Not every security executive on this list carries the CISO title, and that is the point. Miami’s security leadership includes a law enforcement commander who has spent 39 years inside the same agency, a fintech executive who launched a debit card program for unbanked customers back in 1998, and a corporate cybersecurity leader who once ran a 16-employee dry cleaning business. The titles vary. The underlying work, protecting complex organizations across finance, retail, manufacturing, and public safety, does not.
Victor Campos – CISO, JM Family Enterprises
Victor Campos moved through IT leadership roles at an equipment rental company, an energy services firm, and an aviation technology provider before becoming CISO of JM Family Enterprises in January 2020. He started as an IT Manager at Neff Rental in 2003, then spent over six years as Director of Information Systems at SMF Energy Corporation before taking the same title at LiveTV in Melbourne, Florida. From 2015 to 2020, he served as Vice President of IT Security and Infrastructure at Brightstar Corp in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area. Campos holds CISSP, CRISC, ITIL, MCSE, and CCNA certifications, a certification set that spans security governance, network architecture, and service management.
Eduardo R. Ortiz – VP, Global Head of Cybersecurity, Techtronic Industries
Eduard R. Ortiz became Techtronic Industries’ first Global Head of Cybersecurity in 2021, a newly created role built to unify security programs across a $15 billion enterprise spanning power tools, outdoor equipment, and floorcare brands sold to both DIY consumers and industrial users. He directs a 41-member global team and provides oversight to six CIOs, work that earned TTI its first Significant Risk Improvement Award for continuously reducing risk between 2022 and 2025. Ortiz-Romeu built the company’s first Global IT Leadership Steering Committee and Cybersecurity Steering Committee, then launched a cybersecurity awareness program that reached 32,000 employees over a nine to twelve month rollout. He also cut incident detection time from days to minutes and reduced mitigation efforts to under an hour by transforming the company’s managed detection and response capabilities. Before Techtronic, he spent five years as Deputy CISO and Director of Information Security for a public company in South Florida, where he revived a stalled $800 million facility construction project by resolving government security certification issues, helping the project finish early and under budget and win Australia’s Best National Infrastructure Award. Earlier still, Ortiz-Romeu spent eight years at Accenture directing a $20 million network security budget, taught entrepreneurship as a university instructor at DePaul, and ran his own multi-site dry cleaning operation in Miami for six years before returning to cybersecurity full time.
Muhaseen Hyderali – Managing SVP, CISO, City National Bank of Florida
Fidelity Investments achieved global ISO 27001 certification under Muhaseen Hyderali’s leadership, a program he built during eight years directing Enterprise Cybersecurity there starting in 2009. He later spent six years as Director of Technology Risk at Fidelity, leading a cloud transformation effort and establishing risk and security capabilities for the firm’s Asset Management and Enterprise Technology units in Boston. Hyderali then moved to Capital One in 2023 as Senior Director of Cyber Product Security, building product security capabilities across the company’s Information Security Office. His career started at EY as a Senior IT Auditor and continued at Sify Ltd, where he designed information security management systems and helped companies achieve ISO 27001 certification themselves. He took the Managing SVP and CISO title at City National Bank of Florida in June 2026.
George Perera – CTO & CISO, Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office
George Perera entered law enforcement through the US Army, serving as Military Police in Germany before moving into Military Intelligence with the Army Reserve and Army National Guard. That military background carried into a 39-year career at what is now the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, where he currently serves as Chief of Technology and Information Security while also commanding the agency’s Cyber Crimes Bureau and the South Florida Cyber Crime Task Force, one of the largest cybercrime task forces of its kind in the country. Perera has directed advanced cyber investigations, digital forensics, and mobile forensic response for the agency, and he built a nationally recognized digital forensics program along with field-deployable forensic capabilities for critical incidents. Beyond his agency role, he owns Xero-Day Solutions, a cybersecurity and AI consulting practice he has run since 2010, and co-founded Detectix in 2024. He also teaches cyber and digital crime courses as an adjunct professor at Florida International University and serves as acting director of the cybersecurity program at St. Thomas University. Perera has chaired the Digital Crimes and Forensic Evidence Committee for the International Association of Chiefs of Police since 2005 and has led the Cyber Committee for the Department of Homeland Security’s SAFECOM program since 2008.
Juan Carlos Tellez – President & CISO, BanTransfer
In 1998, Juan Carlos Tellez helped launch a debit card program built for people without bank accounts, and by 2003 he was building mobile payment solutions years before smartphones existed. Tellez founded Denarii Systems that same year, building a MasterCard and Visa prepaid issuer processor that delivered digital financial services, mobile remittances, and P2P payments to underbanked Latin American communities in the United States, work that ran for more than seven years under strict AML and anti-terrorism financing compliance across Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and the US. He later spent six years as Director and Chief Solution Architect for Amdocs’ Mobile Financial Services division, supporting banks, payment providers, and mobile operators worldwide as they built open banking and digital banking systems. His career began even earlier, as a software developer at a textile company in Bogota, Colombia in 1978, four and a half decades before he took the President and CISO title at BanTransfer in September 2023. There, he leads information security strategy for a financial technology company modernizing banking infrastructure through banking as a service, card issuing, digital wallets, and institutional digital asset solutions.
Five Titles, One Common Thread
What this group shares has nothing to do with job titles and everything to do with timing. Ortiz-Romeu built Techtronic’s cybersecurity function from nothing as its first Global Head of Cybersecurity. Hyderali arrived at City National Bank of Florida only four months ago after a career spent building risk and compliance programs at two of the largest names in financial services. Tellez was solving problems that the rest of the industry would not name for another two decades, and Perera has spent nearly four decades inside one agency watching the nature of the threats he investigates change entirely. Campos is the closest thing to a traditional CISO climb in the group, moving steadily upward through IT leadership roles before reaching the top security seat at JM Family. Miami’s security leadership bench was not built on a single template, and that may be exactly why it works.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
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- San Diego’s CISOs to Watch: A City That Keeps Its Security Leaders
- Philadelphia’s CISOs to Watch: Securing Health Systems and Heavy Industry
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.