Larisa Yarovaya, Keynote Speaker

Dr Larisa Yarovaya is an Associate Professor of Finance and the Deputy Head of the Centre for Digital Finance at the Southampton Business School, University of Southampton, UK. Larisa has published more than 60 papers in the international finance and Fintech areas and co-edited the book “Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology”.   Larisa is also the Chair and organiser of the Cryptocurrency Research Conference 2018-2023. Her research results have been disseminated via a variety of media channels and platforms, e.g. BBC, MarketWatch, FT Live, CBC, Euronews, Bloomberg, to name but a few. She also has appeared as an expert in the CNBC series on “Ethereum” and “Stablecoins”.

Frances Coppola, Keynote Speaker

Frances spent 17 years working for banks, where much of her work was concerned with settlement, accounting and risk management systems. She left banking in 2002 to concentrate on her singing career, but after the financial crisis returned to write about the banks that had so nearly blown up the world. For over a decade now she has been writing about banking, finance and economics for a wide range of media and industry publications including Forbes, the Financial Times, American Express, The Independent, Open Democracy, CapX, MarketWatch and CoinDesk. Frances is a frequent commentator on financial and economic matters for the BBC, and is in demand as a speaker and moderator at economics and finance conferences. Her blog Coppola Comment is widely read in the finance & economics community.Frances’s book “The Case for People’s QE” was published by Polity Books in June 2019. In December 2021, her academic paper “The political economy of inflation” was published in the European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies. Her forthcoming book “The Absolute Essentials of Banking” will be published by Routledge in 2023.

In addition to her writing and speaking commitments, Frances continues to sing and teach professionally.