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Stephane De Baets is the president of Elevated Returns. He is a pioneer in security token having successfully launched the Aspen Coin. He has 25 years’ experience in capital markets and real estate , he is the owner of the prestigious St Regis Aspen Resort. He has developed a fully compliant and regulated ecosystem in Thailand. Recently , legendary Wall Street short seller Marc Cohodes has referred to him as “The Steve jobs of Token”.
Mark Austen is the Chief Executive Officer of the Asia Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (ASIFMA). Since joining ASIFMA in 2012, he has led the expansion of the association to encompass Equities, Compliance, Post-Trade and Asset Management in addition to its original division for Fixed Income, and its membership has grown to over 100 firms.
Mark is also the CEO of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA), which represents the common interests of the world’s leading financial and capital market participants, and speaks for the industry on the most important global market issues. GFMA comprises ASIFMA based in Hong Kong, The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) in London and Brussels and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) in New York and Washington.
Mark’s key objectives at ASIFMA are to expand its product divisions, continue to build a broad membership base and further strengthen its ability to act as a collective voice for the industry. Mark was formerly with AFME as Chief Operating Officer. He joined AFME (then called The Bond Market Association or TBMA) in 2005 to head up the European Primary Dealers Association (EPDA), which addressed issues of specific interest to government bond markets.
Mark holds an LL.M. from the London School of Economics and an LL.B. from Osgoode Law School in Toronto.
Napoleon Biggs is Founder and Host of Web Wednesday, Asia’s premier networking community for internet entrepreneurs and digital media executives. Launched in July 2006, Web Wednesday now has over 6,000 members with regular monthly networking events in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Beijing and Dubai. He has interviewed over 100 pioneers in the internet space, including Guy Kawasaki and Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of Word Press and many successful internet startups.
Napoleon Biggs is an advisor on digital disruption, and a regular commentator on digital industry trends on the BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC and Reuters.
Simon Blanchet is leading HSBC’s Security Testing organization globally supporting all Group Businesses and Functions. He is also responsible for helping to ensure the delivery of an enhanced capability to support the DevOps ways of working and drive the adoption of automated security testing capabilities within the development/integration pipelines. Regionally managing the Cybersecurity Assessment & Testing service line workforce performing software security assurance functions including End-to-End Risk Consultancy, Security Testing and Third-Party Security Risk Review.
Simon has been professionally working in the fields of Information Security and Security Software Design & Development for the past 19+ years. He started his career as a Software Developer and Development Team Leader (cryptographic & security-related software) in Montreal, Canada where he had the opportunity to contribute to the first version of the SDK implementing Stefan Brands’ Digital Credential (later acquired by Microsoft as part of their user-centric identity management technology called U-Prove). In early 2005, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean to land in Switzerland where he worked in the Private Banking industry for more than 8 years, first as an Application Security Architect at Lombard Odier Private Bankers then as the Head of Application Security for HSBC Private Bank. In late 2013 he moved further east to Hong Kong where, as the Regional Head of Information Security Risk, he led the Asia-Pacific region on all information security related initiatives, projects and operations for HSBC Private Bank. In late 2015, he was globally responsible for Application Security Innovation and R&D before moving into his current role as the Global Head of Security Testing since late 2018.
Marquis is the Founder and CEO of Stat Zero, which has won awards for being the best sustainable investment company in the world.
Prior to Stat Zero, he was IBM’s Global Leader of Digital Government Transformation, including emerging technologies (i.e. Blockchain). He has advised senior government officials in Switzerland, Africa, Denmark, Australia, Belgium, and UAE. Before IBM, he was CEO of Foster Skills, a social enterprise – supported by Microsoft – focused on citizen-driven social innovation. He also founded two startups: RateMyFosterHome.com, a first mover in public sector customer experience metrics; and Physiocare.io, an upstart Uberizing physical therapy.
Early in his career, Marquis worked for Y-Combinator’s Wefunder to champion the Startup Jobs Act; Wayfair, where he developed brand strategy with HGTV celebrities; Massachusetts Appeals and Supreme Courts, where he helped role out case management system; and the White House Chief of Staff’s Office, where he led efforts to improve Recovery Act reporting requirements.
Marquis has won numerous awards: Boston Globe’s Innovator of the Year, Microsoft Changemaker, Massachusetts Nonprofit Excellence Award, Ashoka’s Child Well-being Champion, Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Fellow, Case Foundation Finding Fearless Award, and tied for 1st place in McKinsey’s Agility Hackathon.
Marquis was a plenary speaker at the White House, Harvard Law, IMF, Boston Children’s Hospital, United Way Youth Venture, and his TEDx talk at Columbia University on ‘How To Build a Social Enterprise’ received 60,000+ views. He has been featured in Reuters, NPR, Sydney Herald, and Forbes. Marquis has written for CIO.com and The Huffington Post.
Hillary Clinton nominated him to the Air Force Academy, but he decided to study under former Massachusetts Governor Dukakis and SJC Chief Justice Roderick Ireland at Northeastern University, where he graduated with high honors. Besides work, he loves playing scrabble & basketball, snowboarding, and dancing salsa. Personal site: www.marquiscabrera.com.
Roberto Capodieci, CEO of Blockchain Zoo, is an Italian that started coding as a little kid, sold his first videogame at age 10, but his first encounter with blockchain took place in 2009 when he was already living in Bali, Indonesia. At the time Roberto was studying decentralized systems, peer to peer networks, and spent his days discussing in USENET potential evolutions of the Torrent protocol when someone shared what was an early version of the bitcoin node software. It is so that Roberto, in 2009, with a notebook and a dial-up connection, mined 6 bitcoin blocks, earning a reward of 300 bitcoin. Not making sense of what all that was for, he eventually formatted the notebook with all the private keys eventually worth, in December 2017, a good 5 million and a half US dollars. Fast forward to today, when he is not in tears thinking about the past, Roberto works full time on blockchain technology. After years spent implementing custom blockchain solutions for non-financial use cases, such as decentralized management of trade documents, (non-smart) contracts, ownership titles, IoT data, and others, he has devoted the past two years building, with his company, ZooBC: an innovative blockchain platform with a brand new consensus system especially studied to be the ideal platform for GovTech, RegTech, and all non-financial solutions. It is the first blockchain that can run and be secure without having a coin.
Chris Carlin is Head of Alliances, Redistribution Solutions, and Data Products, Asia for Morningstar, overseeing the business in North Asia, Japan, and ASEAN markets. Carlin spent 16 years at Thomson Reuters where he held many roles, and most recently served as Director of Investment & Advisory products for Asia Pacific. In his career he has worked in the United States, Australia, and Hong Kong. In addition, Carlin was a key member of Irish Funds, an industry body, which promotes Ireland as a domicile for funds and asset servicing.
Daniel is the Head of Blockchain Innovation Lab of FORMS, a leading digital technology services provider to Hong Kong’s virtual banks. He is currently spearheading innovations and promoting blockchain technology education and industry collaboration across financial and technology communities across Asia.
Prior to joining FORMS in 2019, Daniel was a Blockchain Engineer and Researcher at crypto.com. He also is the Founder of DAA Fund, a private fund that adopts arbitraging strategies across global digital asset exchanges, which pledges 7% of the returns for setting up FinTech scholarships for local universities. He is an early adopter and investor in multiple DeFi projects and is passionate in the ways of how bridging private and public blockchain innovations may co-create a better FinTech future.
His previous journeys also involve working in asset management analysis and strategies for RBC and Dah Sing, and being a serial entrepreneur and intrapreneur in the fashion, education, and social enterprise sectors in Hong Kong.
Linda is the CEO and co-founder of Zocial Earn, an influencer and referral marketing platform in Hong Kong. She previously worked as the technical project manager at Credit Suisse. She is a full-stack developer with smart contract experience, and passionate about leveraging blockchain technology to solve economic and social issues such as the implementation of Universal Basic Income.
