Duke Young Danso is a founding member of the SMART America Institute, where he leads much of the work of standing the organization up — building its website, assembling its inaugural publication, and setting up the SMART blogging studio for member interviews — while also helping develop an AI-based smart trading and equity-research platform.
He is a Master of Science candidate in Cybersecurity and Networks at the University of New Haven, an NSA-designated National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations, where his focus spans financial-technology security, fraud detection, IoT security, digital forensics, and AI-driven threat detection. Before relocating to Connecticut he spent nearly a decade in mobile-money and fintech operations at MTN Ghana (Scancom PLC), where as Controller of Mobile Money Payments he ran operations across four regions serving more than two million subscribers and 50,000+ merchants.
There, through systematic transaction-pattern analysis, he detected a national-scale Ponzi fraud scheme — protecting an estimated 40,000 citizens and recovering roughly $2.5M — and designed a financial-inclusion initiative later replicated nationwide. That combination of fintech security, fraud detection, and hands-on technology building is central to the SMART America Institute's mission of guiding emerging technologies toward the public good.
