Marlene Amstad

Marlene Amstad is economics and finance professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ) and Co-Director of the FinTech Center at the Shenzhen Finance Institute (SFI). She is senior fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard university and serves as Vice Chair at the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). Her research and teaching focuses on international finance and quantitative economics. She co-edited and authored the books “The Handbook of China’s Financial System” (Princeton University Press, 2020) and “CBDC and Fintech in Asia” (Asian Development Bank, 2019). In Asia for almost a decade, she coordinated at BIS in Hong Kong the Asian Bond Fund (ABF) initiative and served as advisor to over 10 Asian central banks.

Marlene is the former Deputy Director and Head of Investment Strategy and Financial Market Analysis at the Swiss National Bank. Working at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York she developed their Fed NY underlying inflation gauge (UIG), which is published monthly. Previous posts include quantitative research at Credit Suisse and Swiss Economic Institute/ETH Zurich. Marlene regularly holds visiting positions with central banks, most recently at Bank of Japan. She received her PhD in econometrics from University of St. Gallen and her master degree from the University of Bern. Marlene lives in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Switzerland.