Spring Meetings

Gillian Tett serves as the chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times. She writes weekly columns, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She is also the co-founder of FT Moral Money, a twice weekly newsletter that tracks the ESG revolution in business and finance which has since grown to be a staple FT product. In 2020 and 2021, Moral Money won the SABEW best newsletter. Previously, Tett was the FT’s US managing editor from 2013 to 2019. She has also served as assistant editor for the FT’s markets coverage, capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau  chief, Tokyo correspondent, London-based economics reporter and a reporter in Russia and Brussels. Her latest book, Anthro-Vision, A New Way to See Life and Business came out in June 2021.

Arif Ismail is currently the Deputy Division Chief in the Payments and Infrastructure Division at the IMF. He is responsible for co-leading the Division on payments, financial market infrastructures and digital money matters. Arif’s passion is understanding how digitalization may impact broader society, improve social welfare whilst minimizing risks to both domestic and the international monetary system. Arif was privileged in leading a multi-departmental team on the Board Paper: Elements of Effective Crypto Policies. Arif holds a BSc in mathematics and physics, an MBA through GIBS, and a DBA on strategic leadership and transformation. His area of interest spans the change domain, and includes a focus on complex adaptive systems, psycho-social cognition, and leadership theory.

Rupert Thorne is the Deputy Secretary General of the Financial Stability Board, where he helps in the FSB’s work to coordinate international policy initiatives to strengthen the financial system and promote consistent implementation across sectors and across countries. His work has included focuses on climate-related financial risks, derivatives market reforms, and cross-border payment issues. He has been in his position at the FSB since 2009, and from 2005 to 2008 was in the Secretariat of the FSB’s predecessor, the Financial Stability Forum. Before then, he had worked in the IMF for 11 years, in areas such as multilateral surveillance of mature financial markets and debt management policy advice. Previously, he spent over a decade at the Bank of England, mostly in operational areas such as money market operations, government debt issuance and foreign exchange reserves management.

Linda Jeng is the Chief Global Regulatory Officer and General Counsel of the Crypto Council for Innovation. She is also the Visiting Scholar on Financial Technology and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for International Economic Law and a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School. Her research interests include open banking, digital currency, and DeFi. She has spent most of her career working on financial stability and regulatory reform, including at: the Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland, drafting global standards addressing Too-Big-to-Fail, the U.S. Senate drafting the Dodd-Frank Act, and the U.S. Department of Treasury negotiating the international implementation of G20 post-crisis reforms. 

Linda has worked at the Securities & Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Credit Agricole in Paris. She has a J.D. from Columbia Law School, a Master of Advanced Studies from University of Toulouse, France, and a B.A. from Duke University.Previous roles include: Chief Policy & Regulatory Officer for the Centre Consortium, the standards organization for Centre Standard Stablecoins and Global Head of Policy at Transparent Financial Systems. She also served as Chief of Staff for Risk, Data and Surveillance at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors where she chaired the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s working group on Open Banking. 

Dr. Jiaying Jiang is an assistant professor of law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. She is also a co-leader of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Project, in cooperation with the China Center at Yale Law School, and a contributor to the RegTrax Initiative at Stanford Law School. Her research focuses on the policies and regulations of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, fintech, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and CBDCs. She is also an attorney and counselor at law in both the State of New York and China. 

Dr. Jiang's work has been published in journals worldwide, including the Pittsburgh Law Review, Tsinghua China Law Review, Cambridge University Press, and many others. Her CBDC-related scholarship has been widely cited by reputable institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT, Stanford, the Hoover Institute, and numerous scholarly journals. Beyond academic circle, Dr. Jiang's research has been featured in many news outlets such as the Washington Post, The Hill, Fortune Magazine, Bloomberg Law, and Florida Trend, among others.