Speakers
Ben Charoenwong
Associate Professor of Finance
INSEAD
Ben is an associate professor of finance at INSEAD and fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research. He was previously an assistant professor of finance at the National University of Singapore and an affiliated faculty member with the Asia Institute of Digital Finance, supervising Ph.D. students specializing in the application of natural language processing and machine learning for investments and credit risk analytics. His research focuses on financial regulation, corporate governance, household finance, and corporate finance, and has been published in journals like the American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, Science Advances, Review of Finance, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. His research has been cited in policy reports by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the French Council of Economic Analysis, as well as industry reports by the CFA Institute. It has also been covered by multiple media outlets like The Economist, Reuters, and Seeking Alpha.
Outside of academia, he is co-founder of Chicago Global, a quantitative investment firm headquartered in Singapore. He has also worked at Citadel Investment Group teaching quantitative research and financial econometrics to new hires, and has also advised LEK Consulting on applying machine learning techniques to capital budgeting. He has also provided executive training in quantitative investment management, including the application of machine learning to asset allocation, for the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore (GIC).
Ben completed a Ph.D. in Finance and MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2017, where he received the Fischer Black Ph.D. Fellowship, Eugene Fama Ph.D. Fellowship, and was an inaugural recipient of the Fama-Miller Liew Research Fellowship. Prior to that, he completed a bachelor’s of science in Honors Economics, Honors Statistics, and Financial Mathematics with Highest Distinction from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.
Speaking at SFF 2026
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4:15–4:30pmThu 19 NovFrontier StageHall 6, Singapore EXPOPremium
Technology Rewiring
When Agents Buy: Rebuilding Payments for Agentic Commerce - Powered by Pine Labs
Frontier StageHall 6, Singapore EXPOPremium
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Vijeth PanditChief Product Officer, PaymentsPine Labs
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Sanjeev KumarChief Technology Officer, Digital PaymentsPine Labs
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Ben CharoenwongAssociate Professor of FinanceINSEAD
About this session
Discovery is shifting from ads to AI agents, and those agents now pay. Get a front-row seat: live on stage, an agent on popular AI platform finds a product, waits until its conditions are met, then completes a real purchase on a storefront. What banks and enterprise merchants need to get there: agent-ready catalogues, rules agents act on, and guardrails that keep every payment authorised.
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