Central Bank Digital Currencies;
from concept to reality

For three decades Barry has been a leading, independent, tech innovator, architect and entrepreneur. Leading innovation first in the UK National Health Service and later in Fintech, Blockchain and Frontier technologies – including Fintech regulation. Winning major UK, US and European patents along the way.

From this (and an earlier systems design career in the banking and telecoms sectors) he’s long been an independent voice as a writer, ecological and systems thinker and analyst,

Recently mostly focussed on Web 3.0/Metaverse, Decentralisation and DeFi, the global societal implications of the design and advent of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the impact of financialised framing and biases on society and planetary ecology via the Humane Economics project.

An early champion of Crowdfunding he envisioned and was first to propose and then advocate a Fintech ‘Innovation Unit’ (and innovations remit) within the UK financial regulator (FSA/FCA from August 2012) and successfully campaigned for its subsequent creation.

For this he co-creating the Crowdfunding:Deep Impact conference, The Westminster Crowdfunding Forum and the All-Party-Parliamentary group which it spawned. The resulting FCA Fintech Innovation Unit has since been copied around the world.

He is Founder & Chair of the British Blockchain & Frontier Tech Assoc Founder The Humane Economics Network and a Visiting Fellow at Portsmouth University Business School.

Lee has extensive banking experience in product management, risk, payments and strategy. With responsibility for payment strategy Lee supports customers across multiple brands collaborating with internal and external payment partners.

Lee joined NatWest after 13 years at the Co-operative Bank where he held senior leadership roles within product and payments. Latterly owning the payment strategy together with responsibility for regulatory change including PSD2 and key scheme relationships.

Married with a daughter, Lee is a keen footballer and captains his local side. He is an ardent supporter of Liverpool FC and has followed them all over Europe.

Jannah Patchay is the founder of Markets Evolution, a consultancy specialising in financial markets innovation and in helping financial institutions and fintechs to define, develop and execute their commercial strategies in a highly regulated environment. Her passion lies in building the financial markets of the future, harnessing frontier technologies to create new and innovative financial services and products that can promote wider social and environmental benefit, and greater access to financial services. Her current focus areas include sustainable and green finance, and the development of digital asset markets and central bank digital currencies.

She is Policy Lead and an Originating Member of the Digital Pound Foundation, a not-for-profit membership organisation established to advocate for the introduction of digital Pound, and for a healthy and diverse ecosystem for new forms of digital money – both public and private – in the UK. She is also a member of the steering committee for Global Blockchain Convergence, co-host of the Financial Markets Insights podcast, and writes on financial and technology innovation for Best Execution magazine and other publications.

Oliver is an Advisor at the BIS Innovation Hub, focusing on topics related to tokenisation and CBDC. As part of Project Helvetia team, he is addressing functional, operational and policy questions related to the issuance of a wholesale CBDC. Before joining the BIS Innovation Hub, Oliver was a senior economist at the Swiss National Bank and a visiting fellow at the Sveriges Riksbank. Oliver holds a PhD in economics from the University of Basel.

James is a global economist at HSBC. He joined the Economics team in 2013 having previously worked within the Asset Allocation research team. His global work focuses on longer-term trends and themes, and the impact that they have on the economy and policy decisions today. Demographic data is at the heart of much of his work, but he has also written about urbanisation, the role of technology in the economy and how the world is moving away from cash. Alongside this, he provides economics coverage of Scandinavia. James holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Bath.

Aman serves as SVP for RealNet Central at FIS where he leads corporate strategy in advancing global real-time payments. In this role, Aman is responsible for developing and delivering the technology and services that will empower nations to enhance or develop account-to-account, cross-border real-time payment schemes for their central infrastructure. This includes CBDC and digital currencies.​

Previously, Aman ran the Enterprise Strategy & Innovation function for FIS International Banking & Payments business. ​

Prior to FIS, Aman worked at Accenture, Lloyds Banking Group and Capco. Aman held a variety of strategic leadership positions that intersected across various financial services segments (retail, wholesale, insurance), functional domains (banking, payments, risk, sales) and FinTech (legacy and disruptive tech). ​

Before joining FIS, Aman worked for a Venture Capital firm where he played the role of Venture Builder, creating and managing a portfolio of start-up and scale-up firms. ​

Aman holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Birmingham University and a masters degree in Management Science & Operational Research from Warwick Business School. He recently received a diploma in Innovation & Design Thinking Executive Leadership from the Royal College of Arts.

Caroline is Head of Financial Services Regulatory at leading independent law firm Burness Paull.

Dual qualified, she has worked both in private practice and for a UK Bank (where she headed up the retail banking legal team). She has extensive knowledge and experience in advising on all matters relevant to retail banking and payments, together with particular expertise in consumer credit.

Caroline regularly advises clients on a broad range of matters relevant to the UK’s payments and financial services regulatory markets and works closely with FinTechs to ensure their products are compliant. She has an interest in emerging payment technologies including central bank digital currencies and regularly writes/talks on the topic.”

Johannes is product and project manager for crypto products at the eToro Labs and Research Coordinator at the Financial Transparency Group at the University of Copenhagen. He joined eToro through the 2019 acquisition of the proto-DeFi startup Firmo, where he led product development. Johannes has published widely in academic journals and conferences on DeFi and the application of permissionless and permissioned blockchain solutions in the financial services.

Dr. Novelette Panton is the Division Chief of the Financial Markets Infrastructure Division at the Bank of Jamaica. She has responsibility for the Payment System, Cambio & Remittance Licensing & Monitoring Departments. Her area of responsibility extends to the provision of authorization to Payment Service Providers to issue electronic retail payment services, as well as researching, advising and implementing FinTech innovations. In addition, the licensing and supervision of Money Services Businesses (MSBs), that is Cambios and Remittance entities fall under her purview.

Novelette is the Chairperson of the Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) Steering Committee, facilitating the piloting and implementation of the country’s CDC. She is also the Deputy Chair of the Risk Management Committee, a member of the Central Bank’s Committee of Administration, as well as a member of the National Payments System Council.

She has served the Bank of Jamaica for over 38 years in various areas, inclusive of Currency Operations, Economic Research, Human Resource, Training & Pension Administration, Corporate Risk Management and Financial Markets Infrastructure.

Novelette has represented the Bank at many international conferences and meetings and has served as a member of several international committees including the Caricom Fintech Working Group; Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA) Fintech Expert Forum, serving as a member of the CBC and the Fintech Data Gaps Working Groups; World Bank Expert Group on Faster Payments and Western Hemisphere Payments and Security Settlement Forum.

Novelette holds a PhD in Economic Development Policy from the University of the West Indies and is a Justice of the Peace.

Miles leads the overall market operations of eCurrency. He meets frequently with central banks and customers to discuss their needs to contextualize eCurrency products and services for their markets. He helps customers analyze the business drivers, explore innovation opportunities, define the implementation roadmap and processes, and assess the potential impacts. He works closely with the eCurrency R&D teams to define near- and long-term product roadmap according to market requirements.

Miles is the project director of the Bank of Jamaica CBDC project for eCurrency, providing oversight and strategic inputs to the project and supporting the engagement with market participants.

Miles has been in the management consulting and technology business within McKinsey, Deloitte and Ernst &Young for 25 years prior to co-founding eCurrency. He built and led the CRM practice for Deloitte in Greater China and TMT practice of E&Y in Greater China. His clients included financial service institutions, telecom service providers and digital technology vendors. He has advised various companies in the payments field to develop and implement their strategies. Miles holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Business Administration.

Manuel Klein is Product Manager at Deutsche Bank working on blockchain solutions in corporate payments and cash management as well as Digital Currencies. Before working for Deutsche Bank, he worked as a technology consultant at EY focusing on the adoption of blockchain technology in financial markets. Manuel is also a founding member at the Digital Euro Association.

Graduate from Sciences Po Paris and Law University ASSAS Paris II, I started at the Banque de France as a lawyer in market infrastructures, crypto-assets and blockchain technologies. I’m now deputy head of the Digital Money and Innovation Department at the Banque de France, where we are currently leading experiments on both wholesale and retail CBDC.

Jim has served in the payments industry for over forty years. Learning his craft in the very practical world of back office operations he then moved into more strategic roles from the mid 1990s. Amongst other roles he served on the clearing committee of the ECU Banking Association, the forerunner of the Euro Banking Association. He also served on numerous working groups of CLS Bank and assisted in its creation. In his roles with HSBC and NatWest he was their payments industry liaison executive helping to drive thought leadership in numerous areas including PSD 1 & 2, SEPA, Faster Payments and cheque clearing changes. In 2015 he helped drive the UK ring fencing project at HSBC, assisting in the allocation of sort codes between the ring-fenced and non-ring-fenced bank as well as arranging the on-boarding of the ring-fenced bank into certain UK infrastructures.

Since 2014 Jim has been increasingly involved in Blockchain developments as well as developments in central bank digital currencies. He is a member of the Whitechapel Think Tank Plenary Council and a member of its Future of Payments Working Group. In this capacity he contributed to a major paper presented to the House of Lords on the future implications for Blockchain in the UK. He also worked on a major paper for the central banks of Singapore and Canada on the impacts of a cross border Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) on global payments.

More recently he is a founding member of the Digital Pound Foundation (DPF) which was set up in 2021 to lobby for and educate on the creation of a CBDC in the UK, He is part of the DPF Steering Committee and has published blogs on the payments related impacts of a CBDC. He also co-authored the DPF responses to CBDC consultations from the Bank Of England and the House of Lords. He has also been invited to join the European of the DPF which is the Digital Euro Association.