Luca Gelsomino is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen and the Academic Director of the SCF Community. In this role, he oversees the Community’s research projects, international network, and publication strategy. His teaching interests include supply chain management, financial analysis, and Supply Chain Finance. He holds a Ph.D. with merit from the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano (Italy), on the topic of measuring the financial performance of supply chains. While working for the School of Management, he directed the School’s permanent research program on Supply Chain Finance. His research focuses on the relationship between physical and financial supply chains.

Kavickumar leads Microsoft’s data center sustainability policy work in the Asia region and he is an adjunct teaching faculty member with the National University of Singapore. He spearheads efforts in reducing regulatory risks to Microsoft’s data center operations in this region while ensuring Microsoft remains at the forefront of sustainability for its data center business. A seasoned sustainability professional with over 10 years of experience working in a diverse range of industries across agribusiness, renewable fuel to FMCG, his work has involved policy-making, strategy, and implementation around sustainability for corporates. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He completed an MBA from the University of Manchester and holds Master’s Degrees in Environmental Managemental and Digital Leadership from the National University of Singapore.

Sarat Mohanty is the Deputy General Manager at SMBC bank in Singapore driving Transaction Banking strategy & transformation for Asia Pacific region. Sarat is also an Executive Fellow at National University of Singapore focusing on Digital Transformation leadership development program for C suite executives in the Financial Services sector. Sarat’s core competency includes 1) Physical supply chain management, 2) Financial supply chain management & 3) Digital transformation in financial institutions. Sarat has a decade of physical supply chain management experience at Levi Strauss (Asia Pacific), Adidas (Global) & Black & Decker (EMEA), he is a six-sigma certified in supply chain management. He also has more than a decade of financial supply chain experience at Standard Chartered Bank where he was the Global head of International Trade & Supply Chain Finance client implementation, supplier marketing & onboarding function. Sarat has a strong technology background, he teaches AI, Blockchain & Quantum Computing at NUS Singapore. Sarat has supervised the project capstone at NUS on Digital Supply Chain Finance Tower for master’s in digital finance technology students.

Dr Robert De Souza is the Executive Director and Chief Executive of The Logistics Institute – Asia Pacific since 2003. TLI – Asia Pacific is a premier national institute housed at the National University of Singapore for nurturing logistics excellence in industry, postgraduate research and education.

Prior to joining TLI – Asia Pacific, Dr. de Souza was a senior industrialist and technopreneur serving as Executive Vice President for V3 Systems in the Asia Pacific, Corporate Senior Vice President and Global Chief Knowledge Officer at Viewlocity Inc. and founding Vice Chairman and CEO of SC21 Pte. Ltd.

Dr. de Souza is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore, a Fellow of IEOM and an Adjunct Fellow of SimTech.   Dr de Souza has also held adjunct positions in Europe and the USA and most recently as a Visiting Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Dr. de Souza also served as the Program Manager for Logistics and SCM (Urban Systems Initiative) at the National Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.

He leads teams of researchers in new initiatives and supports key ASEAN Universities in delivering Humanitarian and Urban Logistics Education. He has spoken internationally at many conferences and special sessions and has authored and contributed to many leading publications, also being a member of the Editorial Boards of select international journals and co-editor of an extensive special book series in Logistics published by Springer. Dr de Souza has also been consulted by many multinationals, universities and government agencies. Dr. de Souza is a Chartered Engineer and serves on multiple industry, government and academic committees and serves on the Advisory Boards of SCALA, SUSS Business School Logistics Program and University Duisburg-Essen Centre for Logistics and Traffic.

Dr. de Souza received his Ph.D., M.Sc. and B.Sc. Honours in the United Kingdom. In 2014, Dr De Souza was conferred the IEOM Distinguished Service Award by his peers in 2104, the SCA Supply Chain Educator Award in 2017, the Distinguished Industry Award in 2018 and most notably the Public Administration Medal (Bronze) by the President of the Republic of Singapore.

Steven Beck is the head of trade and supply chain finance at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a program which supports over 10,000 transactions worth about US $8 billion annually. In his fifteen years at the ADB, Mr. Beck has led the program to exponential growth, and has launched multiple initiatives to make trade and supply chains green, resilient, transparent, and socially responsible.
Mr. Beck established the first and only authoritative source of default and loss data in trade financing at the peak of the 2008 Financial Crisis, reshaping the regulatory treatment of trade finance and freeing up billions in additional financing capacity as a result. More recently, Mr. Beck launched ADB’s groundbreaking analysis on global unmet demand for trade finance, highlighting the imperative to address this market failure to create transformative economic benefits, particularly across developing Asia, and in support of small businesses across the region.
ADB’s Trade and Supply Chain Finance Program has been a champion of the digitalization of global trade, with Mr. Beck driving the creation of the Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) in partnership with the Government of Singapore and International Chamber of Commerce. Under Mr. Beck’s leadership, a gender audit was conducted of ADB partner commercial banks to develop specific recommendations to attract, retain, and promote more women in banking.
Mr. Beck mandates the team at ADB to actively develop projects that advance prosperity and inclusion through trade; these include initiatives to combat money laundering in trade, efforts to increase traceability of carbon emissions and sustainability in global supply chains as well as solutions targeting greater adoption of social and labour safety standards in international commerce.
He serves on industry bodies, including the Governing Board of the Digital Standards Initiative and the World Trade Organization (WTO) Working Group for Trade Finance and others. Mr. Beck is a member of Advisory Council of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, providing strategic advice on international accounting and sustainability reporting standards.
Mr. Beck began his career with roles as a special assistant to the Canadian minister for international trade and as a senior manager at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). He left CIBC to help start up a new multilateral development bank, the Black Sea Trade & Development Bank (BSTDB), which focused on economic development in Türkiye, Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union. Following BSTDB, he took up roles as a senior consultant, including work with the United States Agency for International Development in southern Africa.
He holds an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, USA and a B.A. from Queen’s University, Canada.

Sanjay is a Supply Chain professional who runs his own advisory consulting practice based out of Singapore. He sits as an Advisory board member  for multiple start-ups and SME’s located in Asia. He also runs Humana international handling Talent Development & Executive Placements in supply chain domain across the region. He is an honorary Life Member for Institute of Directors (IOD) India. He also serves as an Overseas Advisory Member on the board of SME Chambers India. Prior, he has led diverse and world class supply chain verticals for MNC’s like VeriFone Inc, Huntsman Inc, ThermoFisher Scientific, JohnsonDiversey, DELL Global, Apple Inc, ExxonMobil, MOTUL Lubricants, Rhone-Poulence Rorer & UniLever Brothers. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Postgraduate in Materials Management from premier Indian business school. He is a Certified Logistics Professional from The Logistics Society, Singapore.  He is a certified (CPIM) practitioner from APICS, USA. He has completed formal Executive Leadership management courses at INSEAD, Singapore.

Michael manages BT Sourced’s Professional Services Team and drives the adoption of emerging, AI-based technologies to boost the effectiveness of BT’s procurement processes. He is at the forefront of implementing BT’s supply chain financing program and building an ecosystem around it.

Yan Xin is currently pursuing a Ph.D. from both the Asia Pacific Institute of Logistics at the National University of Singapore and Beijing University of Technology in China. Prior to his academic pursuits, Yan Xin gained experience working in credit at the Bank of China. His research focuses on various aspects of supply chain management, such as optimization, finance, blockchain, resilience, and finance.

Jens Rutenkröger is a Senior Solution Architect in the advanced analytics and AI team at TÜV SÜD Digital Service GmbH. He has a diploma in physics and has over 30 years background in software engineering, architecture and project management in small to large scale projects. He has a passion for engaging with new technologies such as AI and blockchain to develop novel service offerings. In the scope of SuppliedTrust, Jens led the TÜV SÜD team to apply block chain for supply chain transparency.

Peter works as Senior Director, Head of Supply Chain Management APAC at Cushman & Wakefield. He has diverse international experiences in Global Procurement /Sourcing and Supply Chain leadership roles in the High Technology and Services industry. He is a senior management executive with proven track record in various greenfield startups in Supply Chain Operations and Procurement Transformation.

Ajith is the Director of Global Supply Chain Excellence Projects at Mondelez International. He is specialised in driving transformation and change. He drove the set-up of regional and global spend towers as part of organization-wide procurement transformations. He led projects involving significant upgrade of capability (people, process, systems) in Logistics, Customer Service and Asset Reliability and worked across multiple supply chain disciplines.

Priti is a Global Digital Supply Chain Transformation Leader with an amalgamation of deep business process expertise and technology know-how focusing on value creation leading to value realisation. She worked across all functions in Supply Chain: Planning, Manufacturing, Sourcing, Logistics, Quality, Finance, and Data & Analytics with focus on Digitalized Customer Experience. Currently, she is Vice President- Global Supply Chain Transformation Planning at Schneider Electric.