays).
2005 - 2007
Politecnico di Milano logo
Politecnico di Milano
Master Degree in Computer Engineering
Grade: 110/110 cum laude


Thesis: Estimating camera rotation parameters from a single blurred image (in collaboration with the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory).
2002 - 2005
Politecnico di Milano logo
Politecnico di Milano
Bachelor Degree in Computer Engineering
Grade: 110/110 cum laude


Thesis: A new environment for schema support in the XQBE system (in collaboration with the DataBase Group).
Lecturing & Teaching
A selection of private lectures and educational activities on Data & AI.
Master - AI, Competencies and Change Management
Graduate School of Management, Politecnico di Milano · Feb 2026 · Online
4-hour lecture for 25 managers of a single company on AI adoption and key decisions.
EMBA - AI & Data-driven business transformation
Graduate School of Management, Politecnico di Milano · Jan 2026 (teaching since 2024) · Rome
Teaching a full day to Executive MBA students on what using AI & Data practically means in large corporations.
Teaching assistant on Data Science courses
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore · May 2025 (teaching since 2023) · Milan
Hands-on data science for final-year M.Sc. Economics students
AI adoption for Executives
Private company (NDA) · May 2024
Guest speaker at the annual meeting of the executive team (50+ people) of a large Italian company (400+M€ revenues) on AI adoption and challenges.
Mentoring on Natural Language Processing
Pi School · Dec 2021 to Feb 2022 · Online
Mentored two international students on an NLP application for patents, papers and grants.
Side projects & Miscellanea
Kaggle logo
Kaggle Competitions Grandmaster
Kaggle is the main platform for AI/ML competitions, acquired by Google in 2017, where sponsor companies reward algorithmic problem-solving skills with real-world prizes (more than 20M$ awarded over the years).
In 2018, Alberto was the first Italian to reach the top tier (Competition Grandmaster) and was ranked in the top 100 worldwide.
Substack logo
All About Data
Alberto writes regularly on his Substack blog (Italian & English) on Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Usually one article per month. Roughly 2,000 subscribers and up to 5,000 readers per article.
AI/ML GPU Bench screenshot
AI/ML GPU Bench
An open-source Python project to benchmark typical AI workloads (LLM inference and XGBoost) on local hardware. It provides a simple framework to share and compare results across machines, with hundreds of submitted benchmarks.
Kaggle and Practical AI Milan placeholder
Kaggle and Practical AI Milan meetup organizer
Since 2019, Alberto is co-organizer of the Milan meetup for Kaggle and Practical AI, where data scientists and AI practitioners meet and share their experiences. Usually one meetup per quarter in some cool Milanese venues. Most meetups are live streamed on the meetup Youtube channel since 2022.
Books logo
Books
Together with Stefano Gatti, Alberto wrote two books, both in Italian: "La Cultura del Dato" in 2022 and "Intelligenza Artificiale in 4D" in 2025.

This website is built with plain static HTML and CSS. If you're a nerd, you'll likely recognize the inspiration (and much of the code). All credits go to him.