Speaker | ASIA22

John Ge

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Matrixport

John is focused on rapidly scaling the company to provide one-stop crypto financial services, across custody, spot and leveraged trading, asset management and lending. Under his leadership, Matrixport has grown into Asia’s largest cryptocurrency financial platform with $10 billion of assets under management. 

John was previously a Company Director and Head of Investment & Financing at Bitmain Technologies. He started his career as an analyst at a venture capital fund.

Sean Darby

Managing Director & Global Head of Equity Strategy, Jefferies

Sean Darby is a Managing Director and Global Head of Equity Strategy for Jefferies based in Hong Kong. He joined Jefferies in September 2011 from Nomura where he spent almost 10 years as Head of Asia Strategy. Sean is responsible for equity allocation across 20 markets as well as publishing top down ideas, completing bespoke portfolio construction and writing thematic reports. The strategy team provides regular updates on the factors effecting share prices as well as contrarian ideas. He holds an engineering degree from the University of Exeter and a postgraduate diploma in Japanese from Stirling University. He is also a Chartered Engineer. In 2015, he was ranked No.2 Investment Strategist by Asiamoney.

Kevin Ching

Consultant Chairman Emeritus, Sotheby’s Asia; Founding Advisory Board Member, Zheng He Bella Romaine

Mr. Ching was the Chief Executive Officer of Sotheby’s Asia from 2006 and retired in December 2021.

He was responsible for developing the strategic expansion of the company in the region, particularly into mainland China. Under his strategic leadership, Sotheby's Asia achieved an over US$ 1 billion total of auctions and private sales in 2011. In 2012, Sotheby’s established Sotheby’s (Beijing) Auction Co., Ltd. the first international fine art auction house in China, in partnership with Beijing GeHua Art Company. The historic inaugural auction held on the 27th of September 2012 took the world by storm.

Prior to Sotheby’s Asia, he was a board executive director and group legal counsel of Dickson Concepts (International) Limited. He was in charge of its legal and general business affairs in the international world of luxury, and led business development and operations of luxury retail in China.

Formally a partner in Johnson Stokes & Master, one of the largest law firms in Hong Kong, he specialised in the areas of banking, international shipping, commercial law, investments in China, as well as sino-foreign joint ventures and arbitration.

Charmaine Chin

Managing Director, Hedge Fund Solutions Group (BAAM), Blackstone

Charmaine Chin is a Managing Director in the Hedge Fund Solutions Group (BAAM) and the Head of Asia Manager Selection. Ms. Chin is based in Singapore and leads BAAM’s investment activities across Asia.

Before joining Blackstone, Ms. Chin worked at Fullerton Fund Management in Singapore where she was involved in managing a global portfolio of hedge funds, private equity and private credit funds. She also led due diligence for co-investments and late-stage growth investments. Prior to Fullerton, Ms. Chin spent 12 years as a Partner and Managing Director at K2 Advisors in New York, part of Franklin Templeton’s Alternatives division. There she oversaw all of K2’s investments in Asia, as well as all investments globally in credit and event-driven strategies. Prior to K2, Ms. Chin worked at Goldman Sachs in the Special Situations Group, focused on opportunistic investing across equities and credit. Ms. Chin began her career in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs in New York and Hong Kong.

Ms.ChinreceivedaBAfromHarvardUniversity,whereshegraduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

Francis Belin

President, Christie’s Asia Pacific

Based in Hong Kong, Mr. Francis Belin has been President of Christie’s Asia Pacific since January 2019. He manages all Asia Pacific-based teams including the regional offices and is accountable for all transactions made by Asia-based collectors globally, across live, online, and private sales. Under his helm, Christie’s Asia Pacific has established a series of milestones and record-breaking results. Sales in Asia in the first half of 2022 reached a staggering US$487 million – the second highest ever first half year auction sale total for the region.

He has 17 years of experience in premium and luxury consumer goods. He joined Christie’s in 2016 as Global Managing Director, Asian Art, from his previous role with Swarovski, overseeing their business in Asia Pacific.

Francis began his career in Management Consulting at McKinsey & Co. in Europe and Asia. He is a member of the Board of Advisors for Kids Earth Fund in Japan and serves on various boards as non-executive Chairman and Independent Non-executive Director.

Hassan Ahmed

Head of Southeast Asia, Coinbase

Hassan Ahmed is an experienced operator and investor in web3 and fintech. He is currently the Regional Director of Southeast Asia at Coinbase, the largest crypto platform in the world. Prior to this, Hassan served a dual role at GoTo Group as Chief Executive Officer of Coins.ph, the leading crypto brokerage in the Philippines, and Head of Strategy for Gopay in Indonesia.

Prior to moving to Singapore, Hassan was based in New York as Director of Finance & Operations at eToro USA, where he was responsible for the launch of their regulated crypto social trading platform in the US. He also served as Head of Business Operations at Venmo and Vice President of Strategy at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management in prior roles.

Hassan obtained his Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

Nicolas Aguzin

Chief Executive Officer, HKEX

Nicolas Aguzin joined HKEX as Chief Executive Officer in 2021 from J.P. Morgan, where he was most recently Chief Executive Officer of J.P. Morgan’s International Private Bank.

He was the CEO of J.P. Morgan, Asia Pacific where he was responsible for all the firm’s business across 17 markets from 2013 to 2020. Concurrent with his Asia CEO role, Mr Aguzin also ran J.P. Morgan’s Investment Banking division in Asia. During his tenure the bank rose to become one of the leading investment banks in the Asia Pacific region.

He joined J.P. Morgan in 1990 in Buenos Aires. In 2005 he was appointed as CEO, Latin America. In subsequent years, he also served as CEO, Latin America, Head of Latin America Investment Banking, and Senior Country Officer for Brazil.

Johnny Adji

Alternatives Investment Leader, Asia, Mercer

Johnny Adji is a Senior Investment Director at Cambridge Associates, based in Singapore, and a member of the Real Assets Investment Group. This global group sources and monitors real asset investments (real estate, infrastructure and global natural resources), manages real asset portfolios for clients, and researches trends that impact on the real assets industry. He is also a member of the Credit team, which identifies, evaluates, and invests in both private and public credit strategies (senior debt, distressed credit, structured credit, etc.).

Johnny works with Asian clients such as SWF, pensions, and families in building their global and Asian real assets and credit portfolios. Johnny is a real estate and private credit specialist and focuses on investment idea generation and due diligence mostly in Asia. He is a frequent speaker at real asset and credit conferences in the region. He is a member of the firm’s Real Assets Investment Committee.

Prior to joining Cambridge Associates in 2011, Johnny worked in real estate roles such as research, valuations, buy-side/sell-side advisor, including portfolio manager and COO of Ajia Partners, an Asian value-add real estate fund and Co-Head of International Real Estate at HanaDaol Trust in Seoul. He started his career in 1996 at JLL in Indonesia and also worked for CBRE in Korea. In addition to English, he speaks Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese Mandarin, and Korean and has worked in Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore.

Matthew Graham

Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Sino Global Capital

Matthew Graham is the founder and CEO of Sino Global Capital, an international crypto-native venture firm founded in 2015 that focuses on investing in best-in-class blockchain and digital asset projects. Matthew has been involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem since 2013 when he drafted a proposal for a large MNC to pre-install a BTC wallet in their devices. Prior to founding Sino, Matthew was an emerging markets tech banker with a China specialty, where he represented some of the top tech firms in the world on strategic international investment.

Balaji Srinivasan

Technologist, The Network State

Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) is an angel investor, tech founder, and author of The Network State.

Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he is an early investor in many successful tech companies and crypto protocols, including Alchemy, Ava Labs, Bitcoin, Cameo, Chainlink, Clubhouse, Dapper Labs, Deel, EPNS, Ethereum, Instadapp, Lambda School, Mighty, NEAR Protocol, OnDeck, Opensea, Replit, Republic, Roam Research, Solana, Soylent, Superhuman, Synthesis, XMTP, and Zora.

Dr. Srinivasan was the cofounder of Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center. He holds a BS/MS/PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

Ron Biscardi

Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, iConnections

Ron Biscardi is the CEO and Co-Founder of iConnections. Ron has over 25 years of experience in the alternative investment industry, and has closed over 20 seed deals and deployed over $600 million in capital. His achievements include building the world’s largest capital introduction conference which takes place annually in Miami Beach. In April 2020, he founded iConnections, a software-powered community connecting the investment management industry. iConnections' platform and app allows managers to securely share company information with allocators, who can seamlessly evaluate and engage with relevant managers. The scalable technology powering iConnections can be used for all types of bespoke investor events and is already the technology of choice of the largest industry events including SALT, AIMA and 100 Women in Finances’ FundWomen Week. iConnections’ annual philanthropic events, which started with Funds4Food, and followed by Funds4Minds and Funds4Ukraine have raised over $2.5million for charities.

Sreeni Prabhu

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Managing Partner, Co-Chief Executive Officer & Group Chief Investment Officer, Angel Oak Capital Advisors

Sreeni is a co-founder, Managing Partner and Group Chief Investment Officer at Angel Oak Capital and is responsible for the overall investment strategy of the firm. He is also the Chief Executive Officer and President at Angel Oak Mortgage, Inc. (NYSE: AOMR).

Prior to Angel Oak, Sreeni was the Chief Investment Officer of the investment portfolio at Washington Mutual Bank in Seattle where he managed a $25 billion portfolio. He was also part of the macro asset strategy team at the bank. Sreeni previously worked for six years at SunTrust Bank in Atlanta, where he was responsible for investment strategies and served as Head Portfolio Manager for the $3 billion commercial mortgage-backed securities portfolio. He began his career at SunTrust in 1998 as a Bank Analyst focused on asset/liability management and liquidity strategies.

Sreeni holds a B.B.A. degree in Economics from Georgia College and State University and an M.B.A. in Finance from Georgia State University.

Alex Klokus

Founder & Managing Partner, Kyber Capital

Alex Klokus is a Founder and Managing Partner at the SALT Fund. Alex is a serial entrepreneur who built and sold both the media company Futurism and the sleep and wellness business Gravity.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Chief Executive Officer, FTX

Before founding Alameda and then FTX, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system. He graduated from MIT with a degree in physics

Todd G. Sears

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Founder & Principal, Out Leadership

Todd Sears is the Founder and Principal of Out Leadership, the global LGBT+ business advisory company that partners with the world’s most influential firms to build business opportunity, cultivate talent, and drive equality forward.

More than 430 global CEOs have engaged in Out Leadership’s work, and the organization counts more than 65 major companies as members. Thousands of LGBT+ and ally executives share insights and best practices at Out Leadership’s annual Summits in New York, London, Hong Kong and Sydney. Many more engage with its global talent initiatives including OutNEXT, the first global development program for the next generation of LGBT+ executives; OutWOMEN, its groundbreaking effort to connect and celebrate Out LBT+ women in business; and Quorum, the first effort to place senior LGBT+ executives on corporate boards.

A former investment banker, Todd specialized in wealth management at Merrill Lynch, creating the first national team of financial advisors on Wall Street focused on the LGBT+ community, which brought over $1.4 billion of new assets to the firm. Todd then moved into diversity leadership, as Head of Diversity & Strategic Initiatives at Merrill Lynch and then at Credit Suisse, where he served as Americas Head of Diversity and Inclusion.

A graduate of Duke University and Woodberry Forrest School, Todd is also an active philanthropist and community leader. He is the founding co-chair of Jeffrey Fashion Cares, a fundraiser supporting LGBT+ civil rights, youth and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, which has applied an innovative cost-structure to raise millions of dollars since its inception.

Todd serves on the non-profit boards of The Williams Institute of UCLA, The Palette Fund, and Lambda Legal. In 2014 he received Aid for AIDS International’s My Hero Award; in 2015 he received the Minority Corporate Counsel Association's Paula L. Ettelbrick Award for achievements in advancing LGBT attorneys.

AJ Scaramucci

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Founder & Managing Partner, Kyber Capital

AJ Scaramucci is a Founder & Managing Partner at the SALT. Previously AJ was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence alongside Dr. Peter Diamandis building Cellularity, an allogeneic cellular therapies company focused on cancer immunotherapy (NASDAQ: CELU). AJ was also a Managing Director at ABG (successor of Tony Blair Associates) where he focused on advising and financing late stage technology companies like Hims & Hers, JUST, and SpaceX. Prior to that AJ held roles at Google, Tesla, Planetary Resources, Sinovation Ventures, HubSpot, and the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

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Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Sinovation Ventures

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and President of Sinovation Venture’s Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures, managing US$2 billion dual currency investment funds, is a leading venture capital firm focusing on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China. Previously, he held executive positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Dr. Lee received his Bachelor degree from Computer Science from Columbia University, Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Honorary Doctorate Degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Times 100 in 2013, WIRED 25 Icons, Asian Business Leader 2018 by Asia House, and followed by over 50 million audiences on social media.

In the field of artificial intelligence, Dr. Lee built one of the first game playing programs to defeat a world champion (1988, Othello), as well as the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. Dr. Lee founded Microsoft Research China, which was named as the hottest research lab by MIT Technology Review. Later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, this institute trained the great majority of AI leaders in China, including CTOs or AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei, and Haier. While with Apple, Dr. Lee led AI projects in speech and natural language, which have been featured on Good Morning America on ABC Television and the front page of Wall Street Journal. He has authored 10 U.S. patents, and more than 100 journal and conference papers. Altogether, Dr. Lee has been in artificial intelligence research, development, and investment for more than 30 years. His New York Time and Wall Street Journal bestselling book AI Superpowers discusses US-China co-leadership in the age of AI as well as the greater societal impacts brought upon by the AI technology revolution.

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner, SkyBridge

Anthony Scaramucci is the Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital. He is the author of four books: The Little Book of Hedge Funds, Goodbye Gordon Gekko, Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole (a 2016 Wall Street Journal best seller), and Trump: The Blue-Collar President.

Prior to founding SkyBridge in 2005, Scaramucci co-founded investment partnership Oscar Capital Management, which was sold to Neuberger Berman, LLC in 2001. Earlier, he was a vice president in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs & Co.

In 2016, Scaramucci was ranked #85 in Worth Magazine’s Power 100: The 100 Most Powerful People in Global Finance. In 2011, he received Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year – New York” Award in the Financial Services category. Anthony is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), vice chair of the Kennedy Center Corporate Fund Board, a board member of both The Brain Tumor Foundation and Business Executives for National Security (BENS), and a Trustee of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Foundation. He was a member of the New York City Financial Services Advisory Committee from 2007 to 2012.

In November 2016, he was named to President-Elect Trump’s 16-person Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee. In June 2017, he was named the Chief Strategy Officer of the EXIM Bank. He served as the White House Communications Director for a period in July 2017.

Scaramucci, a native of Long Island, New York, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Tufts University and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.

Parag Khanna

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Founder & Managing Partner, FutureMap

Parag Khanna is a leading global strategy advisor, world traveller, and best-selling author. He is Founder & Managing Partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based strategic advisory firm. He is the author of four books on the future of world order including The Second World (2008), How to Run the World (2011), Connectography (2016), and the latest The Future is Asian (2019). His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2008, Dr Khanna was named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” and featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.”

Dr. Khanna has been an adviser to the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 program. From 2013-18 he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Prior to this he served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical adviser to United States Special Operations Forces (2007).From 2002-5, he was the Global Governance Fellow at the Brookings Institution and from 2000-02 he worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva.

A widely cited global intellectual, Dr. Khanna provides regular commentaries for international publications with articles that have have appeared in major international publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post and Harvard Business Review. His 2008 cover story for the New York Times Magazine titled “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” is one of the most globally debated and influential essays since the end of the Cold War. He is a contributing editor to WorldPost and serves on the editorial board of Global Policy and as a consultant to the National Geographic series Origins.

He also appears frequently in media around the world such as CNN, BBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters. Dr Khanna has spoken at the main TED conference in 2016, TED Global in 2009, and was a guest host of TED Global in 2012. His TED talks have been viewed nearly three million times.

Dr. Khanna lectures frequently at international conferences and gives tailored briefings to government leaders and corporate executives on global trends and scenarios, systemic risks and technological disruptions. He has provided expertise to many governments including the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and numerous others. He served on the Singapore government's Committee on the Future Economy.

Dr. Khanna holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. In 2017 he was awarded a Richard von Weizsaecker fellowship of the Robert Bosch Academy. Dr Khanna has been honored as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.