Mr Daniele Forni

Mr. Daniele Forni is an executive coach and author who spent 15 years in global banking before turning his career toward helping neurodivergent professionals thrive. At HSBC, he rose to Director and Head of Wholesale Credit and Lending Analytics. There he delivered USD 8bn+ in risk-weighted asset savings and built a 40-person analytics unit from scratch across the UK, Poland and India. He joins us on this episode to share how AI can help people learn more effectively, and why neurodivergent leaders hold specialities that organisations too often overlook.

Today, Mr. Forni coaches neurodivergent professionals across banking, private equity and trading. His approach is practical rather than therapeutic, grounded in neuroscience and data, and built on a four-step framework: Start, Spot, Shape, Scale. He works in person in Hong Kong, London and Milan, and online worldwide. He is also the founder of Squirrel Coach, a self-development and coaching platform for neurodivergent professionals and students.

Beyond coaching, Mr. Forni is the author of The Celtic Shaman, a manual on nervous system regulation and meditation for high-pressure environments. He also wrote the children's books Dan, the Autistic Alien and The Pirate and R, which introduce young readers to neurodivergence and data science. He hosts The Data Shaman Podcast and chairs the Membership Advisory Committee at the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Across all of it, he is driven by one mission: making high performance accessible to people whose brains work differently.