Archives: Speakers

Michel Roig is Senior VP, Head of Payments & Access at Fingerprints, responsible for the strategy and development of both divisions. Since joining Fingerprints in 2016, Michel has played a central role in supporting the company’s diversification into new sectors – namely, the launch and expansion of its new payment strategy and business line. Michel has two decades of experience in the mobile and electronics industry. Prior to joining Fingerprints he held leading sales positions within telecom and electronics incl. Flextronics and Ericsson. Michel holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Lund Institute of Technology.

Brazilian, economist, Senior Forestry Officer and Team Leader of the Forest Governance and Economics Team in the Forestry Division of FAO. Work on forest socioeconomic contributions to the SDGs, cross-sectoral governance, forest value chains, bioeconomy, and economic instruments and finance to support forestry. Thais is focal point for SDG Indicator 15.2.1 and the FAO leader of the initiative “Sustainable Wood for a Sustainable World”, which articulates governance, economics, finance and scientific evidence to promote sustainable wood value chains and increase forest contributions to the SDGs and climate change objectives.

Thais career has a mix of experiences in finance, national policy-making and global environmental governance. Before joining FAO Forestry Department, Thais served as Senior Officer of the UN-REDD Programme Secretariat, directly in charge of the UN-REDD Global Programme, from 2011 to 2015. Her national policy-making experience comes from Brazil, where she served as Director of Climate Change of the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, and Director of the Brazilian Forest Service, having worked in the development and implementation of the Amazon Fund, the national Climate Change Fund, the Brazilian Climate Change Strategy and the Brazilian commitments to climate change mitigation. In the first phase of her career, Thais worked for 14 years at the Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development, in several executive positions.

Thais holds an MSc in Environmental governance and regulation from the London School of Economics and Political Science – LSE.

Francisco Bonino is partner and CEO of AF Group. Francisco has 20 years of timber and agriculture experience gather in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. In the past he was responsible of product development for Monsanto in northern Argentina, Bolivia and

Paraguay. He graduated as Agronomic Engineering from UDELAR (Uruguay’s National University) and he holds an MBA from the New

York Institute of Technology.

Joe Codd is the Business Development Director at Veon, a forestry consultancy company, who are involved with a range of forestry projects, including reforestation projects worldwide, reporting on timber industries and their macro and micro trends, portfolio acquisition due diligence, feasibility and market studies, ESG and CSR projects with corporates trying to reduce their carbon footprints. With 15 years’ experience, Joe leads sales and client-relationship management, tracking new markets and emerging trends, recommending new products and services, proposing and developing new strategic partnerships, and guiding long-term objectives to meet business needs and requirements. He is also responsible for forest portfolio acquisitions for institutional and domestic investors and some of the largest family wealth offices in Europe. Joe currently sits on the Board of the Society of Irish Foresters as a technical councillor and also the Board of Forestry Careers Ireland. Joe holds a B.Agr.Sc. in Forestry from University College Dublin and Dip.Sc. in Forestry from W.I.T.

Nabeela brings experience in investment, development finance and public policy. She currently works as a Manager at CDC Group – UK government’s development finance institute – focussed on investments in businesses in Africa and South Asia focussed on cross-sector investments with a particular focus on Food and Agri. She helped build the Impact Accelerator at CDC, a cross-sector, direct investment fund focusing on businesses with more challenging risk-return profile than those typically considered by commercial investors.

Previously Nabeela worked at the GAVI Alliance, a development financing agency operating as a partnership of UN Agencies, World Bank, Pharmaceutical companies and Gates Foundation; UK Houses of Commons and UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Commercially she worked with United Health Group to drive their business expansion in emerging markets.