Meet our team

Get to know the leaders at Beyond the Arc who help drive client success.

Last updated: January 2026

Team at a glance

Steven J. Ramirez

CEO

Steven J. Ramirez is the CEO of Beyond the Arc and leads client work at the intersection of Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy, customer experience, and AI innovation for financial services, fintech, technology, and utility companies.

20+ years as an industry thought leader in fintech, AI, and technology  • Fintech & Marketing Strategist   •   Leads Beyond the Arc’s AI innovation practice (AI Agents)  •  Former Time Warner executive  •  Former Silicon Valley spokesperson for AT&T  •  Startup advisor and mentor  •   BA + MBA, UC Berkeley / Haas

Featured in:

Linkedin

Beyond the Arc Blog

Finovate

Fintech Meetup

Finovate podcast

American Banker

Community Bank Podcast

What Steven leads at Beyond the Arc

  • GTM strategy and execution for banks and fintech.
  • AI innovation advisory & solution development: Helping teams apply AI, Agentic AI, and NLP to improve efficiency and decision-making.
  • Data-driven customer strategy + marketing: Strengthening customer experience, marketing, and operations.
  • Training initiatives in compliance, risk, bank operations, and AI deployment.

Highlights

  • Developed positioning, messaging, GTM, and thought leadership strategies to relaunch a Top 20 bank’s flagship commercial credit card program and spend management platform
  • For BAI (now Prosight), created training programs and webinars to educate bank, lender, and fintech teams on lending products, payments and money service businesses, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and AI.
  • Co-founded San Francisco/Silicon Valley Integration Gurus (SVIG), a professional association of merger integration executives from Bay Area companies including Cisco, Google, and Microsoft.
  • Created agentic AI solution to streamline the process of researching historical precedents and drafting new filings for the electric power industry.
  • Co-chair of Generative AI Applications Summit and speaker at 2026 Machine Learning Week.

Spotlight – Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc featured in…

Gavin James

Director of Creative Services

Gavin James is Director of Creative Services and a CX Strategy Consultant at Beyond the Arc. She leads B2B marketing (strategy, positioning, messaging, content, and ABM) to help financial services, fintech, and technology brands connect marketing to revenue. Her work includes developing AI-informed customer insights and personas, and crafting unique marketing and thought leadership content that increases buyer engagement, sales conversion, and customer lifetime value (LTV).

20+ years CX + B2B marketing   •  Marketing for Top 5 banks & Tech leaders    •   Former Info Design Manager + User Education Manager at Microsoft  • Society for Tech Comms award winner  •  Microsoft Press author

Featured in:

Linkedin Beyond the Arc Blog CustomerThink

What Gavin leads at Beyond the Arc

  • B2B marketing strategy: Insights-led, customer-focused product positioning, messaging, and content strategy.
  • Creative services: Content creation and design for integrated, multi-channel marketing and strategic initiatives.
  • Thought leadership: Content that builds trust and demand across the buyer journey, tailored for client segments and industry verticals.
  • Personas + journey maps: Research-backed tools that shape value propositions, CX strategy, and content.

Expertise

Highlights

  • B2B marketing for banks: Helped Top 5 and national banks increase qualified leads and revenue with multi-channel content for commercial payments, treasury management, embedded finance, and global trade finance.
  • Fintech marketing: Created thought leadership blogs, whitepapers and case studies that helped fintech clients accelerate sales conversion for AI-powered payments platforms, automated loan origination systems, and credit risk analytics.
  • Technology marketing: Increased market awareness and buyer demand for AI platforms, cybersecurity solutions, cloud infrastructure, IoT systems, and renewable IT.
  • Wealth management marketing: Helped wealth firms and financial advisors attract and retain high-net-worth clients with clear, engaging content to demystify complex solutions such as trust & fiduciary services and estate planning.

Jacqueline Espinoza

Consulting Practice Leader

Jacqueline Espinoza is a senior strategy consultant at Beyond the Arc, helping regulated industries move from strategy to execution. She leads generative AI initiatives for the electric power industry, designing and building LLM-powered prototypes and apps. She also creates marketing videos that translate complex capabilities into clear stories that drive alignment and go-to-market (GTM) progress.

20+ years in consulting and industry   •  Former Deloitte Sr. Manager   •  BA Pomona | MBA UC Berkeley

Featured in:

Linkedin

What Jacqueline leads at Beyond the Arc

  • Generative AI and Agentic AI prototypes & apps (use cases| POCs| adoption)
  • GTM storytelling and assets, including marketing videos

Expertise

  • AI app & prototype development
  • AI strategy and prioritization for regulated industries
  • Translating AI capabilities into clear value propositions and buyer-ready messaging
  • Stakeholder alignment and launch enablement for AI initiatives

Highlights

  • Principal Investigator: Led research and built an engineer-in-the-loop GenAI web app to accelerate regulatory precedent discovery and first-draft development for high-stakes submissions.
  • Developer: Built EPRI’s Relief Request Index (RRIndex), bundling the complete NRC relief request record (submittal, RAIs/correspondence, closing letters) to eliminate document-by-document ADAMS searching and speed regulatory drafting.
  • Built multiple AI apps that automated time-intensive workflows, improving speed, consistency, and accuracy.
  • Principal Investigator: Led development of an NLP dictionary for nuclear power to improve domain-language understanding for AI/NLP solutions.

Michelle Espinoza

Generative AI App Developer & Video + Visual Designer

Michelle Espinoza is a AI application developer and designer at Beyond the Arc. She builds AI-enabled tools and workflows and creates video, motion graphics, social assets, and landing pages. Her work helps clients in regulated industries, including fintech and electric power, communicate complex ideas clearly across digital channels.

10+ years marketing design + video production   •  AI app development aligned with governance, privacy, risk, and compliance requirements  • Top 5 bank campaigns + communications

What Michelle delivers at Beyond the Arc

  • Generative AI application development: prototyping and building AI-enabled tools and workflows.
  • Creative production for marketing and customer communications: graphics, landing pages, videos, and web-ready design.
  • Campaign-ready content that turns complex ideas into clear, engaging stories across channels.

Expertise

Highlights

  • Generative AI web application for regulatory compliance: Built an AI-assisted web application that helps engineers draft complex regulatory documents.
  • Regulatory research application with indexing and search: Developed an application that speeds up research by indexing and organizing large sets of data-rich documents.
  • Client testimonial video editing: Edited a client testimonial into web-ready and social-ready versions for the client’s website and social media channels.
  • In-app tutorial video production: Produced a step-by-step how-to tutorial video hosted inside an application to help users navigate the site.

Nina Katz

Banking Training Consultant

Nina Katz is a senior training consultant and writer at Beyond the Arc. She helps banks and financial services organizations design training programs that support strategic initiatives and improve performance.

25+ years in corporate learning for retail, commercial & international banking   •  12 years at Bank of America, including VP for Retail Training Program   •  MS in Organization Development

Featured in:

Linkedin Beyond the Arc Blog

What Nina delivers at Beyond the Arc

  • Training program strategy + build: designing and developing training that supports business initiatives (compliance & risk, AI governance, communications, customer service, adoption).
  • Bank communications enablement: helping teams improve how they communicate with customers through standards, training, and practical examples.
  • Workshop-based rollout support: service workshops and user training that accelerate adoption of new tools and ways of working.

Expertise

  • Corporate training and training management
  • Course development & instructional design
  • Strategic planning & process design
  • Customer communications
  • Internal communications

Highlights

  • For Top 5 banks, developed training for brand education and a treasury management platform; revised 1000’s of customer communications for retail and high net worth customers.
  • Designed a certification program to jump-start a new team-focused approach to sales across business lines.
  • Helped drive success of a new business unit with service workshops for providers and user training to accelerate adoption of new technology.
  • Supported rollout of a new brand strategy at a top bank by consulting on training for marketing and communications professionals worldwide.

Cynthia Jones

Utility Strategy & Analytics Consultant

Cynthia Jones is a leader in Beyond the Arc’s utilities practice, bringing deep utility-industry experience as both a senior leader and a “big six” management consultant—combining strategy, financial analysis, and real-world grid operations insight.

Strategic planning leader across 3 large electric & gas utilities   •  Led renewable generation investment cases    •  Top Electric distribution operations engineer  •  BS Electrical Engineering  •  MBA HR Management  •  Wharton Leadership Program

What Cynthia delivers at Beyond the Arc

  • Utility strategy: Corporate strategy paired with financial analysis and consensus-building to move projects forward.
  • Investment-grade business cases for generation and energy initiatives (pro formas, risk/return framing, decision analysis).
  • Operations-focused recommendations informed by hands-on utility industry experience (maintenance, design, planning, construction, grid ops, emergency response).

Expertise

  • Corporate strategy & planning (utilities)
  • Financial analysis, pro formas, investment cases
  • Decision analysis for risk-based strategy profiles
  • Electric distribution operations & grid reliability / emergency response
  • Industry consulting (energy, healthcare, wireless, aircraft manufacturing)

Highlights

  • Senior leader in strategic planning and analysis for three large electric and gas energy companies.
  • Led a financial analysis team to build business cases for large-scale renewable generation investments (solar/wind) ranging from 2–345 MW and ~$13M–$1.5B.
  • Developed a global energy investment strategy using decision analysis to assess risk-based strategy profiles.
  • Unique field-to-exec perspective from work as an electric distribution operations engineer (direct line of sight to customers, field + planning teams, and end-to-end distribution activities).