Federal Council appoints Marlene Amstad as future FINMA Chair

Bern, 13.03.2020 - During its meeting on 13 March 2020, the Federal Council appointed Marlene Amstad as the new Chair of the Board of Directors of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA for the remainder of the 2020-2023 term of office. She will take up her new position on 1 January 2021. She will succeed Thomas Bauer, who will leave the Board of Directors on 31 December 2020. The Federal Council took note of this resignation and thanked Mr Bauer for the services rendered.

Thomas Bauer reaches statutory retirement age this year and has announced his resignation as of 31 December 2020. The search for a successor to the Chair of FINMA's Board of Directors began early on and was based on the Board's profile of requirements of 25 November 2015. The desired candidate was someone with a very broad understanding of the Swiss financial centre and who was also familiar with important financial market issues and the recent history of global financial markets. In addition, the individual needed to have a thorough knowledge of the regulatory environment and the functioning of FINMA and international regulators in particular.

Professor Marlene Amstad (Dr. oec.), currently Vice-Chair of the FINMA Board of Directors, emerged from the evaluation as the best candidate. After her studies, Prof. Amstad worked at the Swiss Economic Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (KOF), Credit Suisse, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Swiss National Bank. At the end of 2011, Marlene Amstad joined the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Hong Kong. In 2016, she was appointed professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, where she researches and lectures on Chinese financial markets. She has been Co-Director of the Centre of Financial Technology and Social Finance at the Shenzhen Finance Institute since 2018. She works regularly as a visiting research fellow at central banks, most recently at the Bank of Japan. She became a member of FINMA's Board of Directors in 2016 and was appointed as its Vice-Chair in February 2018.

Thanks to her many years of experience in the financial sector, Marlene Amstad has an excellent knowledge of the Swiss financial markets and infrastructure as well as the associated institutions. In the United States, she deepened her research into the use of large data sets for timely forecasts. The indicator she developed is still calculated and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York today. She has also lectured on money, financial markets and regulation at the University of Bern since 2007. She works intensively on fintech, blockchain and digital currencies, and has published a textbook on these topics with the Asian Development Bank.

Marlene Amstad's successor as Vice-Chair of FINMA's Board of Directors will be announced at a later date.


Address for enquiries

Peter Minder, Head of FDF Communications
Tel. +41 58 462 63 01, peter.minder@gs-efd.admin.ch


Publisher

The Federal Council
https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start.html

Secretariat-General FDF
http://www.efd.admin.ch

https://www.admin.ch/content/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-78432.html