Joseph C Brandt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of ContourGlobal, an electric power development and operating company he founded with Reservoir Capital Group in 2005. Before founding ContourGlobal in 2005, Mr Brandt served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for The AES Corporation. His responsibilities included global utility operations and development in the Americas, Africa, Europe and Ukraine comprising approximately $15bn in assets, $5bn in sales and 25,000 employees. He also served as AES’s Chief Restructuring Officer, directing the operational and financial restructuring of AES’s largest international investments and a variety of US and international operating and greenfield assets. As Chief Restructuring Officer, he oversaw the successful restructuring of businesses in Chile, Colombia and Cameroon and executed a landmark debt- for-equity restructuring of AES’s businesses in Brazil with the Brazilian State development bank. Mr Brandt earned a law degree from Georgetown University, a Master of Arts degree from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University. He was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Conor Healy is Senior Risk Management Officer in the Economics and Policy Group of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the political risk insurance arm of the World Bank Group. Mr Healy has worked as an economist at KPMG, where he was a manager in the London Transfer Pricing Group and was the senior financial sector transfer pricing expert for KPMG’s entire European operation. Prior to this he worked as an economist at Lehman Brothers, looking at the European economies. He has authored and presented papers at academic and professional conferences, looking at regional macroeconomic risk as well as at topics such as monetary policy, intellectual property, and business cycle theory. Mr Healy has a PhD from Princeton University, as well as an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA (First Class) from Trinity College, Dublin.

Lee Howell joined the World Economic Forum in 2001 and was made Director, Annual Meeting Programme, New York (2001-02), Senior Director and Head, Asia (2004-08), Managing Director and Head, Programming (2009-10), as well as Member of the Managing Board, responsible for the Centre for Global Events and Risk Response Network (since 2011). Mr Howell is an Adjunct Fellow, Pacific Forum, Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Member of the Editorial Board, Global Asia. Before joining the World Economic Forum, he was a Senior Policy Advisor, US Agency for International Development (2002-03), Consultant to UN High Commissioner for Refugees (2000), Deputy Director, Japan Society of New York (1997-99) and Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies (1993-96). He has a BA in Economics; BA in East Asian Languages and Literature; JD; LLM in International Legal Studies; and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland.

Peter Jones is the Secretary-General of the Berne Union, the International Union of Credit and Investment Insurers. The Berne Union is the leading international association for the export credit and investment insurance industry. Its members insured over US$1.8tn worth of business in 2011; more than 10% of the world's total cross-border trade. Mr Jones was previously the CEO of the African Trade Insurance Agency (ATI), having joined ATI from MIGA, a part of the World Bank Group, Washington DC, where he was Head of Reinsurance and Insurance Operations Support.Prior to joining MIGA in 1999, he held several positions with Export Development Canada (EDC), the last one being Vice President of the Transportation Group and Equity Team. A banker by profession, Mr Jones has previously worked for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, London, as Head of Aerospace and Structured Finance; Grindlays Bank / Australia and New Zealand Bank, London and Hong Kong, as a Divisional Director; Chemco International Leasing Inc., Toronto and Hong Kong; and the Bank of Montreal, Toronto.He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators and alumni of the Harvard Business School/World Bank Group’s Executive Development Programme.

Véronique Kessler, a French national, joined the World Bank in 1993 and spent most of her career in the Bank’s Credit Risk Department. As Credit Risk Head, Ms Kessler has assumed a wide spectrum of responsibilities. She has coordinated the risk analysis and ratings of many sovereign World Bank borrowers, notably in the North Africa, Middle East, South Asia and Africa regions. She has represented the Bank at Paris Club meetings since 2003. She has designed and managed the Bank’s country exposure allocation model introduced just before the onset of the 2008-09 global crisis in the context of elevated sovereign risks and fast rising demand from virtually all eligible clients. Prior to joining the World Bank, Ms Kessler enjoyed a twelve-year career in a French public think tank, the Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Information Internationales, and worked on global economic prospects, international trade, the 1980s debt crisis, the international monetary system and North African economies.

Izumi Kobayashi joined the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) as Executive Vice President in November of 2008. MIGA is the political risk insurance arm of the World Bank Group. Ms Kobayashi came to MIGA from Merrill Lynch in Tokyo, where she was President and Representative Director. She joined Merrill Lynch in 1985 to work on the derivatives markets and subsequently held a number of high-level global leadership roles, including serving as Director of Operations and Chief Administrative Officer. As President, Ms Kobayashi successfully developed the company's business in global financial services and its client franchise, working with international teams ranging in size from 10 people to over 1,000. At MIGA, she has ushered in historic changes to MIGA's operational regulations and its Convention that have significantly expanded the pool of investments the agency can insure. A graduate of Seikei University in Japan, Ms Kobayashi was featured in the October 2005 edition of the Wall Street Journal's "50 Women to Watch", and in 2004 she received the "Business Woman of the Year" award from Veuve Clicquot.

Jürgen Michels is the lead euro area Economist and ECB watcher in Citigroup’s Investment Research and Analysis (CIRA) department in London. Mr Michels joined the firm in 2002 and now has the rank of Managing Director. His responsibilities include the analysis of financial markets, and of economic and policy developments in the euro area, Germany, France and The Netherlands. Prior to joining Citigroup, he spent five years as an Economist at Sal. Oppenheim in Cologne. Mr Michels graduated from the University of Bonn in 1996 and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Frankfurt.

Dr Lauren M Phillips is a Lecturer of International Political Economy at the London School of Economics, and specialises in the political drivers of sovereign bond spreads in both developing and developed countries. Dr Phillips' research focuses on the ways that democratic political institutions interact with perceptions of financial risk. She obtained her undergraduate and master's degrees from Stanford University and her PhD from the London School of Economics. She has worked in the financial industry as an investment bank analyst and as a consultant to a London based political risk insurer, and also has experience in the fields of development and policy.

Simon Quijano-Evans has been working in the area of emerging markets since the mid-1990s. Mr Quijano-Evans worked for the Thai Ministry of Industry in FDI promotion; at UniCredit as Director, EEMEA Economics & FI/FX Strategy; and headed the EMEA Economics & Strategy at Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux until April 2011, when he moved to ING where he is now EMEA Chief Economist and Head of Research. He holds a doctorate in Economics from the University of Vienna.

Edith Quintrell is Director of the Operations Group of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), the political risk insurance arm of the World Bank Group. This group is responsible for underwriting MIGA’s guarantees and developing the agency’s business in a number of areas, including infrastructure, post-conflict countries, frontier markets, South-South investment, and sub-Saharan Africa.Prior to joining MIGA in 2007, Ms Quintrell held various senior level positions in the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) such as Vice President for Insurance, Director of Technical Operations, and Regional Manager. She has also been active in the Berne Union, including as Chair of the Investment Insurance Committee. Prior to joining OPIC, Ms Quintrell worked at the Pan American Development Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation in Washington, DC. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Latin American studies from Princeton University, and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia from 1985 to 1986.

Jan Randolph is Head of the Sovereign Risk Group at IHS Global Insight. Mr Randolph is an experienced international economist and country risk manager. He has held positions in a variety of international financial risk management firms in financial services and has over six years of international economics experience with IHS. He holds graduate degrees from the Universities of London and Bristol.

Martin Sandbu has been the FT’s Economics Leader Writer since 2009. As part of the leader writing team Mr Sandbu contributes to shaping the FT’s editorial line, with particular responsibility for international economic policy questions such as the eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the remaking of global financial regulation. He also contributes occasional longer pieces to the FT’s features and news pages. Prior to joining the FT Mr Sandbu worked as an academic researcher and policy adviser on topics in economics, political economy, and philosophy. He spent two years at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow in economic development, then three years as a lecturer in ethics and corporate responsibility at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). He remains a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at Wharton’s Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research. His Wharton business ethics lectures were published in book form by Pearson Prentice Hall as Just Business: Arguments in Business Ethics in 2011. Mr Sandbu holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, and completed a PhD in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University in 2003. He appears regularly on the radio, as well as occasionally appearing on television.

Simon Sole is Chief Executive Officer of Exclusive Analysis, a company he founded in 2003 with the vision of turning regional and thematic expertise into decision-ready forecasts that help clients enhance strategic planning. Mr Sole built Exclusive Analysis upon a strong ethos based around accuracy and objectivity, qualities that underpin the development of the company’s unique methodology and the recruitment of high-calibre analysts. He cultivated his expertise as a professional intelligence analyst prior to starting Exclusive Analysis. He is widely recognised as the global thought leader in political risk, having pioneered the development of proprietary forecasting methodology and technological innovation, including risk aggregation systems and location intelligence software. He is a regular keynote speaker at high-profile international conferences, and a frequent media commentator. Mr Sole has an MPhil in Philosophy of International Relations from Cambridge, a Masters in War Studies from the University of Balochistan, Pakistan, and a degree in Mathematics and Physics from the Royal Military College of Science, UK.