The upcoming 15th annual conference of FinanceMalta will feature a host of high-calibre international speakers as well as local experts, in what promises to be one of the major financial services events this year.
International speakers include, among others, the outgoing president of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Marcus Pleyer; the executive director of the European Banking Authority (EBA) François-Louis Michaud; futurist and professor of practice, Imperial College Business School, David Shrier; as well as the director for Financial and Enterprise Affairs at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Carmine Di Noia.
The theme of this year’s conference, which will be held on December 1 at the Intercontinental Arena Conference Centre, is ‘Learning from the Past: Looking to the Future’. The conference will feature C-level executives from Malta and abroad, EU policymakers, Maltese government representatives, officials of global standard-setting organisations, renowned academics, regulators, researchers and more.
Pleyer is a familiar face given the role he occupied until very recently as president of the FATF during a time when Malta was placed on the grey list and eventually removed a year later following the remediation work carried out by the jurisdiction. Pleyer served as the first two-year president of the FATF from July 1, 2020, till June 30, 2022, after having been FATF vice-president (July 2019–June 2020) and head of the German delegation to the FATF (2016–July 2019). In his national role, he serves as deputy director general in Germany’s federal ministry of finance responsible for policy development and international engagement pertaining anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism and proliferation financing (AML/CFT, CPF), financial sanctions, digital finance including payment services and cyber security. During the FinanceMalta annual conference, Pleyer will be participating in a panel session on the theme ‘Good governance: how does it build trust?’
One of the major financial services events this year
Michaud has been the EBA’s executive director since September 2020. Prior to that, he held responsibilities in banking supervision, as a deputy director general at the European Central Bank (2014-2020) and deputy director at France’s Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution, the French administrative authority responsible for the supervision of banking and insurance undertakings. From 2005 to 2009, he was a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlement in Basel and the secretary to its Markets Committee. Michaud will be delivering a presentation in the segment of the annual conference dedicated to ‘Banking in Malta in the context of European regulatory developments’ and will be also participating in the ensuing panel discussion.
Another key international speaker is Di Noia, who will also participate in the panel session on good governance. He is the director for financial and enterprise affairs at the OECD and has over 30 years’ experience in the area of financial markets and enterprise affairs. Previously, he was commissioner for the Italian Securities and Exchange Commission (CONSOB) and deputy director general at the Association of Italian Corporations (ASSONIME). He holds a doctorate degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate degree in economic theory and institutions from the Università di Roma Tor Vergata. He is a full professor of financial markets and banking at the Business School of Luiss University.
Shrier will be concluding the event with a dynamic session by providing a vision of a potential future direction for Malta, as well as engaging the audience in an interactive conversation about what that should look like. He is a globally recognised expert on financial innovation and a professor of practice at the Imperial College Business School where he is co-founding the Centre for Digital Transformation. He holds C-level roles with public and private companies and has worked with over 100 governments to build Fintech ecosystems. He specialises in helping established organisations build innovative capacity, having developed $10 billion of value-creation opportunities for Fortune 500 companies and leading private equity and VC funds.
Philipp Paech, associate professor of law at the LSE Law School; Wim Mijs, CEO at the European Banking Federation, and Andreas Hoepner, who, among his several high-profile roles, was a member of the technical expert group on sustainable finance at the European Commission, will be contributing to the conference’s proceedings.
Malta’s Prime Minister Robert Abela and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola will be addressing the conference, while Minister for Finance and Employment Clyde Caruana and a number of leading experts in Malta will be discussing several themes that are of interest to the financial services industry.
The event will be chaired by leadership and innovation expert Deborah Webster and will be opened by FinanceMalta’s chairman George Vella.
The annual conference of FinanceMalta also offers the possibility to companies to increase their visibility through a number of sponsorship packages.
For more information on the conference and sponsorship opportunities as well as to register, visit www.fmannualconference.org/.