Ben Keeler
Director , Citisoft, Inc.

Ben Keeler is a Director with Citisoft with a focus on Practice Development. In his role as Director, Mr. Keeler provides professional services to the firm's clients in the form of program and project management, strategic and operational analysis, and client initiative facilitation. In addition to his direct work in the firm's day to day consulting practice, Mr. Keeler oversees the firm's knowledge management practices by developing and managing the firm's intellectual assets and driving the firm's thought leadership in the asset management industry.

Brian Mitchell
Global Head of Dealing & Portfolio Control , Barings

Born in 1968 and educated in Scotland, he spent an initial spells at Fleming Investment Management, Morgan Grenfell Asset Management and Fuji Bank where he worked on various Fixed Income Treasury and Corporate money-market desks. Re-joined Flemings in 1994, studied part-time at London Business School, progressed to become responsible for the firm’s London FX / Fixed Income Dealing team and ran a range of short duration Money Market funds.

Joined Barings in January 1999 as a Director, responsible for the Global Fixed Income and Treasury Trading team, his role expanded in 2002 to include Global Equity, Derivative Trading and the middle-office Order Generation processes. He has ongoing responsibility for the team’s contribution to the Investment / Implementation processes, TCA, Trading activities, Broker relationships and evaluation, MiFID along with related FSA regulatory / procedural issues.
Currently sponsor for Baring’s phased functionality upgrade of legacy Order Generation along with the FIX v4.2 enabled, multi-asset class OMS and LSE FIX Hub. Extending usage of various trading venues and MTF’s across all products, he’s in the past been a member of FXAll’s Client Advisory Board, various FIX JWG’s and is currently Co-Chair of a MiFID Best Execution JWG and on NYFIX Euro-Millennium Advisory Board amongst others.

Chris Skinner
CEO , Balatro

Chris’s background covers over 20 years in banking and technology leading to his creation of Balatro.  Balatro is a networking organisation, a Club and an advisory service, which is dedicated to tracking the key business and technology trends in financial services.  The focus of Balatro includes advising financial institutions on the future of customer, channel and technology usage and segmentation; and advising and supporting technology vendors in their sales and marketing strategies to financial institutions.

One of Chris’s specific skills is translating the learning’s from the Balatro network of over 1,000 professionals into a shared vision.  Chris then shares this vision as an exceptional speaker on the future strategies for banks at the world’s leading financial conferences including the BAI USA, EFMA Europe and the Financial Times UK.  He also writes regular columns on the future of banking for the Banker and Finextra, as well as contributing to other media including the BBC and Financial Times.  

In addition to Chris’s responsibilities at Balatro he is:

• an Associate Director of TowerGroup Research;
• a Contributing Editor to the Banker;
• a member of the Executive team for the standards organisation, TWIST;
• a non-executive director of Original Solutions in Eire; and
• one of the four founders of Shaping Tomorrow, the internet portal for strategists and futurists.

Hirander Misra
Chief Operating Officer and a Director , Chi-X Europe Limited

Hirander Misra is Chief Operating Officer and a Director on the board of Chi-X Europe Limited, a pan-European ATS.  Previously to this, he was Head of the Instinet European Exchange Linkages Group, which successfully delivered Instinet Europe's direct exchange connectivity product suite and the first production ready European Smart Order Routing system.

Hirander started his career as a graduate at Reuters. He is also a member of the Project Management Institute, being a certified Project Management Professional and was educated at the London School of Economics and City University, London.

Johan Erikson
Head of Trading , DnBNOR Asset Management

Runs a global trading team for equities and related instruments located in 3 time zones. Has been 17 years in the market, the last 7 years on buy-side and the previous 10 years on sell-side working for various brokers and banks.
Initiated the first Scandinavian Fix Conference together with FIX Protocol in January 2005 in Stockholm. Winner at Trade Tech awards 2007 - "Best Buy Side Use of Advanced Trading Tools".

John Lee
co-founder, CEO and publisher , The TRADE Ltd

John Lee is co-founder, CEO and publisher, The TRADE Ltd and executive director of writing and research consultancy Information Partners (IP). He is responsible for the editorial direction of The TRADE magazine, which focuses on global equities trading, The TRADE Asia and daily news site www.thetradenews.com.   

John regularly speaks and chairs industry conferences/roundtables. He was co-author of the book ‘Global custody: a guide for the nineties.’ He has written for The FT, The Sunday Times and The Independent, amongst others, and written and produced documentaries on the financial industry’s response to 9/11 and China’s entry into the WTO.