John Dourekas is Kitco's Media Division Director and Kitco's Digital Metals Group Chief Business Development Officer. He is responsible for all aspects of Kitco Media, including its programming, the division's expanding digital properties, mobile applications, editorial units, online assets, marketing, and overall operations. He leads media content, digital metals products, asset tokenization, business development operations, new product development, marketing, and the technology platforms and functions of the company's advertising sales and strategy worldwide. Since joining Kitco in 2008, John has orchestrated multiple ambitious IT, media, marketing, and digital metals strategies. John is an expert in complex transformations; he has lead content creation and oversight of media and distribution, crafted revenue-generating marketing strategies, developed programming, and negotiated key partnerships. John leads the VaultChain™ Gold and Silver products development for Kitco, one of the first precious metals trading platforms using blockchain technology, and Kitco.Gold is one of the first stablecoins backed by physical gold. Prior to joining Kitco, John spent 15 years in technology consulting, advising a variety of top global telecom clients on new product development, innovation processes, start-up strategy, information technology, and business issues. You can follow him on Twitter at @dourekas

Eng. Mohammed Alkaff AlHashmi is a computer science engineer with more than 18 years of experience. With this accumulative experience he focuses on Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Industrial automation, and IOTs. He started his career as an Intelligence Network Engineer at Huawei. Other than the technology part, he has vast experience in Business and management. He is a serial Entrepreneur who believes in projects that have a purpose and could bring value to the community, so he started MCPM Automation in the MENA region that provides cutting edge techs to support Manufacturing, Smart Cities, Energy, Sustainability and Environment. At present he is the CEO of MCPM MENA, MCPM Holding and UI Ventures, he is also partner and board member of CYNAX labs, Kaptive, Co-Founder and Executive Board Member of IslamicCoin which considered one of the mega blockchain projects and others, taking care of the business development, growth and strategy. As Artificial Intelligence became an important pillar of Health technologies and R & D, Eng. Mohammed is also partner and a board member of Quant7 fund that invests in research and development within the medical and health care sectors, and blue ocean unique companies like Cellvera and Prepaire as well as finds opportunities for mergers and acquisition. Having a futuristic approach and unique perspective about things, he always believes in giving back to the society through his knowledge and by creating success stories. He is passionate about bringing top class technologies for the development of the region and thrives on making the Earth a better place to live.

Dr. Cédric Jeannot is co-founder and CEO of Be Mobile Africa, a neo bank which focuses on the unbanked and underbanked in Africa. The company covers 35 markets and is known for operating one of the largest blockchain-based payment systems as well as having one of the most competitive saving’s accounts. Be Mobile Africa recently became a Harvard Business School Case Study.

Dr. Jeannot is also the co-founder of Be Financial Group, a Hong Kong based investment holding firm focused on emerging markets, Chairman of Be One, a challenger bank for crypto natives that offers a range of fiat and crypto services all in one account and a Growth Coach at one of Canada’s largest tech incubators, Communitech where he mentors start-up founders.

Prior to founding Be Financial Group, he was the co-founder and CEO of APrivacy, an award-winning FinTech digital security company who provided encryption and privacy software to the banking industry.

He was named as one of 16 Most Promising Entrepreneurs in Asia-Pacific by EY and served as a Canadian delegate to the G20 Young Entrepreneur Summit for several years. Dr. Jeannot is a frequent speaker at digital conferences worldwide on the topics of FinTech, Trade, Digital security, Impact investing and Poverty alleviation and has been quoted in a number of global press publications.

Dr. Jeannot holds a PhD in Applied Security from the University of Louisville (USA), a Master in Computer Science from the University of Louisville (USA) and a Bachelor in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Montpellier (France).

Peter Englund developed a passion for emerging markets early in his career. Being an active ambassador for growth and development – and in setting high standards for himself and people around him – he has led numerous businesses in both dynamic and challenging environments. Together with his high performing teams, he constantly looks for ways to bring out the best in himself and people around him – a trait originating from his time as squad leader in a Swedish Attack Diving unit.

The Middle East & Africa region has a special place in his heart, and is also where he has spent most of his professional career. He is currently based in the Dubai International Financial Center, where he heads up Zurich’s regional commercial activities. In addition to his current role, Peter also remains active in giving back to a region that has been good to him and his business. He mentors start-ups and InsureTech companies; is an active speaker and contributor at industry specific and regional events; and also gives frequent lectures to foster Middle Eastern talent development.

Peter brings a wealth of expertise and experience in the areas of commercial insurance and reinsurance, investment management, financial lines propositions and Middle Eastern geopolitics. He is a Swedish national and holds a Master’s Degree from the Royal Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance from the Stockholm School of Business

Dr Ira is the founder of Fintech 4Longevity, a research and consulting community helping the financial sector be well prepared for the demographic trend of ageing. She is an expert in the economics of ageing with a particular focus on the role of fintech in improving the financial well-being of mid-life and older adults. In 2020, Ira joined a working group at the World Economic Forum on ‘Redefining Retirement’.
Ira is the founder of the International Financial Innovation for Ageing and Longevity Forum, an international forum which deals with the intersection of longevity, finance and technology. Her academic research deals with the effect of retirement and changing health on the economic outcomes of households within different pension and healthcare systems.
From 2008 to 2019, Ira served as a non-executive director to numerous public companies in Israel including the Bank of Jerusalem and worked previously as an accountant at KPMG.

In her current role at the AMF, Dr Youssef provides support to Arab countries in fields of Fintech, digital financial transformation, and digital financial inclusion. Moreover, she initiated the creation and development of the AMF’s ‘FinxAr’ index – a regional fintech index to track the development of the fintech sector in Arab countries.
A regular speaker in international fora, Dr Youssef has co-authored numerous fintech publications related to the Arab region, such as Open Banking and Open Finance, CBDCs, Digital identity, eKYC and Customer On-Boarding, as well as the tri-lingual (Arabic, English and French) fintech glossary; in addition to delivering regular training sessions on topics including fintech and digital financial services.
Prior to joining the AMF in 2016 she spent almost 12 years as Deputy Debt Manager for the Ministry of Finance in her native Egypt.

Abdulmajeed Alsukhan is the CEO and co-founder of Tamara, Saudi’s first buy-now-pay-later service provider.Tamara launched in August 2020 to address the growing demand for more inclusive and flexible payment methods as online commerce surged in the Kingdom. The pandemic also gave Tamara’s leadership an opportunity to explore new ways of building a global remote team with a unique corporate culture, which is why today the company employs over 50 top talents in four markets: Saudi, UAE, Vietnam, and Germany.  Before launching Tamara, Abdulmajeed co-founded Habli in 2017, a Saudi-based logistics provider for grocery delivery, which was acquired in the same year by Nana Direct, where he joined as co-founder and helped lead the companies growth from less than 50 employees to over 170 in two years and raised over $27M in funding. Abdulmajeed has a B.A. in financial economics from California State University and M.A. in Economy Policy from Boston University.  

Leading the innovation arm of the world’s third largest insurance company, Dr. Mezzour is responsible for developing the group’s innovation capabilities-. Co-creating value propositions with start-ups within The Garage (HITS co-creation space) and within the wider HITS network projects include Human-Centred Design, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain/DLT, Digital Insurance & Payments, and Cybersecurity. Dr. Samyr has over 13 years of experience from various industries such as strategy consulting, insurance, renewable energy, foremost on digital strategies and developing InsurTech solutions. Samyr has a CAS from MIT Sloan School of Management, a PhD from HEC Lausanne, and an MSc from the ETH Zurich.

The first solo artist to hold both number one and number two spots simultaneously on Billboard Hot 100 charts twice, now working on Akon City – a $6 billion project with a tech hub

Based in Jersey, Channel Islands, Jamie is responsible for designing and delivering the overall Customer Experience and Digital banking strategy for RBS International – the offshore division of the RBS Group. In this role, Jamie holds overall responsibility for all customer insight and market research programmes; End-to-end Customer Journey Management, and on-going development of all customer facing digital platforms and channels. Outside of banking, he serves as a Non-Executive Director in the Not-For-Profit sector, and is currently Chairman of Jersey Women’s Refuge.    

The 24-year FBI veteran who has assembled a toolbox of effective tactics for high-pressure negotiations. At Fintech Surge, Chris will have a fireside chat with Ken Rutkowski on advocating for your organization's interests, building trust between stakeholders by negotiating smarter. After 24 years with the FBI, Chris Voss has assembled a toolbox of effective tactics for high-pressure negotiations. In his talk, Voss shares the specific things you can do to turn the tide of a negotiation in your favor—illustrating his points with both riveting, high-stakes stories of criminal negotiations and humorous, personal anecdotes from his trips to the mall alike. From why you always want to get your counterpart to say your name to why “yes” is the last thing you want to hear, Voss explains how to move a conversation along, how to startle people in the right way, and how to uncover what someone’s real motivation is.  

Dr. Juergen Rahmel received his PhD (Artificial Intelligence) in Germany for research covering Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Dr. Rahmel has gained extensive experience in the international financial sector, in roles as Director, Head of IT and Programme Manager of global initiatives for multinational banks. He served as the Head of Artificial Intelligence in the Applied Innovation Team of HSBC as well as Head of Innovation Quality management for all areas of FinTech technologies. He holds an MBA in International Management and currently is Chief Digital Officer of HSBC Germany. He also lectures on Financial Technology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

Alan Qi is the vice president and chief data scientist of Ant Financial, where he leads the AI department that is helping build machine learning and deep learning platforms (including search and recommendation engines) and works with various business units to develop analytical and predictive solutions. Previously, he was a tenured associate professor in CS and statistics at Purdue University. Alan is an associate editor of JMLR and served as area chair of ICML. He has received Microsoft's Newton Breakthrough Research Award in 2008 and USA NSF Career award in 2011. At Alibaba and Ant Financial he has built large-scale machine learning and speech recognition teams and worked on applications in customer service, Ads, and microloan. Alan holds a PhD from MIT.