Speaker profiles

Femke de Vries is a member of the Executive Board of the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) since 1 October 2015. She is responsible for the departments Insurance & and Pensions, Lending, Saving an Retail Investment, Market Integrity and Enforcement, Account Supervision, the Service Centre Supervision and the Expertise Centre, and she represents AFM in the Financial Expertise Centre Board (FEC). Previously, she worked for the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) initially as a Supervisor, Head of Department and Division Director. As a Division Director she was responsible for the supervision of pension funds and investment firms, and from 2011 she was responsible for the newly created Division Supervision Expert Centres. In this position she played a key role in changing the supervisory culture at DNB. Subsequently, as the Secretary-Director of DNB she was responsible for the internal operations of DNB. Femke de Vries is professor in the field of Supervision at the department of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Public Administration at the University of Groningen. In her research and teaching work, she focuses on supervisory developments relating to issues as how transparency and the effects of supervision can boost compliance with the set norms and help to satisfy society’s expectations in this context.

Olha Cherednychenko holds the Chair in European Private Law and Comparative Law at the University of Groningen. She is also Founding Director of the Groningen Centre for European Financial Services Law (GCEFSL). Previously she was a Senior Lecturer/Researcher at the VU University Amsterdam and a Lecturer/Researcher at the Utrecht University (the Netherlands) where she obtained her PhD with a thesis on the interplay between fundamental rights and European private law, with emphasis on risky financial transactions (published with Sellier. European Law Publishers in 2007). She has held visiting fellowships / appointments at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence; the Institute of European and Comparative Law (IECL), University of Oxford; the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), University of London; and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is also a member of several centres of expertise in the Netherlands. As a senior researcher, she has been involved in a number of European research projects, most recently for the European Parliament (2015-2017). Currently, she leads the project ‘Towards Sustainable Financial Practices’ at the University of Groningen. She has published widely on a variety of issues related to EU law, European and national private and regulatory law, and comparative law, in particular in the area of financial services. Her recent publications include i.a. ‘ Public Supervision over Private Relationships: Towards European Supervision Private Law?’, European Review of Private Law (2014); ‘Freedom of Contract in the Post-Crisis Era: Quo Vadis?’, European Review of Contract Law (2014); ‘Contract Governance in the EU: Conceptualising the Relationship between Investor Protection Regulation and Private Law’, European Law Journal (2015); ‘Public and Private Enforcement of European Private Law in the Financial Services Sector’, European Review of Private Law (2015); ‘ Cooperative or Competitive? Private Regulators and Public Supervisors in the Post-Crisis European Financial Services Landscape’, Policy and Society (2016).

Niamh Moloney is Professor of Financial Markets Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and specialises in EU financial market regulation (her books include EU Securities and Financial Markets Regulation, 3 edition, Oxford University Press, 2014). She writes widely on EU investor protection law and policy. Niamh is on the editorial board of a number of leading journals, including the European Law Review, and is an Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation. Niamh has been a Visiting Professor at a number of institutions internationally, including recently Columbia Law School New York and Bocconi Law School Milan and is a Fellow (Household Finance) of Centre for Financial Studies, Frankfurt. Niamh’s external activities include her regular contributions to Parliamentary hearings on financial regulation matters, acting a Special Adviser to the UK House of Lords Committee 2015 inquiry into the EU’s response to the financial crisis, membership of the advisory Stakeholder Group of the European Securities and Markets Authority (2011-2016), and chairmanship of the Central Bank of Ireland Consumer Advisory Group.

Paolo Giudici is Professor of Business Law at the School of Economics and Management of the University of Bozen-Bolzano, one of the top research Italian schools of economics. He is an ECGI Research Associate and professorial fellow at Tilburg University. His research started with antitrust, and then he moved to capital markets law and company law, with a key interest in civil liability and private enforcement. Before starting his academic career he was a practicing business lawyer for fifteen years. In the continental Europe tradition, he continues to serve as legal counsel and advocate in matters concerning his areas of academic expertise. He is partner at Munari Giudici Maniglio Panfili, an Italian law firm based in Genoa and Milan. In his spare time Paolo is a photographer, and he is currently running a project on Genova’s surroundings.

Iain MacNeil is the Head of the School of Law at the University of Glasgow. He joined the School in 2003 and was appointed to the Alexander Stone Chair of Commercial Law in 2005.  He is a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow (LLB) and Edinburgh (PhD).  Iain’s early career was in the investment sector in the City of London during the 1980s. He took up his first academic appointment at the University of Aberdeen in 1993 following completion of his PhD. Iain’s primary interest and expertise lies in corporate governance and financial regulation. He is a member of the editorial board of the Capital Markets Law Journal and has served as general editor of the Law and Financial Markets Review. His current research is focused on legal, regulatory and ethical responses to misconduct in financial markets. In 2012 Iain served as a special adviser to the House of Lords EU Committee. In 2014 he served as a member of the UK Research Evaluation Framework (REF) Panel for Law.  He is currently Senior Adviser on a DG FISMA commissioned project examining national compliance with EU financial sector Directives. In his spare time Iain enjoys swimming and a leisurely game of tennis.

Diederik Bruloot is a Professor at the Law School of Ghent University. He teaches several courses on business law as well as a course on international economic law. His current research focusses on the legal aspects of corporate finance. Over the last years he published on a broad range of topics regarding company law, insolvency law and consumer law. He obtained his PhD from Ghent University in 2012 with a thesis regarding creditor protection in European company law. He is a member of Ghent University’s Financial Law Institute and of the Belgian National Centre for Company Law.

Niels Hermes is Professor of International Finance and Chair of the Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance of the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen. He is also visiting professor at Solvay Business School, Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research focuses on international financial flows and comparative corporate governance. He has published papers on these topics in journals such as Economic Journal, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, and Corporate Governance: An International Review.

Vera Angelova studied economics at Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Western Ontario. In 2010 she received her PhD in economics from Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She continued her work as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena. In 2011 Vera was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society. Vera took up her current position as a research associate at Technische Universität Berlin in 2012. Research stays took her to the Toulouse School of Economics, and the University of California San Diego. Vera's research interests are in Experimental Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Game Theory. Currently she works on unethical behavior, consumer protection measures, discrimination, incentives, and motivation of employees.

Fred de Jong is a self-employed and independent researcher/consultant specializing in the functioning of the financial advisory market. Through his company, he advises financial institutions, conducts (scientific) studies on developments in the financial advisory market and guides organizations in dealing with market developments. Furthermore, Fred de Jong is a scientific researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Insurance Studies and is a lecturer at the Master's program in Insurance Studies. He also regularly publishes in newspapers, academic and scientific journals. In 2016 he published a book with his vision on a commission free business model for financial advisors.

Hans-Martin von Gaudecker is a Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn and is a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor, of Netspar, and of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging. Previously, von Gaudecker was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Mannheim and the VU University Amsterdam. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim. Von Gaudecker does research in the areas of the economics of the life-cycle, household finance, and computationally intensive methods. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Econometrics and other outlets.

Steffen Meyer earned his degree in Business Administration at EBS Business School in Oestrich-Winkel and also finished his doctoral studies there in 2008. He then joined Goethe University as a post-doctoral researcher. Since July 2014, he holds the position as Professor of Financial Economics at Leibniz University Hanover. He teaches classes on Household Finance, Asset Management, Financial Systems and Financial Markets for bachelor and master students and in executive education programs. Steffen Meyer’s research explores a variety of topics of decision making on financial markets including personal and household finance. He is particularly interested in stock market participation, the effects of financial advice and trading motives of private investors. He has published scholarly articles on these subjects, which have been published in journals such as Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, Schmalenbach’s Business Review and the Journal of Financial Markets and Portfolio Management. Parallel to his academic career he has acted as advisor to major industry players and co-authored a report to the Federal Ministry of Consumer Protection.

Marco Meyer works in the Trusting Banks Program at the University of Groningen towards a PhD in economics. His research in economics is on new ways to measure financial literacy. He develops a measure of intellectual virtue to investigate which factors other than knowledge and numeracy shape financial decision making. He earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cambridge for a dissertation on the “Right to Credit”, investigating the role of the credit system in a just society. He has an MA in philosophy from the University of Oxford (BPhil), and has BAs in Philosophy and Economics as well as in European History from the University of Bayreuth. From December 2017 on he will be Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York.

Boudewijn de Bruin is Professor of Financial Ethics in the University of Groningen. He obtained masters degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, and holds a PhD in logic and game theory from the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (Amsterdam). He was a visiting student at Berkeley, is a Life Member of Clare Hall (Cambridge), and has held visiting positions at the Harvard Business School and Cambridge University. De Bruin leads two large projects financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) on trust and finance (with Cambridge), and on epistemic justice in medicine and finance (with Sheffield and the City University of New York). A recent monograph entitled Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.

Greg Van Elsen joined BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, in 2014. BEUC acts as the umbrella group in Brussels for its members and its main task is to represent them at European level and defend the interests of all Europe’s consumers. Just like the EU itself, BEUC’s membership has grown, and its members now include 41 well respected, independent national consumer organisations from 31 European countries. As a policy officer Greg Van Elsen works on issues of consumer and investor protection arising in financial services legislation. In this capacity he has worked on several files of financial legislation, including MiFID II, KID for PRIIPS and the Insurance Distribution Directive. As of 2016, he is representing European consumers within the Insurance and Reinsurance Stakeholder Group (IRSG), one of the main advisory bodies to the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA). Greg Van Elsen is also responsible for tracking digital innovation in financial services from a consumer perspective. In that capacity he is active in the European Crowdfunding Stakeholder Forum, an expert group set up by the European Commission. He has a diverse civil society background, previously working inter alia for Fairfin, a non-governmental organisation advocating sustainable finance. As a policy officer he focused on banking structural reform and socially responsible investing. Previously he spent four years at Oxfam, working on issues of fair trade. Greg Van Elsen holds a master in Applied Economic Sciences (University of Antwerp, 2002) and a master in International Politics (University of Leuven, 2003).

Dirk Ulbricht is Director and Senior Researcher at iff (institut für finanzdienstleistungen, Hamburg), a research institute analysing financial services with a focus on consumer protection and access for vulnerable consumers funded through projects carried out amongst others, for the European Commission, German federal ministries, consumer agencies and providers. Dirk Ulbricht is currently involved in a project grant concerning the development of EU supplementary pensions through equity release schemes for the European Commission (DG EMPL) covering five European countries, the German annual report on over-indebtedness based on iff’s unique panel of about 50,000 consumers (Teambank foundation), a study analysing the role of guarantee banks in SME lending (Bürgschaftsbank Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), and in a capacity building project helping to establish consumer protection organisations in Turkey (Turkey Ministry for EU Affairs). Dirk Ulbricht is an empirical economist with a research focus on Consumer Finance, Over-Indebtedness, Housing, and Quantitative Forecasting. He has worked as a researcher at the DIW (German Institute for Economic Research) Berlin and the ifo Institute Munich in the economic forecasting and business cycle departments and lectured at the Hertie School of Governance and HWR Berlin. He has published in Economics Letters, Journal of Comparative Economics, and Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Journal of Forecasting and Economics Bulletin. He earned his PhD at the Ludwigs-Maximilians University Munich. He has gained practical experience as manager both in sales and internal departments at Allianz.

Enno Wiertsema is director of Adfiz, the branch association of independent financial advisers. Before he took up this position he was an independent consultant for financial service providers, head of Formula Management and Change at De Hypotheker, and advisor at Turner. The members of Adfiz together have 15,000 employees and provide advice to around 7 million clients. The market share of these members is 85 per cent with respect to the corporate market and 55 per cent for the consumer market.

Leo de Boer is, since 1 January 2005, managing director of the Dutch Association of Insurers, where he started working in 1990. His portfolio exists of the departments non-life, general policy issues and services (including human anti-fraude, insurance academy and centre of insurance statistics. Leo de Boer is also responsible for the Innovation project of our Association. Leo de Boer studied Law at the VU University Amsterdam with a major in private law.

Rudy van Leeuwen has been working at the AFM since 2004. He has been involved in setting up the supervision of the Wfd. After that he fulfilled various roles within the AFM, such as supervising investment firms. Now he fulfills the role of Manager Insurance within the Retail department ‘Insurance & Pensions’.
Prior to joining the AFM, he worked for 13 years in various positions within the Delta Lloyd Group.