Singapore 2024

Bharath is a partner with McKinsey’s Singapore office, where he leads the firm’s work with payments in Asia, and is part of the banking, sustainability, and digital leadership teams. Over the past 15 years, Bharath has served a broad range of global, regional, and local institutions across banking, payments, fintech, wealth management, technology, and private equity on multiple cross-functional topics related to corporate strategy and M&A, sustainability, innovation, growth, and transformation. He has experience in building and scaling new ventures and has extensively worked across several markets in Asia, including most markets in Southeast Asia, Australia, India, and Greater China.
Prior to joining McKinsey, Bharath held leadership roles at two other global management consulting firms where he focused on financial services and digital banking across Asia–Pacific.

Chee Kin is accountable for the team which manages the legal and regulatory risk of DBS across legal entities, segments and geographies. Prior to joining, he held various legal and compliance portfolios in Standard Chartered Bank, JPMorgan, Rajah & Tann and Allen & Gledhill, including a stint as Chief Operating Officer, South East Asia for JPMorgan. A lawyer by profession, he has particular expertise in financial services regulation, and financial markets product and business structuring. Currently, however, he is focusing on the impact of digitisation, and the evolution of frameworks that will be necessary to cope with digitisation and data, together with second-order issues such as how criminal activity will also evolve, and how legal and compliance departments can benefit from analytics and AI.

Samarth Bansal is the General Manager, Asia Pacific at Wise Platform, Wise’s global payments infrastructure for banks, financial institutions and enterprises around the world. He leads the Wise Platform team in APAC, and is responsible for driving the growth of Wise’s infrastructure offering to banks and enterprises in the region, including the partnerships with Mox Bank, Bank Mandiri and ZA Bank. Prior to joining Wise, Samarth has held leadership positions at other fintechs in the B2B cross-border payments space across product, expansion and business development.

Sonia-Carla Ciocirlie is the Head of Business Operations at Wise Platform, Wise’s market-leading global payment infrastructure for banks, financial institutions and enterprises around the world. She leads the Servicing teams providing enterprise-level support to Wise Platform partners, ensuring scalability, whilst reducing costs and improving SLAs. The Servicing teams include Compliance Operations, such as KYC and KYB, Risk Assessment and Monitoring, Enterprise Support, Customer Success, FinCrime Operations and Payment Operations. Since joining Wise in 2016, Sonia has held various positions including in Marketing and Sales. 

Steve Naudé is the Global Managing Director of Wise Platform, Wise’s global payments infrastructure for banks, financial institutions and enterprises around the world. Wise Platform provides these organisations with the capabilities, technology and network to enable fast, secure and cost-effective international payments for their customers. Previously, Steve has worked on payments international expansion, as well as direct connections to payment schemes such as UK Faster Payments and Swift.