Steve Vaile has spent three decades in technology, financial services, and telecommunications, most of it in program governance and operational risk. He trained as an electrical engineer in the Royal Navy. He then spent more than a decade in causal and root-cause analysis for defense and telecommunications networks, at Groupe Bull, RiverSoft, and EMC’s SMARTS and Voyence businesses. In that work, he traced how a fault in one component affects the others. Organizations now need the same analysis for their cryptographic estates.
He is Director of Post-Quantum Cryptography and Resilience for banking and financial services at Applied Quantum. He advises institutions on migration governance, operational resilience, and the third-party and concentration risks that cryptographic dependencies create. He is also a director at Quantum Security Defence, which supports a community of more than 1,400 practitioners across industry, government, and defense.
With Marin Ivezic he co-wrote the Cryptographic Concentration Framework, published at ccframework.org, a method for measuring how far a single shared cryptographic dependency reaches beneath the vendor layer. The two also co-wrote the Applied Quantum CBOM Profile at cbomprofile.org, the open CycloneDX property taxonomy for cryptographic bills of materials. Both the Concentration Framework and the PQC Migration Framework, the eight-phase migration methodology Marin wrote, use it.
Earlier in his career he advised on Cambodia’s first national credit bureau, working with the International Monetary Fund and the National Bank of Cambodia. Since 2018 he has been a board director at Wizzwang, conducting technology and investment due diligence for deep technology companies across Europe.
He holds an executive MBA from Rome Business School, with executive programs in venture finance at Oxford’s Saïd Business School and in digital strategy at Yale School of Management.
At Quantum Academy, Vaile teaches the governance side of cryptographic transition. His material covers how a board reaches a decision, what a supervisor will ask for, and how to measure dependency risk.