Arnoud Boot is professor of Corporate Finance and Financial Markets at the University of Amsterdam and fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He is research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London, and a member of the Financial Economists Roundtable. He was part of the Inaugural Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), served as chairman of the Bank Council of the Dutch Central Bank (DNB), and as crown member of the Social Economic Council (SER) and council member of the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR). From 2016-2023, he was chairman of the European Finance Association. Earlier he was on the faculty of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Chicago, and was a partner in the Finance and Strategy Practice at McKinsey & Co. Currently, he is a non-executive director and advisor of several corporations and holds several policy related positions. Arnoud Boot held visiting appointments at various universities. He was Bertil Danielsson Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, Olin Fellow at Cornell University in the U.S., and is also conferred a honorary visiting professorship at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. His research focuses on corporate finance and financial institutions. His publications have appeared in major academic journals, such as The Journal of Finance, The American Economic Review, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Journal of Financial Intermediation and The Economic Journal.

Dr. Bimal Patel is an architect, urbanist and academic who has crisscrossed disciplinary, professional and institutional boundaries to explore how architecture, urban design and urban planning can enrich the lives of people in India’s cities. He received his PhD and Masters in City Planning, and Masters in Architecture from University of California, Berkeley in 1995 and his Diploma in Architecture from the School of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad in 1984. He is Chairman and Managing Director, HCP Design, Planning and management Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad and President, CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Dr. Patel's work has won numerous awards. In 2019 he was awarded the Padma Shri.

Avinash Persaud’s career unusually spreads across finance, academia and public policy. 

He was a former senior executive of J. P. Morgan, UBS, State Street and GAM London Ltd and former Chairman of Elara Capital PLC and RBC Barbados. He is a non-exec director of Proven Investments Limited. 

He is a former Governor, London School of Economics and 2010 President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected Trustee of the Global Association of Risk Professionals and the Royal Economics Society. He won the Jacques de Larosiere Award in Global Finance from the Institute of International Finance and was voted one of the top three public intellectuals in the world on the financial crisis by an expert panel. He is Emeritus Professor of Gresham College in the UK. 

He was Chairman, regulatory sub-committee of the UN Commission on Financial Reform; Chairman, Warwick Commission on Financial Reform; Chairman, Financial Services Commission of Barbados; Member of the UK Treasury’s Audit and Risk Committee and the Pew Task Force to the US Senate Banking Committee; Visiting Scholar at the IMF; Distinguished Advisor, Financial Sector Law Reform Commission of India; and Chairman, CARICOM Commission on the Economy.