Illinois remains one of the country’s most important financial hubs, with institutions spanning global custody and wealth management, derivatives markets, mortgage lending, commercial banking, and broader financial infrastructure. The cybersecurity leaders in this feature reflect that range. Their backgrounds cover business-unit security, security architecture, threat management, regulatory alignment, cloud transformation, enterprise risk governance, and the building of mature programs inside organizations where trust, resilience, and operational continuity are central to the business.
Darryl D. Dozier — SVP | BU CISO, Northern Trust Corporation
Darryl D. Dozier is senior vice president and business unit CISO at Northern Trust, where he brings a background rooted in business information security, IT risk, and line-of-business security leadership. His profile points to a practitioner who understands how security decisions intersect with application development, SDLC risk, compliance obligations, and business investment priorities, which is especially important inside a major financial institution. Before joining Northern Trust in 2025, he held multiple business information security roles at Bank of America and earlier worked in IT risk management at U.S. Bank and information security risk management at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. That progression gives him a strong mix of banking, risk, and business-facing security experience.
Darren Warden — Executive Director, Chief Security Architect, CME Group
Darren Warden serves as executive director and chief security architect at CME Group, where his role extends across enterprise security architecture, cyber risk governance, secure-by-design transformation, cloud security, identity and data protection, application security, and third-party assurance. His profile describes him as operating as a de facto deputy CISO, representing security leadership in board discussions, regulatory examinations, and firm-wide risk committees, which speaks to the level of trust and influence he holds inside one of the world’s most important financial market operators. Before CME Group, he spent nearly a decade at TransUnion in senior security architecture, compliance, and technology risk roles, where he worked on secure SDLC integration, PCI- and SOX-aligned controls, threat management, and enterprise infrastructure hardening. His background makes him especially notable in a sector where market resilience and regulatory scrutiny go hand in hand.
Darin Hurd — CISO, Rate
Darin Hurd is chief information security officer at Rate, where he leads cybersecurity for one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the United States. His background stands out for its depth across both security leadership and broader technology and business transformation, including risk management, board engagement, M&A due diligence, cloud-based security program building, and executive oversight through rapid growth periods. Before joining Rate in 2018, he served as interim CISO at Safelite and held senior IT leadership responsibilities at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, where information security was part of his remit alongside governance, strategy, planning, and vendor management. Earlier consulting and architecture work also gave him experience across financial services and enterprise technology transformation, which helps explain the broad, executive-level lens he brings to security leadership.
Dimitri Gavriilopoulos — VP, Head of Security Engineering & Threat Management, Wintrust Financial Corporation
Dimitri Gavriilopoulos is vice president and head of security engineering and threat management at Wintrust Financial Corporation, where he oversees application security, vulnerability management, offensive security, security engineering, and network security. His profile reflects a technically grounded leader with a career that has moved through threat intelligence, consulting, security operations, and enterprise security metrics before arriving in a senior financial-services security role. Prior to Wintrust, he held leadership roles at KPMG and JLL, including work on security operations offerings, attack surface management, vulnerability management, and enterprise security metrics engineering. Earlier roles at TransUnion, Trustwave, Secureworks, and Discover helped build a foundation in cyber threat analysis, consulting, and operational security, giving him a broad view of how security engineering and threat management programs need to function in practice.
James Maxwell — CISO, ABOC
James Maxwell is chief information security officer at ABOC, where he oversees cyber risk management for a commercial bank with traditional assets nearing $1 billion and trust assets exceeding $14 billion. His profile emphasizes long experience in security strategy, program oversight, technical architecture, standards, controls, procedures, and guidelines across systems, platforms, applications, networks, cloud technologies, and hosted environments. That breadth is especially relevant in banking, where cybersecurity leadership must sit close to both regulatory requirements and day-to-day business operations. Maxwell also brings deep familiarity with banking-specific obligations including BSA, AML, OFAC, KYC, GLBA, privacy, deposit and lending regulations, and broader consumer protection requirements.
Maxwell’s long tenure at ABOC also stands out. He has been with the organization for more than two decades, progressing from information security project manager to information security officer and vice president before taking on the CISO role in 2018. Across those roles, he developed the bank’s IT security program, built out a cybersecurity team and architecture, and helped mature a program designed to reduce risk while meeting management and regulatory expectations. That combination of institutional knowledge, program-building experience, and banking compliance depth makes him a strong addition to this Illinois financial services slate.
Security leadership across Illinois finance
Illinois financial institutions rely on cybersecurity leaders who can do more than defend systems. They need executives and senior operators who can translate risk into business decisions, work across regulators and internal stakeholders, and build programs that scale with complex financial operations. The leaders in this feature reflect that mix of architecture, governance, business alignment, and operational depth that continues to shape cybersecurity across the state’s financial services sector.
Explore more profiles of the leaders shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our CISOs to Watch collection.