Marlene Amstad is Chair of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA, honorary professor of the University of Bern and senior fellow at Harvard university.
Her research interests are Money, Banking and International Financial Markets. She publishes in refereed and policy oriented journals such as Journal of International Money and Finance, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Economic Policy Review and BIS Quarterly Review. Marlene is Co-Editor and Author of The Handbook of China’s Financial System (Princeton University Press; with Wei Xiong and Sun Guofeng and a foreword by Darrell Duffie) and Central Bank Digital Currency and Fintech in Asia (joint with ADB; with contributions by PBoC, OJK, BoJ, BoK, BoT, RBA as well as BIS, IMF, Keio University, Luohan Academy and a foreword by Ken Rogoff).
Previously, Marlene acted as Deputy Director at the Swiss National Bank (SNB), served as the Head of Investment Strategy and Financial Market Analysis and was a member of the SNB investment committee. At the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Hong Kong she coordinated the Asian Bond Fund initiative (ABF), a milestone in central bank cooperation in Asia to broaden and deepen the Asian bond markets among 11 leading Asian central banks (Reserve Bank of Australia, The People’s Bank of China, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank Indonesia, Bank of Japan, The Bank of Korea, Bank Negara Malaysia, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Monetary Authority of Singapore, Bank of Thailand). As central bank specialist she regularly holds research fellowships, most recently with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of Japan, Bank of Finland and BIS.
Marlene creates economic indicators for policy makers and investors. At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York she developed the “Fed New York staff underlying inflation gauge (UIG)” which is published monthly by the Fed NY. In joint work with People’s Bank of China she developed a similar gauge for inflation in China. At Credit Suisse she built quantitative credit risk models and developed business cycle indicators at KOF-Swiss Economic Institute.
She held academic positions as economics and finance professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ) and Co-Director of the Center for Financial Technology and Social Finance at the Shenzhen Finance Institute (SFI). She taught courses in “Financial Markets in China and the World” in the Master of Finance program and “Economics of Money and Financial Institutions – from the classic textbook to FinTech” at CUHK-SZ and Shenzhen Finance Institute, “Money, Institutions and Financial Markets”, and lectured on “Financial Institutions and Regulations” at the University of Bern and in the “MBA in Finance” at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
A native Swiss, Marlene received a master in economics (magna cum laude) from the University of Bern, a doctorate in econometrics (summa cum laude) from the University of St. Gallen and pursued her management education at INSEAD and IMD.
