Asia-Pacific FinTech Month 2022

Larry Cao, CFA, is senior director of industry research at CFA Institute. He conducts original research with a focus on investment industry trends and investment expertise. Mr. Cao’s current research interests include multi-asset strategies and fintech. He frequently speaks at industry conferences on these topics and has more than 20 years of experience in the investment industry. Mr. Cao started his career at the People’s Bank of China as a US dollar fixed-income portfolio manager. He has worked at HSBC as senior manager for the Asia-Pacific region; Munder Capital Management, managing US and international equity portfolios; and Morningstar/Ibbotson Associates, managing multi-asset investment programs for a global financial institution clientele. Mr. Cao has been interviewed by a wide range of business media, including Bloomberg, CNN, the Financial Times, South China Morning Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard University and was a visiting scholar at MIT.

• Chief Financial Officer of Ant Bank (Hong Kong), one of the 8 virtual banks established in Hong Kong.
• Main focus is on international FinTech banking business in Hong Kong and advising businesses in Singapore, Thailand, Bangladesh and Macau.
• Former Financial Controller of Citi Malaysia.
• Established the first Corporate Treasury function in Citi China for the national implementation of interest rate liberalization and to support international Renminbi business development in 2011.
• Former project management officer of the Citi-Orient Securities Co. formation.
• Certified Public Accountant and Chartered Banker.

Matt Hougan is one of the world’s leading experts on crypto, ETFs, and financial technology.

He is Chief Investment Officer for Bitwise Asset Management, creator of the world's first cryptocurrency index fund. In that role, he helps create the index methodologies that underlie Bitwise’s investment products, and conducts fundamental research into the role cryptoassets can play in a diversified portfolio.

A three-time member of the Barron’s ETF Roundtable, Hougan was previously CEO of ETF.com, where he helped create the first institutionally oriented ETF classification and ratings system. Hougan led the sale of that business in three transactions to FactSet, BATS, and Informa, in 2015 and 2016.

He was also Chairman and CEO of Inside ETFs, the world’s largest ETF conference, where he helped guide efforts to educate financial advisors on the role ETFs and index-based investments can play in building efficient portfolios.

Hougan’s thoughts on investing have been widely profiled in the media, including in Barron’s, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Institutional Investor, CNBC, and the Financial Times. He is co-author of two publications for the CFA Institute Research Foundation: “A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange-Traded Funds,” published in 2015, and “Cryptoasset: The Guide to Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrencies For Professional Investors.” A crypto columnist for Forbes, Hougan has been featured on Bloomberg’s “Masters of Business.”


Hougan serves on the Board of Directors of Equbot, creator of the world’s first artificial-intelligence-driven family of ETFs, is a co-founder of Advisor Circle, a product studio for growth-oriented financial advisors, and is a strategic advisor to a number of firstm, including Blockworks and StratiFi.

He graduated from Bowdoin College with a B.A. in philosophy.

Siva Raj Jeyarajah is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He currently heads the Finance, Methods and Risk Management Department of Maybank’s Group Operations Division. Siva Raj is a qualified Accountant and holds the ACCA qualification and the CPA certification, including a BSc (Hons) from the National University of Malaysia, and MBA from the University of Lancaster UK. He is also a member of the Malaysian Institute of Accountants (MIA) and a fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (UK).
Siva Raj joined Maybank in 1995, starting off his career as a Graduate Trainee in Maybank at the Branch, after which he went on to assume roles in Management Reporting, Business Planning, Financial Analysis, Data warehousing and Business Intelligence in the Finance and Global Banking Divisions of Maybank Group. Siva Raj had also represented Maybank on the Supervisory Board of their associate company, Uzbek Leasing International in Uzbekistan, in 2013. In addition to his current role, he is also heading the Group’s internal carbon emission management and reporting function which forms part of the Group’s Sustainability initiative.

D Kumaratunge is the Assistant Governor in Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL). He has more than 30 years’ experience in Central Banking and worked in several departments in different position including Economic Research, Information Technology Department and Payments and Settlements Department.
D Kumaratunge is the Board Member of Lanka Financial Services Bureau Ltd, Member of the Expert Committee for Digital Banking, Blockchain related Industries, Member of the Steering committee of National Transit Card Implementation Project, Member of the committee to formulate the Regulations to execute digitized system for Spot fine for traffic offences, he worked as Country Director of the SAARC Payment Council (SPC), Alternate Country Director of Sri Lanka in Asian Clearing Union (ACU), Secretary of the National Payment Council which is the highest decision making body of the Payment system of Sri Lanka, Team Leader of the Bank of Korea, Knowledge Partnership Programme on Payment Systems, Member of the Public-Private Dialog on E-commerce Reform & also a Member of the Research Panel of International Labour Organization (ILO).

Tengfu Li is an Assistant Vice President – Analyst with Moody’s Financial Institutions Group. Based in Singapore, he is responsible for the credit ratings of financial institutions in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Prior to Moody’s, Tengfu worked at OCBC Bank, where he developed credit risk models.
Tengfu holds a MSc in Accountancy from Nanyang Technological University, and a BEng in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore.

Marco Lim has over 14 years of experience overseeing electronic sales and trading operations in institutional fixed income, commodities, currencies with major financial institutions. Prior to joining MaiCapital, a Hong Kong licensed virtual asset fund manager. He was the Head of North Asia Fixed Income, Commodities, Currencies electronic distribution for Goldman Sachs Asia LLC. Mr. Lim is the co-fund manager for Blockchain Opportunity Fund and the fund manager for the Bitcoin Plus Investment Fund.

Mr. I-Cheng Liu (IC Liu) is a Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School alumnus, he received his B.A in Business Administration from National Taiwan University and MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is the Chairman of the Wharton Taiwan Alumni Club and the Honorary Director of CFA Society Taiwan. His last well-known position was the General Manager of the NEXT Bank. Prior to that, he has served as the Chief Innovation Officer at the CTBC Financial Holding Corporation, CEO (Cards and Payment Division ) of CTBC Bank, Chairman of EasyCard Corporation, the Corporate/Consumer Banking Head of Cathay United Bank, Senior Vice President of Cathay Financial Holdings, and Vice President of JPMorgan Investment Banking Division. He has worked in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei, and visited 31 home stadiums of Major League Baseball. He is also a film investor and a feature writer for several magazines in Taiwan. Currently he is a self-employed entrepreneur who infuses his work and life with his passion toward culture, art, sports, and finance.

Dr Lok is responsible for nurturing ethics trainers, producing ethics bite-size media as well as facilitating member societies to promote ethical behavior in their local capital markets. In his role, Dr Lok works with member societies to advance awareness and adoption of CFA Institute ethics and standards, as well as policy positions on ethical conduct and culture related issues. This involves outreach to local stakeholders, including the industry, financial regulator, and the public across the APAC markets. Dr Lok also manages ethics related content and events together with societies leaders as well as facilitating their outreach activities on the Asia-Pacific Research Exchange (ARX) post publication.
Dr Lok joined CFA Institute in February 2014 as the Director of Capital Markets Policy in the Standards & Advocacy Division (APAC) before moving to the role of Director, Society Advocacy Engagement (APAC) in January 2017. In that role, Dr Lok has built up close relationships with society leaders and volunteers in the APAC region. Dr Lok was also responsible for directing the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Research Exchange (ARX). Over the years, he co-authored two monographs on portfolio pumping and market manipulation, submitted numerous regulatory consultation papers, written many blogs & articles and supported the Singapore Society in their Industry Research series in the Singapore Business Times.
During the decade prior to joining CFA Institute, Dr Lok was the senior investment manager of a Chinese solar-energy conglomerate and worked as both a buy and sell-side research analyst in Singapore. Dr Lok also served as the Adjunct head of two modules in Nanyang Technological University (南阳理工学院) as well as the module leaders for various universities in Hong Kong SAR, Mainland China, and Singapore.
Dr Lok graduated with a degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2003. Subsequently, he went on to read his MBA at the University of Manchester in 2013. He obtained the FRM certification from the Global Association of Risk Professionals in 2007 and was subsequently awarded the CFA certification from the CFA Institute in 2008. Dr Lok was recently awarded a doctorate degree from the University of Middlesex, London in 2021. His latest publication was a co-authorship with ACCA entitled “21 Sector Analysis: A Questioning Framework for Investors”.

Aaron is CEO of LUMIQ, and Principal of Lumen Advisors.
Prior to that, Aaron was Head of Portfolio Management at PIMCO managing global and emerging markets funds and overseeing Asia investment strategies. Before joining PIMCO, he was Head of Fixed Income (Portfolio Management) for Allianz Dresdner Asset Management (Asia) and Rosenberg Capital Management (RCM) Global Investors (San Francisco), managing global balanced and fixed income portfolios. He started his career in IBM.
He currently serves on the board of directors of Triumph Capital International (Singapore), Guotai Junan Asset Management (Hong Kong), Vice-Chair, Board of Trustees of the Research Foundation (US) and board editor on the Journal of Futures Markets (US). He also is senior advisor to Hashkey Capital.
Previously, Aaron was the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the CFA Institute (US), and on boards of the Singapore Foreign Exchange Markets Committee (SFEMC), Government of Singapore Pension Fund, Investment Management Association of Singapore (iMAS), Wealth Management Institute (WMI), BNP Paribas Bank Hedge Fund Center (SMU). He has been Senior Advisor to the Harvest Fund Management (Beijing), Bosera Asset Management (Shenzhen) and Minsheng Tonghui Asset Management (Shanghai).
Aaron graduated with a PhD in International Financial Economics from Anderson School, UCLA, and other graduate programs at Stanford University, MIT and University of Chicago and an engineering degree from NUS. He is a CFA charterholder.

Jo has been in Asia for 25 years and has held senior Asia Pacific wide management positions, successfully leading sales, business development, marketing, and client relationship management divisions; and has both built and managed large and effective regionally located teams.

Jo was expatriated to Hong Kong with Morgan Stanley and has worked for several global institutions including HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Triple A Partners. Jo’s roles have covered intermediary, buy and sell side as well as entrepreneurial groups, and now is Managing Director, Asia Pacific for the CAIA Association.

Jo enjoys the reputation of being hard-working, capable, committed, and commercial; is a seasoned presenter and sought out moderator, regularly contributing to leading forums addressing topical aspects of the financial services sector, with a particular focus on the Asia Pacific private markets landscape. Jo was a founding executive committee member of AIMA Hong Kong and now sits on its Education Committee, and holds corporate and NFP advisory board directorships, is a Fellow of Singapore University of Social Sciences and is an advisory council member of UPACA Gurukul (India).

Abhilasha is the Founder and CEO of Blue Sky Analytics, a Climate-Tech start-up using satellite data and AI to build environmental monitoring and climate-risk data products. She is a Fulbright scholar, Yale and IIT alum with over ten years of work experience in private equity, business development, product development and environmental policy.

She began her career as a Research Associate at J-PAL, working on air pollution regulation with the Ministry of Environment, India. After her Masters in Environmental Management from Yale, she worked at pay-as-you-go solar home system startup PEG Africa as a data manager, and GoldenSet Capital on executing sustainable infrastructure investments of over $150 million.

In 2018, Abhilasha returned to India to build Blue Sky Analytics with her core belief that “data can enable and change an entire ecosystem". She deems Blue Sky as a focal point of enabling global climate action with high quality, high resolution accessible environmental and climate intelligence to various global stakeholders from large asset managers, to insurance providers to journalists and policymakers. Abhilasha believes that the day, data on pollution in a lake or emissions from a power plant, both far away from human settlements is made available to human beings on their smartphones in a user-friendly manner, would be the start of revolution on climate action.

Dr. Carlos Queiroz is currently the head of data management for CCIB, where he is responsible for Data Management, Machine Learning Engineering and Data Assets. He has accumulated more than twenty years building critical systems applications, from legacy, client/server applications to enterprise data platforms. In his previous organisation, he was responsible to build and run their enterprise data platform. He comes from Academia where his expertise was around streaming data applications. He’s got a PhD in Computer Science from RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia.

Sivananth Ramachandran, CFA, CIPM, is the director of capital markets policy, India, at CFA Institute. In his role, he is responsible for advocating policy positions on issues that affect Indian capital markets, including corporate governance; environmental, social, and governance (ESG); and pensions. He is frequently quoted in media. Ramachandran has more than 14 years of experience in financial services. Before joining CFA Institute, Ramachandran worked at Morningstar and led their global index product development team. He also served as a spokesperson for sustainability at Morningstar India. Before his time at Morningstar, Ramachandran worked at MSCI where he co-authored research papers on small-cap investing, portfolio construction, and economic exposure. Ramachandran holds a masters of business administration from the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow. He also holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA®), Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM), and Professional Risk Management (PRM) designations, and the Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting (FSA) credential provided by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).

Nabila, CFA, is currently a Credit Risk Manager at Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd. Prior to this role, she held the position of Banking Supervisor at Bank Negara Malaysia, analysing financial institutions’ risk profiles, risk management processes, compliance to applicable laws and regulations, adequacy of capital, and the sustainability of earnings to ensure earnings long term viability.
Nabila was one of the forum speakers for “How Millennial Women are Redefining Leadership at Work” during the CFA Society Malaysia 2019 Career Day. She graduated from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with a Bachelor's Degree in Accounting & Finance.

Laurel Teo, Ph.D., CFA, is a behavioural scientist who studies how new technologies such as artificial intelligence influence the way people think, feel, and behave in organizational settings. Her research interests include the impact of technological changes on privacy issues and the future of work. From July 2022, Dr. Teo joins the Institute of Policy Studies at the National University of Singapore as a senior research fellow. Dr. Teo was previously Director, Society Advocacy Engagement, at CFA Institute, where she supported CFA member societies in Asia Pacific in regulatory outreach, market integrity research, and investor protection programs. Before joining CFA Institute, she was a consultant in investor relations. Dr. Teo began her career as a political and business journalist reporting in Singapore and Indonesia with leading newspapers. She earned her Chartered Financial Analyst® designation in 2011 and has been elected to the board of CFA Society Singapore since 2018. She is currently the honorary secretary of CFA Society Singapore. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) double majoring in Anthropology and Chinese from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in Business (Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources) from Singapore Management University.

Prof. Raymond Tsang is currently an Associate Professor of Practice at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (“CUHK”) and a Founding Fellow of the CUHK’s Engineering FinTech Applied Research Academy.
Alongside teaching in the areas of financial engineering and financial technology, he also provides career advice for students, as well as performing liaison work connecting the finance industry and academia. Before joining the academic world, Raymond was a rate derivatives trader at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, BNY Mellon, Susquehanna International Group and Bank of Canada. He has covered markets in Canada, the United States and the APAC region.
Raymond received his Bachelor of Commerce in Finance and Management Information System from McGill University, and a Master of Science in Financial Mathematics from the University of Chicago. He is a CFA Charterholder and a Financial Risk Manager (FRM). Raymond is also a Hong Kong Football Association License D football coach and is actively involved in other sports activities.

Jason is a technology and sustainability expert with an MBA from Stanford and previous work experience at Standard Chartered Bank, WeLab, and Robinhood. He, representing MioTech, is a member of the Hong Kong Green Finance Association and the Director of the Alliance of Carbon Emissions Trading in China. He has been invited to speak at world-renowned conferences such as at IOSCO and at UNEP FI to address the role of technology in the global sustainability push.

Bryan Ventura is an expert in FinTech and Web3 (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi and blockchain) and their regulation, advising blockchain and crypto businesses and platforms since 2017. He is a senior associate at MinterEllisonRuddWatts and the current Chair of BlockchainNZ. He is also a Council Member of the International Digital Asset Exchange Association (IDAXA).

After nearly a decade in Finance, Dael pivoted into technology and pursued her passion to drive sustainability culture within business. Dael sought certification in Business Sustainability Management at the University of Cambridge's Institute for Sustainability Leadership and holds a Certificate in ESG Investing issued by the CFA Institute. She also holds an FSA Credential issued by SASB, a Master of Applied Finance, a Bachelor of Applied Finance and a Bachelor of Commerce-Accounting.
Dael is presently Chief of Staff and Head of Sales at ESGTech where she engages all functions to ensure that company strategy and governance is maintained across the organisation.

Shih Shen Wong is the Country Manager(SEA) with Planet. He is responsible for all customer facing sales activities in the South East Asia Region and has more than 20 years of sales, marketing, IT consulting and customer success experience in prior roles with Microsoft, Protiviti, PayPal and HP.
Shih Shen holds a Masters degree in Business Administration from the University of Adelaide and an Electrical Engineering degree from the National University of Singapore.

Ming Zheng, Senior Financial Business Architect, Alibaba Cloud, is currently working on the digital transformation of China’s financial enterprises, e.g. banks, insurance companies and securities companies. In addition, Ming is the Shanghai representative for CFA Institute Asia-Pacific Research Exchange (ARX). Ming used to be a big data and AI expert of Ant Group, where he was in charge of the data science and algorithms for the Ant’s core business such as recommendation systems, risk management and financial knowledge graphs. Before joining Alibaba, Ming worked for a quant investment company where he managed an equity long short fund in China’s A-share market.