CRYPTO AND BLOCKCHAIN ECONOMICS RESEARCH FORUM
Perspectives and Regulations of Digital Finance Panel
Moderators
Agostino Capponi
Columbia University
Agostino Capponi is an Associate Professor in the IEOR Department at Columbia University. Agostino's research has been funded by major government agencies and private corporations, including NSF, DARPA, DOE, IBM, GRI, Ripple, and Ethereum. His research has been recognized with the 2018 NSF CAREER award, and with the inaugural JP Morgan AI Research Faculty award. Agostino is a fellow of the crypto and blockchain economics research forum, an academic fellow of Alibaba's Luohan academy, and an external fellow of the FinTech Initiative at Cornell. He serves as an editor of Management Science in the Finance Department, co-editor of Mathematics and Financial Economics, and area editor of Operations Research Letters. Agostino is the former Chair of the SIAG/FME Activity Group and of the INFORMS Finance Section, and the founding director of the Columbia Center for Digital Finance and Technologies.
Bruce Choy
Global Risk Institute
Bruce Choy is a Managing Director for the Global Risk Institute and leads their research activities. Dr Choy was formerly a Partner with PwC and a General Manager with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. He has a track-record in university research, executive financial institution leadership and management consulting, with extensive global financial services experience in North America, Asia and Australasia. Dr Choy was awarded a doctorate from the University of Sydney, Australia, for his research on the mathematics for risk management. He is a University and R.A. Priddle Medalist from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Engineering and a Sloan Fellow from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Panelists
Mohamad AL-Bustami
OSFI Canada
Mohamad “Mo” AL-Bustami is Managing Director of the Digital Innovation and Impact Hub in Policy Innovation and Stakeholder Affairs (PISA) within OSFI. Mo has been with OSFI since 2019 where he built the Technology & Cyber Risk Division from the ground up. In April 2022 and as part of OSFI’s recent transformation, Mo was asked to lead the build of the hub. The vision of the hub is to ensure that OSFI is prepared to regulate and supervise an evolving digital innovation landscape, while ensuring entities are appropriately managing risks. The hubs vision is to become a global leader in prudential supervision, ensuring operational & financial resilience of regulated entities in the face of digitalization.
Francesca Carapella
Federal Reserve Board
Francesca is a principal economist at the Federal Reserve Board and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She was also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Bern (Switzerland), and LUISS University (Italy). Her research interests focus on money and banking, market microstructure, financial economics, economics of digital assets and blockchain technologies. Her recent policy work studies the implications of digital assets and of issuing a CBDC for monetary policy implementation and financial stability. Her recent discussions of CBDC-research were published in peer reviewed journals and held at international venues such as those organized by the G20.
Michael Junho Lee
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Michael Junho Lee is a financial economist in the Research Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His research interests are broadly in financial intermediation, financial markets, and corporate finance. Recent work explores the intersection of technology and finance. Relevant topics include digital assets, the design and safeguarding of financial and information networks, the economics and regulation of data, and financial market architecture. Michael received his Ph.D. in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016.
Valerie A. Szczepanik
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Valerie A. Szczepanik is the Director of the Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology (FinHub) Office at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Before that, she was the Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation and an Associate Director in the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance. She also served as Assistant Director in the SEC Division of Enforcement’s Cyber Unit. Ms. Szczepanik served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. She clerked for federal judges on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and, prior to clerking, practiced patent law. Ms. Szczepanik received her Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University and her Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.