Speakers

Venkatesh leads Wise’s expansion efforts across Asia-Pacific, co-leads the multi-currency debit card program globally, and serves as the CEO of Wise Asia-Pacific Ltd, the company’s APAC hub in Singapore.

Prior to joining Wise, Venkatesh was with the Office of Tony Blair, where he advised governments on topics such as economic reform and electronic payments; and earlier, at Bain & Co., where he was a strategy consultant. He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received an MBA from the Wharton School and an MA in International Studies from the Lauder Institute.

Vijay leads business development at dYdX (https://dydx.exchange/), a decentralized derivatives exchange. Prior to dYdX, Vijay led business and corporate development at SharesPost and spent 3 years building out the Ripple ecosystem earlier. Before that, Vijay was an investor at BlackRock on a team managing $65 billion of actively managed capital across a number of discretionary fixed income strategies.

Vikram Khanna is Associate Editor and economics commentator at The Straits Times, Singapore’s main daily and flagship publication of the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) group. Prior to joining SPH in 1993, he served for seven years with the IMF in Washington, DC. He has B.A, M.A and M.Phil degrees in economics from Cambridge University in the UK He is the author of the book “”Headwinds and Hazards: Economic Snapshots in an Age of Populism”” and is Vice-President of the Economic Society of Singapore.

Vikram S. Pandit is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Orogen Group, an operating company he created with Atairos that makes significant long-term strategic investments in financial services companies and related businesses with proven business models.

Mr. Pandit Morgan Stanley in 1983 and ultimately became President and Chief Operating Officer of the company’s institutional securities and investment banking businesses. Mr. Pandit left Morgan Stanley to become a founding member and chairman of the members committee of Old Lane, LP. When Old Lane was acquired by Citigroup in 2007, Mr. Pandit became Chairman and CEO of Citi Alternative Investments and later led Citi’s Institutional Clients Group. He became CEO of Citigroup in December 2007 and successfully recapitalized, restructured and revitalized the company before he left in October 2012.
Mr. Pandit is a member of the Board of Directors of ExlService Holdings, Inc., Fair Square Financial Holdings, Westcor Land Title Insurance Company, and JM Financial Credit Solutions Ltd. Mr. Pandit is a member of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School and a member of the Board of Visitors of the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science. Mr. Pandit earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in engineering from Columbia University and received his Ph.D. in finance from Columbia in 1986.

Vincent is the Assistant Managing Director for the Technology Group at MAS and is responsible for Technology (CIO functions), Data (CDO functions), Digitalisation, Cybersecurity and Technology Regulations.

Previously, Vincent was the Financial Services Leader for Accenture, Singapore. He advised global organisations and governments on strategizing and managing innovation, disruption and digitalisation.

In PwC, Vincent led the APAC Financial Crime and Cyber practice. Additionally, he was also the Singapore Financial Service Risk Assurance and Data Analytics leader. Vincent, trained as an accountant, was made partner in PwC UK, where he spent more than 20 years, and led the UK Financial Services Technology Risk practice. He advised the board and management of many complex global financial services clients on both business and IT operations, risks, cyber resilience, and governance in response to technological, business, regulatory and organisational changes.

During his time in the UK and US, Vincent has led major high-profile financial industry reviews, investigation and remediation of systemic technology incidents/failures and implementation of various industry leading initiatives.

As a leading industry subject matter expert and thought leader, Vincent has been interviewed, presented, and wrote on thought leadership for many international media.

In Singapore, Vincent advised boards of major international companies including government-linked organisations etc. Vincent also led major growth studies for the Singapore government covering various areas including cybersecurity. Vincent sits on NUS School of Computing Industry Advisory Board, NUS Business School Accounting Advisory Board, and was a sub committee member for Committee for Future Economy of Singapore. Vincent also sits as an independent board director at Integrated Health Information Systems in Singapore.

Virginia has a demonstrated track record of securing strategic partnerships between corporations, governments, and non-profits to deliver on social impact projects. She started her career in telecommunications, building satellites, and the distribution of free-to-air television across 60 countries in Asia.

Seeing the uptake firsthand, Virginia focused on education, believing that investing in people is the key driver for impactful change. Bringing together diversity and crossing cultural divides is a pathway to create Shared Value in our world, aligning purpose with profit.

After serving on the board of several educational institutions, Virginia is now a member of the Board of Directors of the Adecco Group Foundation in Switzerland a social innovation lab, incubating and accelerating new solutions in the world of work.

Vivek has been passionate about climate for most of his career. In his current role, he takes inspiration from two of his strongest beliefs – that the world needs urgent action to combat climate change, and that addressing climate change will generate huge business opportunities for the private sector and capital markets.

As IFC’s Global Head and Director of Climate Business, Vivek looks for these opportunities and works to mobilize capital needed to move them forward. He also leads business development, guides standard-setting and new product design, and connects the dots across the corporation to mainstream the climate lens into all IFC’s business.

Prior to his current role, Mr. Pathak was IFC’s Regional Director for East Asia and Pacific, where he led operations across 18 countries, reaching $4.2 billion in long-term investment in fiscal year 2020, and was one of the first at IFC to integrate climate into all aspects of the business. Before that, he was IFC’s Director and Global Head of Credit and Investment Risk. He had also held multiple leadership roles managing portfolio, credit risk, and business development in frontier markets at IFC, Bank of America and ABN AMRO Bank.

Mr. William Fung is Group Vice President of AMTD Group and CEO of AMTD International, responsible for strategic development of investment banking and asset management businesses at AMTD. Prior to joining AMTD, he served at UBS AG, Nomura International and Lehman Brothers. Mr. Fung also has extensive experience in arranging and structuring international capital markets transactions.

Winston is the Founder & CEO of Finute, an education technology company that merges education and play through technology to empower the next generation of learners.

Winston has been an avid software and games developer since he was 10 and spends his free time programming open-source applications.

As CEO, Winston works with multinational corporations, SMEs and government agencies to bring their ideas to life and won several global and national innovation competitions.

Winston is also the recipient of the National Youth Entrepreneurship Award for his contributions to Singapore’s startup ecosystem.

Winston is featured on reputable news outlets including Mediacorp’s Channel 8, Lianhe Zaobao, Youth.SG, CNA938.

Mr. Wenhui Yang is the General Manager of Tencent Financial Technology Asia Pacific and is in charge of the business development in the region.

Prior to joining Tencent, Mr. Yang was General Manager of UnionPay International Southeast Asia, where he led the team to actively participate in both domestic and cross-border ePayment infrastructure building in the region. Before that, he was with American Express China, overseeing business management and development, and led the rollout of the first batch of American Express card issuing projects in China.

Yee May Leong joined Equinix in April 2019 as Managing Director of Equinix South Asia, leading the company’s business strategy in Singapore and Indonesia.

Ms. Leong brings to Equinix more than 30 years of experience in the Information and Communications Technology sector. She has held senior management positions in leading technology companies including IBM, Lotus, F5 Networks and Orange Business Services, where she spearheaded the companies’ market growth and industry leadership in the Asia-Pacific region.

Prior to joining Equinix, Ms. Leong was the Vice President of the Communications Sector for IBM in Asia-Pacific, overseeing the company’s strategic business development in ASEAN, Australia, India, Korea and New Zealand. Ms. Leong also had an eight-year tenure with Orange Business Services, where she significantly grew the sales volumes and revenues of their Asia-Pacific business. She also spent four years with F5 Networks, during which she led their Asia-Pacific expansion into Greater China and ASEAN countries, and continuously achieved double-digit business growth for the region.

Ms. Leong holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, major in computer science and minor in management studies from the University of Waterloo in Canada. She also completed the advanced management program at Harvard Business School in the United States.

Yi Ming leads Tribe. Tribe connects tech talents to global opportunities. Tribe works with more than 100 leading organisations including AXA, BMW, Citibank, IBM, Nielsen, Pfizer, and others. Yi Ming also serves as an Entrepreneur in Residence at INSEAD, supporting promising MBA students with their entrepreneurship pursuits. He is also a member of the Milken Institute’s Young Leaders Circle.

Yi Ming was recognised as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Honoree in 2020. During his military term, he was also awarded the Singapore Armed Forces (Artillery Formation) Outstanding National Serviceman Fulltime (NSF) of the Year. Yi Ming graduated with a Bachelors in Engineering (First Class Honours) from Imperial College London and has attended Harvard University and Peking University.

Yishan Wong founded Terraformation with a vision to bring Silicon Valley’s expertise in rapid growth to the climate movement.

Yishan previously served as CEO of Reddit and Director of Engineering at Facebook, and was an early engineer at PayPal.

In 2019, he turned his attention to the biggest problem facing our planet today: climate change. Terraformation’s mission is to rapidly scale native forest restoration projects around the world to capture carbon and reverse the impacts of climate change. Yishan partnered with forestry and financial services experts to identify and solve some of the largest bottlenecks holding back rapid reforestation, including water and land availability, technical training, and financing.

He recently completed construction of the world’s largest fully off-grid, 100% solar-powered desalination system to alleviate water shortages that hinder arid ecosystem restoration.

Yishan and his team are also developing innovative financing solutions to help scale forestry through a profitable and accessible asset class. Given the monetization opportunities offered by carbon credits, and the key role of carbon negative assets in net zero strategies, novel forestry-linked or forestry-backed financial products could provide green investments to move the world to a sustainable future.

He lives in Waimea, Hawaiʻi with his family and dogs.

Yogesh Patel is the Chief Technology Officer & Head of AI Research at Callsign, where he designs intelligence driven authentication solutions for large financial institutions. He is an expert in the fraud and security space, providing guidance to the industry and helps to shape strategic thinking and planning at the CxO level.

Previous roles have included senior positions at organisations such as Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC Plc and NICE Actimize, where he was responsible for defining IT Strategy for Security, Fraud and Financial Crime domain.

Yogesh holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) of London Metropolitan University in the domain of Fraud Detection using Advanced Machine Learning Techniques.

YT Siew is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Jirnexu Sdn Bhd (Jirnexu). In 2012, YT Siew co-founded RinggitPlus.com as an online financial comparison website. In 2016, the website successfully merged with SaveMoney.my to form Saving Plus Sdn Bhd.

Since then, YT Siew has led and grown Jirnexu into Southeast Asia’s first full-stack FinTech solutions provider. After Jirnexu received US$6.5 million in its Series A funding round in 2017, YT Siew and his team developed and launched XpressApply. In 2018, he led Jirnexu through a successful Series B funding round of US$19 million.

YT Siew is a former Business Development Director at Redberry Sdn Bhd (2010 – 2012), former Analyst at Axia Advisors, the United Kingdom (UK) and European research arm of Kynikos Associates (2007 – 2010), and former Investment Banking Analyst at Citigroup Inc (a.k.a Citi) in the UK (2004 – 2006).

YT Siew graduated with a degree in Modern History from Oxford University, UK in 2004. He also went the extra mile to learn Mandarin at the Beijing Language and Culture University for a year in China (2000 – 2001).

Yusho Liu is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Coinhako, Singapore’s market-leading digital assets platform, where he drives Coinhako’s corporate strategy, investor relations as well as its business development and expansion. As one of Singapore’s pioneers in the digital assets space, Yusho is a seasoned professional within the spheres of trading and marketing, and co-founded Coinhako with his long-time friend Gerry Eng – whom he met while serving the Singapore Armed Force – in 2014, with the aim of improving access to Bitcoin and other digital assets for the mass market in Asia.

Under his leadership, Coinhako has emerged a market leader in local fiat currency trading with digital assets in Asia, and has scaled to serve multiple countries in the Greater Asia Pacific region. Yusho is also part of the founding team of ACCESS – Association of Crypto Currency Enterprise and Startups Singapore – which is the main representative body for cryptocurrency businesses in Singapore with the local government, and has been an entrepreneur for much of his career, having established in multiple startups over the years.

Yuval is a visionary leader at the intersection of finance and technology.

Yuval co-founded Digital Asset in 2014 to fill a gap in the blockchain space, ultimately taking the technology beyond cryptocurrencies and using it to bring greater efficiency to financial services.

Under his leadership, Digital Asset has grown from a fledgling start up to a leading enterprise blockchain company whose technology is used by top institutions and market infrastructures around the globe. With a vision for a world where businesses seamlessly connect regardless of the underlying technology, he is taking Digital Asset to the next level by creating a Global Economic Network that will fundamentally change the future of business and how companies interact.

During his tenure, Yuval hired the majority of the company’s executive leadership, established its presence in six countries, and facilitated the acquisition of four tech startups in two years. He has secured more than $300 Million in financing for the company from a range of strategic investors across financial and technology industries.

Yuval serves on the Board of Directors of the Global Blockchain Business Council, a leading global industry association for the blockchain technology ecosystem. He is also a frequent speaker at industry events, and is often quoted in well respected media outlets such as Bloomberg, Financial Times and Forbes, among others talking about enterprise blockchain in the context of interoperability, central bank digital currency, clearing and settlement, and sustainable finance.

Yvonne works on building robust quantum hardware using superconducting microwave circuits. Their devices provide useful avenues to develop novel techniques for quantum information processing as well as to explore interesting effects in quantum physics. Yvonne is a recipient of the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellowship and MIT Tech Review’s Innovator’s Under 35 (Asia-Pacific) award.

Zennon is the Founder and Director of Kapronasia, one of Asia’s leading providers of strategic consulting services focusing on the fintech industry. Zennon has been involved in financial technology for over 20 years and covers all topics fintech and blockchain. Before Kapronasia, Zennon was the Global Banking Industry Manager for Intel based out of Shanghai, China and, prior to Intel, was the CIO for Citigroup Portugal. Zennon has testified in front of the U.S. Congress on issues of China fintech and is the author of ‘Chomping at the Bitcoin: The History and Future of Bitcoin in China’ published by Penguin. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University and an MBA from INSEAD.

Zoë Knight is a Managing Director and Group Head of the HSBC Centre of Sustainable Finance. Zoë joined HSBC in 2010 and since then has co-authored reports on low-carbon opportunities in bond and equity markets, long-term carbon and water risks and managing financial stability in relation to climate change. She has advised global institutional investors on equity investing and climate change for over 20 years. She authored the ‘Keeping it Cool’ Series of briefings on climate policy, economics and investment ideas from 2014 to 2017, which resulted in a No 1 ranking for Climate Change by institutional investors in industry awards.

In 2018, Zoë set up the Centre of Sustainable Finance at HSBC. The Centre provides thought leadership about transforming the real economy and strengthening the financial system response to climate change. She has participated in a variety of advisory boards and councils on climate across the financial services industry. Currently, she is a Commissioner on the Energy Transition Commission, and sits on the Advisory Boards of the UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment and All Parliamentary Group on Climate Change.

In 2020, she was recognised as one of 275 Global female energy influencers by the Women’s Energy Council.