Ville Sointu is the Chief Strategist for digital currencies at Nordea Bank. With a career spanning since 2002 in fintech, Ville has held pivotal roles globally, innovating in financial services and connected devices. His expertise is recognized in influential circles, including the European Central Bank’s former Digital Euro Market Advisory Group, the board of Mobey Forum and the advisory board of GSMA’s Inclusive Tech Lab. Ville has also contributed to a number of key industry and policy organizations like the EBF, OECD and EBA and in his free time enjoys co-hosting the ‘Fintech Daydreaming’ podcast, sharing his insights into fintech’s evolving landscape.

Emma has over 23 years’ experience in Financial services, mainly in retail banking. She has worked across the three lines of defence, front line customer services, through risk and GIA, before returning to the first line business in 2015. She has spent the last 15 years focused on Risk Management, Sourcing and Operational Resilience. Continuing in this, in January she joined Nationwide to lead the Operational Resilience agenda. Emma is passionate about people, diversity and the development of talent. She considers herself customer focused and is also driven by our responsibilities to the communities in which we operate. From a personal perspective, she is married, has three daughters and enjoys travel, food and running, as a way to support her own mental wellbeing. 

Joel Perlman is the Co-founder and Senior Managing Partner of OakNorth, the leading fintech business focused on transforming how entrepreneurs grow their businesses by providing them with access to much-needed credit and other banking services from a partner who understands their business. He started his first business, Copal Partners, a financial research company, in 2002 with just $60k. Over 12 years, he and his Co-founder, Rishi Khosla, scaled it to a 3,000-employee organization across 13 markets, before selling it to Moody’s Corporation (NYSE: MCO) in 2014. They then set out to build their second business – OakNorth, a leading fintech neobank.

Joel grew up in Bogota, Colombia. He began his career as a Consultant at McKinsey & Company and has degrees from the London School of Economics and Georgetown University.

Joris Hensen is responsible for the development of the Deutsche Bank API program, which he co-founded at the beginning of 2015. In his more than ten years at Deutsche Bank, he has worked in various international projects as a project and innovation manager.
Joris Hensen became enthusiastic about innovations and future trends at a very early stage and in 2012 he was given the opportunity to set up a corporate foresight program in which future scenarios and innovation strategies for Deutsche Bank were developed. From 2014 on, as part of this, he was also a guest lecturer at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen on the topics of foresight, innovation and design.
What once began as a foresight scenario was officially launched in November 2017 as a developer portal, which offers external partners the opportunity to connect personalized apps and services via the API of Deutsche Bank (dbAPI), thus opening up new areas of value creation for Deutsche Bank.
Joris Hensen understands himself as an intrapreneur and is dedicated about future trends and how they can change and improve people’s lives.
Follow him at @joris_hensen on Twitter.

Saira Khan is the Head of Innovation and Partnerships for First Direct Bank(HSBC), was recognised in Innovate Finance ‘Women in FinTech Powerlist 2023 & 2022’. Having led the creation of innovation teams and centres in the United Kingdom, Asia, and the United States, while building and testing data management and open banking through global hackathons, she has developed a unique vision and reputation for being a catalyst for transformation around the world on leading deliveries with commercial impact. She is known as a key connector and championing moves towards a digital-first culture, enabling greater collaboration and connectivity between startups and corporations with proven results. While her passion and advocacy for change sets her apart from her peers in the finance sector, it is her work mentoring and supporting global talent in Africa, Asia, and the United States that drives Saira as she focuses and champions efforts around diversity, inclusion, education, and sustainability.

Howard has undertaken a diverse range of roles in the financial services sector spanning the disciplines of operational management, corporate relationship management, strategy and risk management.  

Passionate about preventing Economic Crime his current role is to provide Oversight of Economic Crime risks with particular focus on screening and transaction monitoring. 

He is an advisory board member for Cifas, the UKs largest cross-sector fraud data sharing organisation, as well as a member of the European Banking Federation Exco financial crime strategy group.   He is also an active member of the Europol Financial Intelligence Public Private Partnership. 

As an active LinkedIn member Howard regularly shares thoughts and insights into the world of Economic Crime Prevention and the latest developments around the globe. 

Howard enjoys running getting in a 5km jog on most days. 

Originally a Commercial Banker, Helene is an Associate Director with the Centre for Digital Banking and Finance in LIBF, an experienced FinTech Programme Director, exited entrepreneur, educator and author. Her career boasts a number of ‘firsts’, including the creation of the FinTech Scale Colab Programme for Rainmaking, the Inaugural Programme of Education and Events for Innovate Finance, the FinTech on the Entrepreneurship Masters’ for UCL. Board and advisory roles include the Spanish digital identity scale up, Biid, the UK safeguarding RegTech, Kalgera, and the SME payments company, TomatoPay.  Helene was named on the Computer Weekly 100 Women in Tech Award, the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Power List, and the Fintech Magazine 100 Women in Fintech list. She was also part of the FCA 2020 Data Sprint on SME Lending, and the recipient of the FT/Google Digital Pioneer Award. Her new book ‘Reinventing Banking & Finance: Frameworks to navigate global fintech innovation’ (Kogan) came out in November 2020, and was named the number one banking book for 2021 by Investopedia.