Jim Northey currently serves as a director of FIX Protocol Ltd. and the Chair of ISO TC68, the ISO Technical Committee for Financial Services. Jim served as the Global Technical Committee Co-chair for the Americas until his election as an FPL director and the interim chair of the US Technical Advisory Group for ISO TC322 Sustainable Finance. Jim is a past member of the US Treasury Office of Financial Research Financial Research Advisory Committee and the US CFTC Technology Advisory Committee Subcommittee on High Frequency Trading. Jim previously served in the roles of FIX Americas Region Co-chair and the co-chair of the FIX Global Derivatives Committee. Jim was awarded the FIA Annual Achievement award in 2006 as part of the team that created FIXML for listed derivatives clearing standardization.

Jim was a Senior Vice President of Strategic Research focusing on Protocol Engineering and Standards at Itiviti Group AB, following acquisition of The LaSalle Technology Group, LLC in 2015, which he co-founded in 2006.

Jim holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Indianapolis and an M.S. in Financial Markets and Trading from Illinois Institute of Technology.  Jim is an adjunct instructor of Finance at Michigan Technological University where he teaches courses on Derivatives and Financial Engineering and Financial Technology.  Jim serves on the board of the Keweenaw Financial Corporation in Michigan and is the US Director and CIO for V2G Limited based in Camelford, UK.

Mark Beeston, Managing Partner and Founder, Illuminate Financial

Mark Beeston is Managing Partner and Founder of Illuminate Financial, a thesis-driven venture capital firm investing in enterprise fintech and B2B software companies solving problems across financial services. Illuminate is recognised as a trusted partner to multiple banks and industry strategics. Their portfolio includes Curv (acq. by PayPal), RegTek Solutions (acq. by Bloomberg), Privitar, Genesis Global, and DV01.

Mark has nearly 30 year’s experience in capital markets as an operator, entrepreneur, and investor. Previously, he served as CEO of ICAP’s post-trade risk and information business as a member of the ICAP Exco with responsibility for industry platforms such as Reset, ReMatch, TriOptima, and the CVC Euclid Opportunities. Prior to ICAP he launched the fintech T-Zero, a post-trade platform, growing the company from start-up to exit and sat on the Exco of Creditex prior to its acquisition by ICE in 2008. He started his career at Deutsche Bank in derivatives trading and management, including serving as COO for both the Global Rates and Global Credit businesses.

Mark has featured in Institutional Investor’s Fintech Finance 40 and Trading Technology Top 30 lists, Financial News Fintech 40 Power List and has served as a member of the boards of Markit, OTCDerivnet, and ISDA.

Rob Cranston, Global Head of Equities Product, Liquidnet 

Rob has worked in product management in electronic trading for over 20 years, accumulating a wealth of knowledge predominately in Equities. In his current role he is responsible for the global diversification and evolution of the Liquidnet equity products.

Prior to his time at Liquidnet, Rob was the Head of Equity Product Management at SIX Swiss Exchange. He spent the bulk of his career at Instinet heading system development for equity trading in Europe, emigrating to London, from Calgary, Canada where he started his career in 2000.

Leen Vermeersch, Public Policy Officer, Euroclear

Leen is a lobbyist, corporate influencer and strategic storyteller, connector of people and dots, supporter of systemic stability and public policy. She’s a structural optimist with more than 15 years of experience in the world’s largest financial market infrastructure.

Leen has about 8 years of experience in managing the outbound links with international CSDs and custodian agents, from a relationship management, contractual, servicing, regulatory and risk point of view. Thereby ensuring a safe, reliable and efficient access to +45 markets for Euroclear’s clients. She has managed various projects related to the integration of T2S, CSDR and other regulatory initiatives and maintained relationships with public authorities.

Leen is dedicated to managing and influencing public policy files since 2017, at national and EU level. She has put in place a Regulatory Forum, bringing together senior experts across the group to discuss and report to senior management and boards of directors on forthcoming regulatory initiatives.

Her focus in public policy relates to the CSD Regulation, Outsourcing, Cybersecurity and Operational Resilience. Leen is currently very active on the Digital Finance Strategy package (MiCA, DLT Pilot Regime and DORA), and preparing the first review of CSDR. She is a representative of Euroclear in the ECSDA trade association (Policy Working Group).

Jonathan Herbst, Partner / Global Head of Financial Services Regulation, Norton Rose Fulbright

Jonathan Herbst is the Global Head of Financial Services Regulation and joined the London practice as a partner in October 2002. He was previously Head of European Law at the UK Financial Services Authority from 2001 to 2002.  

Jonathan is a leading practitioner in the field of UK and EU financial services law and regulation. He specialises in regulatory advice relating to bank structuring, markets, commodity derivatives, custody and clearing and the regulatory aspects of acquisitions and disposals. Much of his work now involves strategic advice to senior management and legal teams on the implications of regulatory reform and relationships. In particular he has advised a number of banks on their documentation and systems and controls projects to implement the senior managers’ regime. 

Jonathan is ranked Band 1 in Chambers, where he is “noted for his strength in the regulatory compliance space”, as well as being recognised in Legal 500’s Hall of Fame where he is “praised for forward thinking and ability to listen”. In 2014 he won the Legal Week Client Partner of the Year (Global firm category) award. General Counsel who took part in the Legal Week survey described Jonathan variously as “brilliant”, “flexible and interactive”, having “excellent kudos” and being “incredibly bright and knowledgeable”. 

Jonathan is a leading commentator on Brexit and co-authored a report for the Financial Services Forum on regulatory equivalence which was extensively referenced in a number of publications including Financial News, Reuters, FT Financial Adviser and City AM.  As testament to his expertise on the topic, Jonathan gave evidence to the House of Lords EU financial affairs sub-committee inquiry on the impact of Brexit on financial services. 

Jonathan is a member of the Law Society Financial Services sub-committee and the FCA Lawyers Consultative Group.  Jonathan is the editor of ‘A Practitioner’s Guide to MiFID II’, published in 2018. Additionally, he is the co-author of the e-commerce volume of the Butterworths Financial Regulation Service, has written articles on market abuse and other regulatory issues for the Journal of International Financial Markets and is a frequent speaker at financial services conferences. 

Jonathan’s recent experience includes: 

• Advising on the HSBC re-domicile project in 2015 and the ring fencing project for HSBC UK over the past three years 
• Advising on a number of bank, broker and asset manager projects including two globally systemic banks 
• Advising on various private equity regulatory issues for major private equity houses 
• Long standing adviser together with other partners in the team to CME 

Paul Squires, Independent

Paul Squires was until recently the Head of equities trading: EMEA and APAC for Invesco having also previously managed the Henley Fixed Interest dealing team. He joined Invesco in 2018 from AXA Investment Managers where he held a number of positions, culminating in becoming the Global Head of Trading and Securities Financing in 2015, a global team of over 70 professionals responsible for all multi asset – cash and derivatives -execution (equities, fixed income, FX and money market securities) and securities lending.

Paul started his investment career as a UK equity dealer at Mercury Asset Management in 1993 before joining Sun Life Investment Management (which later became AXA Investment Management) in 1996 where he went on to trade European equities and fixed income, setting up the London FI dealing desk. He has been Co-Chair of the Investment Management Working Group of FIX, a non-executive Director of Smartpool and was a founding  Director of PLATO (rejoined with Invesco in 2019).

He has an honours degree in Business Economics from Reading University and holds both the SFA Registered representative dealing certificate and the IMC.

Benoît Gourisse, Head of Asia Pacific, ISDA

Benoît Gourisse has worked for ISDA for ten years. He has served as Senior director, European Public, from 2011 to 2020, then Deputy Head, European Public Policy and was appointed Head of Asia Pacific in April 2021.

He headed European ISDA work streams on Commodities, application of non-cleared margin rules, recovery and resolution framework for CCPs, CCP supervision, MiFID 2/ MiFIR framework and is the ISDA primary contact to the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).

Prior to ISDA, Mr. Gourisse spent five years at the French Banking Federation in Paris, where he was deputy director of Corporate and Investment bank activities. In this role he advised the executive management of French banks in every issue relating to financial markets, corporate services, custodian activities, asset management and distribution of financial instruments to retail investors.

He also worked for the French Savings banks as head of legal department and for Société Générale as compliance officer.

Mr. Gourisse has a Masters Degree in tax and business law from Paris XI University.

Shari Noonan, CEO, Rialto Markets

Shari Noonan is Rialto Markets CEO and has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry.  Her career has focused on building and scaling electronic trading and Alternative Trading System (ATS) products and businesses in highly regulated environments and to scale.  She received a BS in Accounting from Marquette University and a MBA from Columbia University and holds Series 3,7,24,55,63 registrations.

Ryan Pierce, Co-Chair Digital Asset Working Group, FIX Trading Community and Chair Product Advisory Committee, DTI Foundation

Ryan Pierce is an independent consultant with 25 years’ experience in financial trading, post-trade, and digital asset standards and architecture. He has served as Co-Chair of FIX Trading Community’s Digital Asset Working Group since its founding in 2015. Appointed in 2018, he represents FIX on International Organization for Standardization (ISO) TC68/SC8/WG3 as an expert member.

Within ISO WG3, Ryan served as an author and editor for the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier (DTI) standard. The DTI Foundation, operated by Etrading Software and selected by ISO to act as the Registration Authority for the DTI standard, has appointed Ryan as Chair of its Product Advisory Committee. The PAC consists of experts in the digital asset space, making recommendations for the governance of DTI, the evolution of the DTI data records, and arbitrating on disputes concerning registry data.

Ryan worked for CME Group from 2010 to 2019, initially in Post Trade Technology where he defined FIXML standards for clearing listed derivatives, and later as Director and Technology Architect, Digitization where he contributed thought leadership in DLT, blockchain, and cryptocurrency technology, serving as technical lead for the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate and Bitcoin Real Time Index and CME Bitcoin Futures. Ryan managed the Digitization IP portfolio and holds seven US patents. He previously served as Technical Director of FIX Trading Community, and held software engineering positions as Vice President, Equities at Lehman Brothers, and at Townsend Analytics.

Ryan has taken leadership roles and authored key specification documents for FIX Trading Community ranging from adding listed derivatives support to FIX 4.1, creating the market data suite of messages in FIX 4.2, co-authoring the ‘FIX Security White Paper’, and collaborating in the creation of Parties Reference Data, Allocation Extensions, Trade Match Report, and CFTC Part 43 and 45 Reporting extensions to FIX 5.0 SP2. He has worked closely with the Global Exchanges and Markets Committee and the FIA Post Trade Working Group. Ryan is an active participant on the Global Technical Committee and

Americas Regional Committee and serves on the GTC and Americas Governance Boards.

Ryan is based in Chicago, and he concurrently studies Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University.