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Speakers
Dubravka Negre
European Investment Bank, Head of Regional Representation for the Western Balkans
Dubravka Nègre has been heading the European Investment Bank’s Regional Representation for the Western Balkans since August 2016. EIB, European Union’s bank, is the world’s largest multilateral bank and one of the largest lenders in the Western Balkans with close to EUR 9 billion of the committed financing in the last 15 years. Prior to coming to Belgrade, Dubravka was responsible for EIB’s Public-Private Partnerships and Project Finance operations in Ireland, France, UK, and Benelux. She closed financings for projects in the renewable energy, road transport as well as the healthcare, among others. She negotiated and executed the first Public-Private Partnership in Croatia. For this project, she won Project Finance Deal of the Year and EMEA Finance Magazine European Deal 2013 in London. Dubravka led EIB operations in Albania, FYROM, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. Between 2004 and 2013, she appraised, negotiated and signed numerous transactions in education, energy, health, R&D, telecommunications and transport. She wrote several research papers in the field of Public-Private Partnerships. Before joining EIB, Dubravka worked as a Television Producer for Cable News Network International (CNNI), covering conflicts, including the war in Afghanistan. She won an award from the US National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences. She graduated Finance and Banking at the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade, and holds Master degree in International Finance and Management from SDA Bocconi University in Milan and Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles. Dubravka speaks fluently English, French, Italian and Serbian. She is married with two children.
Aleksandra Vukosavljevic
EBRD, Associate Director, FI
Aleksandra Vukosavljevic is an Associate Director at EBRD and works on financial sector transactions in the Western Balkans Region. Being based in EBRD’s Resident Office in Belgrade, she primarily coordinates EBRD’s activities in the financial sector in Serbia, but is also acting as a business leader for EBRD’s FI operations in Albania and Kosovo. Since 2017 she serves as a member of the Managing Board at the European Voluntary Pension Fund, the first third pillar pension fund in BiH. Aleksandra has over 15 years of experience in banking and finance. Prior to joining EBRD, she worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she was involved in a number of benchmark M&A, audit and forensic audit transactions in financial sector in the Western Balkans and also headed Investment Banking and Research at Raiffeisen banka a.d. Serbia, where she was actively involved in asset allocation decision process of the bank’s dealer operations and asset management of subsidiaries (member of investment committees in voluntary pension and investment funds). Ms Vukosavljevic is a Serbian national, graduated from the Belgrade University (Faculty of Organisational Science). She is a member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, UK and a licenced Portfolio Manager by Serbian SEC. She completed Management Development Program at the Austrian Raiffeisen Banking Group.
Jasna Atanasijevic
National Secretariat for Public Policy, Acting CEO
Jasna Atanasijevic has occupied the position of Acting Director at the Serbian Republic Secretariat for Public Policies (RSPP) since August 2014, where she is tasked with establishing an expert body within the Government for supporting public policy planning and coordination and quality of regulations based on heavier reliance on analyses and data, as well as with the reform of planning within the state administration. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Sciences – Department of Mathematics and Informatics, she teaches Finance and Mathematical Fundamentals of Economics. During the 2009-2014 period, she worked as Chief Economist at the Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank in Serbia. She was previously engaged as a researcher at the Foundation for the Advancement of Economics (FREN), working on implementing it at the Faculty of Economics during the 2004-2008 period, as well as a consultant at the KPMG Belgrade. She graduated in Finance and Banking at the Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade. She obtained her Master’s degree in Banking and Finance from the Toulouse 1 University of Social Sciences and her PhD degree in economics at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in France. She is the author of numerous papers on applied economics which were published in renowned domestic and foreign magazines, as well as of many expert reports in the field of economics and finance. She was editor or associate on several expert editions in the field of macroeconomics, business economics and finance. As of December 2015, she is member of the Presidency of the Serbian Association of Economists. She is fluent in English and French and communicates in several other foreign other languages.
Sandra Rodic
USAID Business Enabling Project, Financial Market Development Expert
Sandra Rodic is Financial Market Development Expert with the USAID-funded Business Enabling Project (BEP) in Serbia, implemented by Cardno Emerging Markets USA Ltd. USAID BEP provides assistance to the Government of Serbia in improving the overall competitiveness of the Serbian economy, through strengthening business-enabling regulatory environment, improving public financial management, and developing Serbian financial market. In the past seven years, Sandra has been leading USAID BEP’s efforts to broaden access to finance for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) through introducing non-bank financial institutions; reform MSME-oriented state aid programs; and to institute a sound profession of real property valuers, therefore improving the quality of real property valuation and enabling lenders to place more trust in such valuations. Prior to joining the USAID BEP team, Sandra amassed 10 years of experience in finance, with proven expertise in developing and managing portfolio strategies, and gained thorough knowledge of South-Eastern European and global capital markets. She holds MSc in Economics from the University of Belgrade, and is one of the first holders of the Portfolio Managers License, issued by the Serbian Securities Commission.
Nikola Altiparmakov
Fiscal Council of the Republic of Serbia, Member
Nikola Altiparmakov is a macroeconomist specialized in the field of public finance. He has studied at internationally renowned universities, including University of California at Berkeley, and University of Toronto. He has started his professional career as a Debt Analyst within the Serbian Treasury, advancing to the position of Macro-Fiscal Consultant within the Ministry of Finance. He then served as the Economic Adviser within the Serbian Tax Administration and as the Fiscal Consultant on the pension reform and economic development of Serbia projects. He has published a number of academic papers in the field of pension insurance and tax systems in leading international professional journals, in which he performs the function of the reviewer by invitation. He regularly publishes research papers in the field of fiscal policy in refined domestic journals and professional conferences.
Sebastian Sosa
IMF, Resident Representative for Serbia
Sebastián Sosa is the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Resident Representative in Serbia. Previously, he was Senior desk economist for Spain in the European Department. He also served in the Regional Studies Division in the Western Hemisphere Department, producing cross-country research and analysis of macroeconomic issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, and worked on a number of country assignments in this region. Prior to joining the IMF in 2006, he was Teaching Assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and professor (macroeconomics) at the Universidad de la República and researcher at the Center for the Study of Economic and Social Affairs (CERES), a think tank, in Uruguay. His areas of expertise and research interests include international macroeconomics and finance, and he has published several academic and policy papers in books and economic journals. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA in 2006.
Predrag Dedeic
Securities Commission, Chairman
Predrag Dedeic graduated and earned master and doctorate degree at the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade. He worked in law firms, foreign trade and legal-economic consultancy. He began his university career in 2004 at the University of Belgrade, and then continued at the Belgrade Banking Academy, Union University in Belgrade. He was a lecturer in brokerage and investment consultants courses in the Republic of Srpska and courses for internal auditors in Sarajevo. At the Law School of the University of British Columbia, Canada, he was a visiting professor in 2010/11. He published works in domestic and international journals and participated in international conferences, of which the last was in May 2017 in Ankara, where he was a panelist at the III Symposium on Commercial Law, Banking and Capital Market Law. He is currently working as Chairman of the Securities Commission of the Republic of Serbia.
Slavko Caric
Erste bank a.d. Novi Sad, CEO
Slavko Caric is the CEO of Erste Bank Serbia, the member of Erste Group, one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe. Mr. Caric was born in 1971, in Novi Sad. He received his education in America and Switzerland, where he earned a degree in Business Administration from the University of Geneva in 1995. In January 2009 Slavko Caric became President of the Management Board of Erste Bank Serbia. Previously, since 2007, he was Deputy President of Erste Bank in Serbia, in charge for corporate business development and capital market. During his career, he founded several successful companies in the area of trade and finance. Mr. Caric knows business environment in Serbia very well thanks to his long-standing experience within investment banking and capital market in Serbia. Voluntarily performs the function of Board member of the Tennis Association of Serbia and member of the Managing Board of the Serbian Association of Managers. He speaks several languages: English, French, Italian, Russian, and German.
Vladislav Cvetkovic
PricewaterhouseCoopers d.o.o. Beograd, Director - Advisory Markets Leader
Vladislav Cvetković is the Advisory Market Leader Director in PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in Serbia. PwC is the largest network of Professional services firms globaly. In 2009 – 2013, he was the Director of Privatization Agency, Serbian central privatization authority. The responsibilities included the operational management, privatization origination and execution, post-privatization monitoring and improvements of privatization framework in Serbia. Vladislav had significant involvement in the major financial sector projects of the Serbian transition governments in 2001-2007, driven by the Central Bank and the Ministry of finance of Serbia. The project agenda included sucessfull initial restructuring of Serbian banking sector, regulatory improvements of financial legislation, privatization strategy development and numerous banking and insurance companies privatization and restructurings, He was the lead Privatization advisor operationally responsible for a number of complex privatization transactions, inlcluding the largest successful privatization transaction in Serbia so far (sale of Mobi63 mobile operator to Telenor) and several major banks privatizations: Jubanka, Novosadska, Panonska, Vojdodjanska, NSB, DDOR, which were sucessfully sold to large regional and international banking players. He served on the Supervisory Board of the National Bank of Serbia in 2004-2005 and was the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Komercijalna Banka in 2006-2009. In 1994. – 2000. worked in Auditing and Financial Advisory departments in Deloitte Serbia and CEE. He gradudated from the Faculty of Economics of the Belgrade University, where he was also teaching at the department of Finance and Accounting for many years.
Jorge Tavio Ascanio
Thomson Reuters, Head of Digital Innovations & Partners, Europe
Jorge is has always been passionate about connecting the dots between the financial industry, the latest technology trends and regulatory change. He moved young to United Kingdom to become a Software Engineer during the dotcom bubble. After graduating with honors in Oxford Brooks, he returned to Spain where he started selling IT projects as a free lance consultant. He then coursed an MBA specialist in ecommerce at the Polytechnic University of Madrid whilst the trend was then Service Oriented Architectures and web 2.0. In the mean time worked at the Project Management Office at Banco Santander and also Compliance officer at IBM, before joining Thomson Reuters in 2007. Ever since, Jorge has been building tailor made consulting projects and strategic account management before he was recruited by the European Market Development team to lead the buy side proposition for western Europe in the strggle between active and passive management. Now Jorge leads the Partners and Digital innovation team for Continental Europe within Thomson Reuters. His teams manages and onboards strategic partnerships in the financial industry and channels the partnership response to many trends affecting the financial ecosystem such as Fintech revolution (also WealthTech, InsurTech and RegTech) and Regulatory Tsunami (under MIFID II, PRIIPS, AML, MAD and PSD II), and latest technology enhancements such as Big Data, Blockchain, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Urmas Peiker
Funderbeam SEE d.o.o, Co-Founder
Urmas Peiker is the Co-founder, Chairman and in charge of business development of Funderbeam. Beginning his career as a securities regulator in Estonia, in charge of both the regulation and supervision of public capital markets he established an early interest in growth capital and legal compliancy. He achieved an LL.M degree from Duke University (U.S.). Which led to careers at EBRD, Morgan Stanley, and finally as the Head of Compliance at LHV Bank (Estonia) before beginning to build Funderbeam. Urmas Peiker’s main interests and experiences have concerned the history, function, and evolution of global capital markets. He has since led the charge of creating and developing Funderbeam’s marketplace, where growth companies can be funded and traded across borders.
Milan Solaja
Vojvodina ICT Cluster, CEO
Milan is a future-oriented and success driven leader. Since 2010, he is at the helm of the Vojvodina ICT Cluster, based in Novi Sad, capital of Serbian province of Vojvodina. He uses his experience in managing international projects and knowledge of Serbian IT sector to shape this young association into the strongest Serbian cluster to-date. Conversely, heading such a cluster is a full time, demanding job – which Milan manages only with a little help from the cluster members. The values, such as joining efforts and knowledge sharing, are at the core of this cluster’s success – making way for others to follow. The vision of Vojvodina ICT Cluster is DITIGAL SERBIA. Milan is one of the loudest Serbian IT sector lobbyists, launching IT industry in the center of public attention in recent years, raising awareness about the sector’s capacities and opportunities for IT-lead revival of economy ever since. Milan’s previous experiences include investor counseling, financial expertise and managing international development projects with strong information technology note. He is married and has two children.
Sinisa Krneta
Belgrade Stock Exchange, CEO
Sinisa Krneta started his professional career in 1997 at Kapital banka, Belgrade, on the activities of trading in financial derivatives, and index futures of the world's largest stock exchanges. He has been on the Belgrade Stock Exchange since 2001 and has been in leading positions since then. He started as the Head of the Trading Department, and since 2004 he has been the Director of Business Operations. Mr. Krneta, as a member of the Belgrade Stock Exchange team, has played a very important role in the development and building of the image of the Exchange in the past period, which is now recognizable in domestic and international frameworks.
