Mark MacDonald

Mark’s presentation will focus on the application of trust-enabled technology to improve the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of public financial management.  Using case examples from the international development sector, the presentation will discuss current leading practice and present a vision for how the future will move towards a new model of public investment where impact drives public value.

Biography:

Mark MacDonald is leader of EY’s public money sector globally and is sponsor of EY’s dedicated blockchain applications in the public budgeting and international development space.  He has a 25+ year career advising governments in multiple jurisdictions developing and executing strategies to improve the fiscal, economic, and service competitiveness of the public sector.

Address:Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Wee Kee Toh

Biography:

Wee Kee is Executive Director and Global Head of Business Architecture for Kinexys Digital Payments at J.P. Morgan, where he is responsible for architecting business capabilities for digital payments, and developing strategies to address current needs and capture future opportunities. He works closely with the product team to develop product vision and strategies, and with the technology team on aligning technical solutions with business needs.

Prior to joining J.P. Morgan in 2022, Wee Kee was the Specialist Leader for Distributed Ledger Technology at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and led Project Ubin, a collaborative industry project exploring the use of blockchain and DLT for clearing and settlement of payments and securities. He was also Advisor at the BIS Innovation Hub, where he led Project Dunbar with a vision of enabling interoperable CBDCs and connected multi-CBDC platforms.

Address:New York, New York, United States

Andreas Veneris of University of Toronto

Biography:

Andreas Veneris is a Connaught Scholar and Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, cross-appointed with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In the past, he held joint faculty positions with the Athens University of Economics and Business (Dept. of Informatics, 2006-
16) and with the University of Tokyo  (Dept. of ECE, 2010-11). For more than 20 years he worked in the field of CAD for VLSI synthesis, verification and debugging using formal methods where he published more than 120 conference/journal papers.

Today, he focuses on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), mechanism/economic design of distributed systems, formal methods for smart contract verification, and techno-legal blockchain policy/regulatory questions. Prof. Veneris has received a 10-year Best Paper Retrospective Award, five other best paper awards and holds three patents. He was a member of the team in the first webcast ever (37th Grammy Awards, 1995), an event acknowledged by the American Congress.

In February 2021 his work with the Bank of Canada became public, proposing Canada's Central Bank Digital Loonie -- the first work of its kind that presents a comprehensive technological, regulatory/legal and economic model for a central bank digital currency. In 2021 he was honored to be acknowledged for his contributions on a classified report by the Hoover Institution, prefaced by former United States Secretary of the State Condoleezza Rice and co-authored by an extensive list of prominent world-thinkers. This report was released on March 1, 2022 titled as "Digital Currencies: The US, China, And The World At A Crossroads". A week later US President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order following most of the recommendations of this report. Today he engages with many G20 Central Banks on the topic of CBDCs, and his work has been featured in publications by the IMF and BIS, among other.

Email:

Address:Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Paul Samson of Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)

Biography:

Paul Samson is President of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), an independent Canadian think tank working on international governance with a focus on policy solutions for the digital era. For more than 20 years with the Government of Canada, including at the deputy minister level, Paul worked at Finance Canada, Global Affairs Canada, the Privy Council Office and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Among other positions, Paul served as Canada’s deputy for finance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and as co-chair of the G20 Framework Working Group on the global economy. Earlier in his career, he worked at several think tanks and universities in Geneva, Washington DC, Oslo, and Boston. Paul completed a doctorate in international relations at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and his undergrad at the University of British Columbia. He completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard University and was a research associate at the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs.

Address:Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Scott Hendry

Biography:

Scott Hendry was appointed Senior Research Officer in the Economic and Financial Research Department in January 2025. He previously held the role of Senior Special Director, Financial Technology (FinTech) in the Banking and Payments Department (BAP) from 2016 to 2024. Before that he was the Senior Research Director for the Funds Management and Banking Department (FBD) and the Financial Markets Department (FMD). His personal research has focused on central bank digital currency, electronic payments, price discovery in the Canadian government bond market, and central bank communication. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Western Ontario.

Email:

Address:Ottawa, Ontario, Canada