Sascha Steffen is Professor of Finance at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Educated at Goethe, Wharton and NYU, he previously taught at ESMT and Mannheim Business School before joining Frankfurt School. His research is in the area of banking, corporate finance and financial intermediation and has been published in leading finance journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies and has received several Best Paper Awards. Sascha Steffen was awarded the Lamfalussy Fellowship from the European Central Bank in 2010 and his research has been supported e.g. by The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in Washington DC and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He is a regular speaker at meetings organized by central banks, governments, and international organizations, including the Deutsche Bundesbank, European Central Bank, the European Parliament, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Chicago, the Board of Governors, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the FDIC. He has developed and delivered MBA classes and executive education programmes for major global banks and institutions. He also acts as an advisor/consultant to commercial and central banks as well as to asset management firms on finance, investment and banking issues and is member of the academic advisory committee of various startups (FinTechs) in Berlin and Frankfurt. Prior to joining academia, Sascha Steffen worked in credit risk management related areas at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and New York.

Andrei Kirilenko is Associate Professor in Finance at the Cambridge Judge Business School and a Research Fellow in the Financial Economics Programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Prior to joining Cambridge in the Fall of 2019, he was the Founding Director of the Centre for Global Finance and Technology at the Imperial College Business School. Prior to joining Imperial in August 2015, he was a Professor of the Practice of Finance at MIT Sloan and Co-Director of the MIT Center for Finance and Policy. Before MIT Sloan, Professor Kirilenko served as chief economist of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) between December 2010 and December 2012.  In 2010, Kirilenko was the recipient of the CFTC Chairman's Award for Excellence (highest honor). Professor Kirilenko's scholarly work focuses on the intersection of finance, technology and regulation. Kirilenko received his PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialization in Finance from the Wharton School.