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Biographies

Barry Cooper CENFRI Barry is a technical director at Cenfri and has been part of the team since June 2013. Since joining Cenfri, Barry has collaborated with Cenfri on their retail payments thematic area and has been part of the MAP diagnostic team in Swaziland, Mozambique and Malawi, amongst others. In the process he has gained detailed knowledge of the financial regulatory and supply side landscapes, national payments systems and emerging payment related initiatives in the different jurisdictions. Barry is also currently involved in the focus group on digital financial services at the ITU, Geneva, tasked with formulating international guidelines for digital financial services including interoperability, financial ecosystems, consumer protection and technology, innovation and competition. Previous to Cenfri, Barry started his career in the insurance industry and moved on to the banking industry with significant exposure to payment systems, wholesale and consumer banking as head of consumer banking operations, South Africa for an international bank. Barry has a particular interest in the development and regulation of digital payment instruments and currencies, with an emphasis on the human rights impact of financial regulation. He is also a legal advisor, by profession. Barry holds a B.Com (legal) from the University of the Witwatersrand and an LLB from the University of South Africa.
Bilel Jamoussi Chief of Study Group Department, TSB, ITU Tunisian born, Dr. Bilel Jamoussi is Chief of the Study Groups Department of ITU Standardization Bureau in Geneva Switzerland. Since 2010, he has been leading the bureau’s standards making activities into a new era characterized by rapid convergence and the need for increased collaboration with vertical sectors and partnership between developed and developing countries. Prior to 2010, Jamoussi worked for a Telecommunication equipment and solutions provider for 15 years in Canada and then in the United States where he held several leadership positions and was granted 22 US patents in diverse areas including packet, optical, wireless, and quality of service. He holds a BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is fluent in Arabic, French, and English and speaks some Spanish and German.
John Kiff IMF John Kiff has been a Senior Financial Sector Expert at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 2005. Prior to that, he worked at the Bank of Canada for 25 years, where he spent most of his time managing the funding and investment of the government's foreign exchange reserves, including running its large interest rate and currency swap book. At the IMF he has been part of the team that produces the semi-annual Global Financial Stability Report. More recently he has been focusing on fintech issues, over-the-counter derivatives, and pension risk transfer markets. He has published many articles and papers on these topics, and actively tweets on them on Twitter (@Kiffmeister)
Thomas Kudrycki Chief Technology Officer Thomas Kudrycki has had a distinguished career as a technology and product development leader in diverse US corporate environments from AT&T Bell Labs to various Silicone Valley startups. He is currently a Chief Technology Officer and one of the founding members of eCurrency, a Silicone Valley company that created an ability for central banks to issue Digital Fiat Currency and circulate it just like physical cash using existing e-money infrastructure. He has over 25 years of experience in large-scale technology development and management and holds a BS in Physics and Applied Mathematics and an MSEE in Computer Engineering.
Klaus Martin Löber Head of the Oversight Division, European Central Bank Klaus Martin Löber is Head of the Oversight Division of the European Central Bank, in charge of the oversight of financial markets infrastructures and payments instruments. His areas or responsibility also encompass the ECB's global regulatory policy activities with a focus on payments and market infrastructures. Furthermore, Mr Löber is contributing to the global fintech and digital innovations agenda, chairing the CPMI working group on digital currencies and co-chairing the CPMI-IOSCO working group on digital innovations looking into relevant developments. Prior to his current position, from 2012 to 2016, Mr Löber was Head of the Secretariat of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) hosted by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a global regulatory standard setting body in the areas of payments, clearing and settlement. Earlier positions include the European Central Bank, the European Commission, Deutsche Bundesbank and private practice. Mr Löber regularly publishes on financial markets legal, regulatory and infrastructure issues.
Mikhail Mironov Everitoken Mikhail Mironov built career with top European banks. As a Coverage Banker for Financial Institutions in EMEA region at ABN AMRO Bank he managed large million dollars assets portfolio. He was an early days community growth mastermind at Airbnb. Mikhail is involved in blockchain projects since 2015. He is a foundation council member of Global ICO Transparency Alliance (GITA), a Founding Partner at SMC Capita - NYC based investment and advisory firm and Strategic Advisor to EveriToken. He holds an MBA from the University of Wales and a Masters Degree in International Relations from the University of Amsterdam.
Egidijus Paleckis Head of Cash Policy, Issue and Control Division, Bank of Lithuania Egidijus Paleckis is Head of Cash Policy, Issue and Control Division at the Bank of Lithuania responsible for developing and implementing cash policies. He is also a Digital Collector Coin project manager, Member of the Bank of Lithuania Innovation Committee and Deputy Chairperson of the Bank of Lithuania Coin Creation Commission. Previously he also worked as a Communications Officer at the European Central Bank.
Daniel Gersten Reiss Central Bank of Brazil Daniel Gersten Reiss is an advisor for the research on banking operations and payment systems at the Central Bank of Brazil. Besides monetary policy management duties, his responsibilities includes strengthening the current research on the usage of payment instruments and innovations in this area. He is also currently a member of the Economics and Politics Research Group at Universidade de Brasilia. For the past four year, Daniel has been working closely to the recent developments on the money domain, including topics such as the virtual currency phenomenon and the possible use of new technology architectures by the central bank for issuing digital currencies. In international forums, he is currently representing the Central Bank of Brazil at the BIS CPMI Working Group on Digital Innovations and the CPMI-IOSCO joint working group on the same topic. Daniel is also a participant in International Telecommunications Union's activities related to payments, namely the Focus Group Digital Currencies and the Financial Inclusion Global Initiative. Formerly, Daniel has acted as vice-chairman to the ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services. Daniel has also already been a visiting member of secretariat at the Bank for International Settlements’ Committee of Payments and Markets Infrastructure and both lecturer of international economics and academic advisor at Universidade de Brasilia. He has also been the project manager for the implementation of the Brazil-Argentina Local Currency Payment System and he has already worked as a consultant in retail payments and as an international technical cooperation coordinator. Daniel has a doctorate in economics, a master's degree in public sector economics, a PG diploma in international relations and a certificate in accounting. He has graduated the Brazilian Naval Academy with a major in management.
Lawrence Rufrano Future of Currency Lab, Stanford Lawrence Rufrano spent 25 years in banking, providing capital markets services to money center Banks. Lawrence also spent 10 years at the federal reserve board in Washington DC writing banking regulations. Lawrence is now the Executive Director of an Advanced Financial Technologies Lab at Stanford University.
Dinesh Shah Bank of Canada As Director Fintech Research, Dinesh leads the technology aspect of the Bank of Canada’s research agenda in fintech and e-money. The research agenda encompasses the analysis of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies with wide applications to financial market infrastructure and the financial system. This analysis supports economic and financial system research into the implications of such technologies to the core mandates of the Bank of Canada. Prior to his current role, Dinesh was Technical Researcher in electronic payments and electronic money. His research focused on understanding and communicating the workings and impact of new technologies in finance, such as distributed ledger technology, and research into conceptual architectures for central bank issued e-money. Dinesh first joined the Bank of Canada in 2009 as an Enterprise Architect. Before joining the Bank, Dinesh has been a co-founder and architect at various start-ups. He spent 8 years as a developer of various fixed-income trading and risk management systems at financial institutions in London. In addition, he provided expertise on the application of leading edge technologies to securities trading and clearing firms. Dinesh holds a BSc (hons) in Physics with Computing from The University of Kent in the U.K.
Song Shuang Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Dr. Song Shuang is assistant research fellow from the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWEP), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Her research field is international finance, and mainly focuses on the topics of international monetary system, RMB internationalization, and global financial governance. She has studied digital currency and cross-border payment system since 2017, and has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals. She holds a doctorate from Tsinghua University.
David Wen FG DFC Chairman Dr. David Wen is the Chairman of ITU-T Focus Group on Digital Currency including Digital Fiat Currency. He is also the co-founder and Chief Scientist of eCurrency. After obtaining his Ph.D from Oxford University, he has worked atNTT Communication Science Laboratory in Japan, before appointed the youngest Associate Professor in Tokyo Science University. When visiting Stanford University as a visiting professor, he decided to apply his research to build solution for challenging and impactful ventures in the real world. He started as a security architect at ActivCard (now HID Global) and was responsible for the design of the Identity Management Solution for the Department of Defense’s Common Access Card (CAC) program. He went on to become the product manager, program manager and Chief Scientist at Fortune 500 companies such as Dell and SAIC, managing the deployment of US Federal Government’s Personal Identification and Verification (PIV) program at NASA, DHS, FDA. He is one of the main contributors who enabled the most advanced Digital Identity Management solution for the entire US government by the 2008 deadline set by President George Bush in HSPD-12. In September 2011, he co-founded eCurrency Mint Ltd, applying his extensive experience building nationwide security program to the solution of a Central Bank Issued Digital Currency. He helped coin the term Digital Fiat Currency working as the US expert to ISO Technical Committee 68 (SC 2) for digital currency security, and led the establishment of the ITU-T Focus Group on Digital Fiat Currency, working with central banks and telecom regulators from the over 27 developing countries. He is also the founder of Digital Fiat Currency Institute, and one of China’s “Thousand Talent” award winner. ****