Topic: FinTech

Victoria Scholar

Winner of CITY AM's Analyst of the Year 2023 Award, Victoria Scholar is one of UK TV’s foremost financial commentators, enjoying a rare combination of banking, television and journalistic experience. Known for her plain English approach to financial news, Victoria excels at translating complex City moves to a wider audience and has a regular opinion column in The Telegraph, sharing her advice with readers.

A hugely popular broadcaster and expert on business, finance and economics, Victoria is the Head of Investment at Interactive Investor - the UK’s second largest direct-to-consumer investment platform. She has a wide-ranging broadcast remit discussing the daily business news agenda, investment strategy and asset allocation, collective investments and direct shares, as well as macro-economics and markets.

Victoria is a popular event host and keynote speaker on business, economics and the markets. Victoria hosted the Euromoney Awards and is regular panellist at business and financial conferences and other events.

Previously Victoria was a financial journalist with IG Group and presented the business news at the IGTV broadcast channel. She has a background as a producer for Bloomberg and broadcast journalist for CNBC and BBC and is in demand as a financial and markets commentator for major TV networks in the UK and across the world.

Victoria started her career on the trading floor in the square mile at the investment bank Nomura. She holds a degree in Economics from University of Bristol and a broadcast journalism masters' degree from City University, London. She is also an award-winning technical analyst, having received the Bronwen Wood prize in her Society of Technical Analysis Diploma.

Tram Anh Nguyen

Tram Anh Nguyen serves as Board Advisor for EDHEC, NED Passerelles Numeriques, Board Member for Business France Frenchtech UK, Advisory Board Member of the Association of the Corporates Treasurers, and Board Member with Global Impact FinTech (GIFT) Forum.

She is the co-author of CFTE's world's largest Fintech Job Report Book. Entrepreneurship Expert Saïd Business School, Oxford and is an Industry Fellow of Imperial College. She is an advocate of lifelong learning and believes that continuous education is the best tool to help people adapt to a fast-changing world.

Tram Anh strongly believes that in a world dominated by technology, people must remain at the centre of society and organisations, and that education and training are key to helping individuals adapt to a fast changing world. This was the motivation that drove her to launch CFTE to help finance professionals up-skill, find more opportunities and build better finance.

She works tirelessly with governments, policymakers, industry experts, and academia to push initiatives in financial education for Finance 2.0. She followed her passion to bring about a skills revolution in finance to not only transform the industry but to help a multitude of stakeholders, like women and people from different backgrounds and walks of life, to enter the new world of finance.

The platform includes hundreds of experts (from heads of innovation in banks to CEOs of challenger banks and CEOs of Fintech VCs), who have created a platform that helps the industry acquire this knowledge quickly, from Fintech to Artificial Intelligence to Open Banking to Extrapreneurship programmes, with an engaged community with 100,000+ alumni around the world.

CFTE is headquartered in the UK. In addition to London, CFTE is present in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Luxembourg, and France and works with most Tier 1 financial institutions.

Highly respected in the industry, Ambassador for the Singapore Fintech Festival, From 2017 until today as Senior Leader Women in Fintech, International speaker at global events, mentor and judge for the industry.

Of Vietnamese origin, Tram Anh was born in France and lived in Paris, New York, and now London. She provides a great understanding of both Asian and Western cultures and is always keen to bring the best of them together.

As a part of CFTE, a few of Tram Anh’s significant achievements include being a part of releasing the Fintech Job Report and the Blockchain Job Report. The Fintech job report is the first of its kind in history, where the major developments in the field, possible work roles, and pertinent employability skills required to help governments, regulators, employers, and job applicants with future job creation and prospects have been outlined. The Blockchain job report examines the employment implications of blockchain technology from the viewpoints of prospective employees, financial institutions, blockchain enterprises, and governments. The positions that are now in demand in blockchain and the qualifications that are necessary for success in this fiercely competitive market for blockchain are also explored in the report.

Tram Anh primarily concentrates on providing lectures in the financial, fintech, business, government, and academic sectors.

Kristin Smith

Kristin Smith is the Executive Director of the Blockchain Association, the Washington DC-based trade association representing more than 80 of the industry’s leading companies. Kristin serves as a liaison between policymakers and the cryptocurrency industry to assist in the creation of legislation and regulation that promotes the growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem in the U.S.

She is also a leading, public voice advocating for the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry through top-tier media interviews, op-eds and letters to the editor, and global speaking engagements. Kristin is a renowned voice for the industry, having been featured on Fortune's 2020 40 under 40 list, CoinDesk's 2021 50 people who defined the year in crypto, and CoinTelegraph's  2022 top 100 Influencers in Crypto and Blockchain.

Prior to leading the Blockchain Association, Kristin helped blockchain and technology companies achieve their public policy objectives in Washington. She served as a Senate and congressional aide on Capitol Hill for nearly ten years, much of which was spent focusing on technology policy. She co-founded HODLpac and currently serves on the organization’s board of directors. Kristin is a Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web board member and an independent director for Skybridge Capital’s G and GII Funds.

Eileen Burbidge

Eileen Burbidge is a Partner at Passion Capital, the pre-eminent early-stage technology venture fund based in London. She brings extensive operational experience to her investment activities gleaned from business and product roles at Yahoo!, Skype, Apple and elsewhere. On behalf of Passion, Eileen serves as non-executive director on a number of fast growing SMEs including Monzo Bank, Digital Shadows, Marshmallow and Butternut Box among others.

Burbidge started her career in Silicon Valley, working for some of the world’s most prestigious tech companies, including Apple, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. In 2004 she moved to London to become one of Skype’s earliest employees. In 2011, as a founding partner of Passion Capital, Burbidge was part of the team that built the pre-eminent early-stage technology venture fund based in London. At Passion, she serves as board director for Digital Shadows, Focal Point Positioning, Prowler.IO, Butternut Box and other portfolio companies.

Eileen Burbidge is also a member of the board of Dixons Carphone, the FTSE 250-listed consumer electronics retailer. Eileen was awarded an MBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Business. She also holds a BSc Engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Burbidge was also formerly chair of financial technology start-up Tide, one of the first digital-only finance platforms in the UK to provide current accounts for businesses, and an early investor and director at consumer challenger bank Monzo; where she is now Board Director.

In 2018, Dixons Carphone appointed Burbidge as an independent non-executive director of the Board and a member of the Audit Committee, and she joined the Transformation & Innovation Advisory Board for UniCredit in early 2019.

In addition to Passion Capital, and as described by Fortune Magazine as “The Queen of British VC”, Eileen Burbidge is one of the UK’s biggest Tech personalities and one of London’s most influential venture capitalists. She is the UK Treasury’s Special Envoy for Fintech, appointed by the Chancellor; Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London’s office and served on former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Business Advisory Group as well as Chair of Tech Nation for 5 years, stepping down in 2020.