FESE- BETTER FINANCE Online webinar

Alexandra Jour-Schroeder is Deputy Director General of the European Commission´s Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union since March 2021. In her function, Alexandra Jour-Schroeder supervises and monitors the policies of the Directorate General.

Alexandra Jour-Schroeder is a graduate in law. Following initial assignments in the German federal government, she started working for the European Commission in 1996, holding several positions in competition, enterprise and industry policies as well as justice. From 1998 to 2007, she was Member of Cabinet for the Commissioners responsible for regional policy and justice and home affairs and for the Vice-President for enterprise and industry. Since 2017, she has been the Director for Criminal Justice in the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers, working inter alia on the establishment of a European Public Prosecutor´s Office and Anti-Money Laundering policies. From 2018 to 2021, she was also overseeing consumer policies as Acting Deputy Director General in DG Justice and Consumers.

Bryan Coughlan is a Senior Financial Services Officer at BEUC, The European Consumer Organisation. In this capacity he works closely on consumer protection issues in retail investment markets. The Retail Investment Strategy, MiFIR, and the major files of the EU Sustainable Finance Strategy have been the most recent fields of engagement. Prior to working at BEUC, Bryan worked at the Federation of German Consumer Organisations in Berlin, in the financial markets team.

Bryan Coughlan holds a B.A in economics and a M.A. in international economics, both from the university of Göttingen.

Nikolaj Kosakewitsch is Senior Vice President and Head of European Equities & Derivatives and President of the Nasdaq Copenhagen Exchange. Nikolaj joined Nasdaq in May 2017 and brings years of extensive knowledge, experience, and insight from sell-side working with buy-side institutions in the Nordics, Europe and the U.K.

He holds a Global Executive MBA from INSEAD.

Aleksandra Mączyńska is Acting Managing Director of BETTER FINANCE. She comes from Warsaw, Poland, where she was the Deputy Director of the International Relations Department of the Polish consumer and competition watchdog.

She studied at the Faculty of Management at the Poznan University of Economics and at the Warsaw School of Economics. She has also a vast experience in management of international projects, e.g. EU funded capacity building projects. As a Fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation Programme for the Young Executives from the Public Sector, she worked at the Division for World Bank International Monetary Fund, Debt Issues and International Finance Structure at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. She was an expert at various EU Council’s Working Parties such as the WP on Financial Services and WP on Competitiveness and Growth, as well as European Commission’s Working Groups and Advisory Committees.

EU expert groups: Member of the Directorate-General for the Environment on the European Commission Eco-labelling Board, Vice Chair of EIOPA’s Occupational pensions Stakeholder Group (OPSG), Member of the United Nations Civil Society Advisory Body of the Principles for Responsible Banking (UNEPFI), Member of The Consumer Policy Advisory Group (CPAG).

Ján Šebo serves as a senior economist for the Government Office of Slovak republic responsible for the pension reform and sound public finance under the Recovery Ana Resilience Plan.

Since 2008 he has been working in the Financial Services User Group at the European Commission and served as a member of the Occupational Pensions Stakeholder Advisory Group at EIOPA (Frankfurt, Germany). He is the co-author and head of research of the Orange Envelope® - a fintech application oriented on personal wealth management and pension tracking system.
He has been a member of many working and expert committees focusing on pensions policy and financial sector regulation at home and abroad. He is a regular speaker at national and international scientific and professional forums.

Mr. Šebo holds master degree in Public Economics and PhD in Economics. He also holds the law degree with focus on economic, financial and monetary law.

Rainer Riess is Director General of the Federation of European Securities Exchanges (FESE) and an independent advisor to exchanges and financial services companies with more than 30 years of experience in the global exchange industry. He is also Vice Chair of the Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group (SMSG) which provides ESMA with opinions and advice on its policy work.

For many years, he served as Vice Chairman of the Board of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and was responsible for the cash market business of Deutsche Börse AG. During his career at Deutsche Börse, he created and managed markets, drove changes in European corporate governance and accounting practice, financial market regulation and supervision of market player. Major initiatives include running the cash market in a competitive MiFiD environment and financial market crises, the creation of DTB Deutsche Terminbörse / Eurex, developing European primary markets (Neuer Markt, indices, corporate governance and regulation), the launch of the Xetra electronic trading system and the CCP as well as the creation of the European ETF and structured products markets.

He holds a Master in Economics from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and an MBA from the University of Miami (Fulbright Scholar).