Focus on Digital Capital Raising

Benjamin Duve is part of the Digital Asset Unit at BNY Mellon. In his enterprise wide projects on digital asset, he is looking at opportunities around tokenisation and beyond. As a realistic, early-days blockchain and DLT enthusiast, he works on finding tomorrows solutions for today’s capital markets’ challenges. Being involved in many securities related proof-of-concepts and live trades dating back to 2017, he is a thought leader and sought after panelist in the field. He represents the bank in various industry working groups.

In his previous roles as a Head of Digital Assets, he explored the new value proposition from issuance to custody for institutional and corporate clients and oversaw a digital assets strategy around crypto and digital assets. Among several client coverage roles, he ran a successful integrated execution to custody business as Head of Custody and DMA part of an investment bank.

Before joining Bitstamp again in 2021 as CEO for Europe, Jean-Baptiste Graftieaux had been the Executive and Chief Compliance Officer at the company in the years from 2014 to 2016. Jean-Baptiste is back at Bitstamp with even more fintech and payment experience to support the company’s vision.

In his Bitstamp-off time, he was the Managing Director at eBay Europe, where he led their regulatory business operations for payments in Europe and spent five years on the board of directors of several eBay entities. Prior to his leadership role at eBay, Jean-Baptiste worked at PayPal as the Executive and EMEA Chief Compliance Officer. In his first two years at Bitstamp, he was responsible for obtaining regulatory licenses for our EU-based business and operations.

Jean-Baptiste is now responsible for managing Bitstamp’s regulatory relationships and leading compliance and legal teams as well as growth and business development in the region.

Chris Hollifield is head of business development at Luxembourg for Finance, where his work involves advising FinTech and financial companies looking to develop cross-border activity through Luxembourg-based platforms. He also advises on the development of the ecosystem in Luxembourg and on synergy creation with other key financial centres, with a focus on East Asia.

Prior to working at Luxembourg for Finance, Chris worked in the strategy department of Clearstream Banking SA, an International Central Securities Depository that facilitates the settlement of interbank transactions in over 50 markets worldwide. Here, his work focused particularly on strategic projects concerning distributed ledger technology and other FinTech topics.

Marion Laboure is a Senior Economist at Deutsche Bank in London and Lecturer at Harvard University. She has extensive private sector, public policy, and monetary policy experience, including at the European Commission, the IMF, the Luxembourg Central Bank, and Barclays. She received first prize from the American Society of Actuaries, Revue Banque nominated her as a rising star in finance, and Business Insider named her a cryptocurrency mastermind.

Solenne Niedercorn-Desouches is French and Luxembourgish. She graduated from the Universities of Paris Dauphine and La Sorbonne in Management, Finance and Tax.

In 2003, Solenne joined the the Swiss banking institution: UBS as Advisory Portfolio Manager .During these 6 years spent within the UBS group, the latter also held the positions of Investment Consultant, Project Manager and Business Analyst.

Solenne subsequently joined another Swiss Banking Group: Lombard Odier to participate in the opening of the Luxembourg entity and launched the Independent asset manager desk activities of Lombard Odier in Europe.During these 5 years spent at Lombard Odier, Solenne was involved in numerous regulatory projects, linked to the expansion of the Banking activities of Lombard Odier in Europe.

In 2015, Solenne launched her first venture. Subsequently, she joined a startup incubator, where she created and deployed a simple and effective classifieds platform for selling second-hand and discounted items in Luxembourg.

Currently, Solenne is independent and holds non executive director positions in regulated entities and performs consulting assignments for startups or scaleups. She is also Conducting Officer of Fabric Ventures (Registered AIFM investing in the open economy).

She is the host of Finscale: a French podcast presenting innovations in the finance industry (Banking, FinTech, Insurance, InsurTech, Investment).

Karen O’Sullivan is Head of the Innovation, Payments, Market Infrastructures and Governance at the CSSF.

She coordinates the activities of this department which is responsible for financial innovation, both the application process and on-going prudential supervision of payment institutions and electronic money institutions, the registration and AML supervision of virtual asset service providers, market infrastructures and the oversight of remuneration and governance practices and policies implemented within financial institutions.

Furthermore, her team is responsible for coordinating the CSSF’s efforts with regards to MiCA Regulation. In this respect her team spearheads the CSSF’s internal MiCA taskforce and is responsible for the authorisation and the prudential supervision of crypto-asset service providers and certain EMT/ART issuers.

Being the department in charge of financial innovation means that Karen and her team are the privileged contact and point of entry to the CSSF for the FinTech industry.

She represents the CSSF on an international level through participation in various working sub-groups and as speaker at several conferences, covering payment services, virtual asset and/or crypto asset service providers, innovation topics, and corporate governance matters at both national and international level.

Tobias Seidl has co-founded STOKR in 2017 with the vision to simplify investing and to increase the choices of investment opportunities for everyone.

He focuses not only on the challenges SMEs face when seeking funding in Europe but also on the pain everyday investors have when trying to invest outside of the established financial products.

Tobias creates new alternative investment products for both sides. They can be directly issued to the investors’ wallets increasing diversification possibilities, decreasing risks and allowing control over the investor base and investments.

While Tobias worked most of his life as an investment structuring expert for international law firms and asset managers, he worked as well for a few years as an industrial designer of snowboards and lifts. He never lost his passion for the beauty of simple functional design and guided the platform design and branding of STOKR in this spirit.