Keynote presentations

Why finance needs its own brand of leadership

About the speaker:

Emilia Bunea, Ph.D., CFA, is a leadership scholar, non-executive director and entrepreneur whose nearly-two-decade-long corporate career as CFO and CEO in the financial services industry included overseeing a €20 billion balance sheet and leading an organization serving two million customers. She is co-founder of Ed.movie Inc. and serves on the board of an asset management company.

Dr. Bunea’s research has been published in prominent academic and practitioner outlets. She lectures on leadership at business schools and corporations, and has written and produced “Crossroads Life”, the first-ever cinematic management case study, based on the real-life story of a finance leader. Emilia blogs about the human side of leadership for Psychology Today, and her TED talk at London Business School on how top CEOs fuel their leadership has attracted wide attention. Emilia holds an MBA from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her upcoming book “Leadership for the CFO” (Routledge, 2025) attends to the specific leadership needs and preoccupations of finance executives.

The promise of digital finance: Greater transparency, enhanced efficiency, and more effective and less burdensome regulation.

About the speaker:

The Honorable Allan Mendelowitz, Ph.D. is the President of the ACTUS Financial Research Foundation. The ACTUS Foundation is focused on expanding financial transparency, efficiency, and digital finance through the development and adoption of a royalty-free algorithmic financial contract standard. His most recent government service was as the Chairperson of the Federal Housing Finance Board, the regulator of the Federal Home Loan Banks. Previously he has served in several federal government positions including Executive Director of the Congressional Trade Deficit Review Commission, Executive Vice President of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and Managing Director of the U.S. GAO. Previously he was a Brookings Institution Economic Policy Fellow. He has published in scholarly journals and popular publications, lectured widely in the United States and abroad, and has testified before the U.S. Congress more than 145 times on financial and economic issues.

Dr. Mendelowitz received his undergraduate education in economics at Columbia University (A.B.) and his graduate degrees in economics from Northwestern University (M.A., Ph.D.).

What we can learn today about the markets of tomorrow: Crypto, crashes and credible research

About the speaker:

Albert Menkveld is Professor of Finance at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute. He holds a Tinbergen PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and spent multiple years on visiting positions at NYU, Wharton, and Stanford. Albert’s research agenda is focused on securities trading, liquidity, asset pricing, and financial econometrics. He has published numerous academic articles including over a dozen in top journals (the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies), and was the best publishing Dutch economist in 2020, 2021 and 2022 according to Economentop 40.

Albert is a former president of the European Finance Association, and is currently Associate Editor at the Journal of Financial Economics, member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), member of the Capital Market Committee of the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), and member of the Advisory Committee of EuroCTP.