Governor Christopher J. Waller, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Christopher J. Waller took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on December 18, 2020, to fill an unexpired term ending January 31, 2030.

Prior to his appointment at the Board, Dr. Waller served as executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis since 2009.

In addition to his experience in the Federal Reserve System, Dr. Waller served as a professor and the Gilbert F. Schaefer Chair of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. He was also a research fellow with Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies. From 1998 - 2003, Dr. Waller was a professor and the Carol Martin Gatton Chair of Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics at the University of Kentucky. During that time, he was also a research fellow at the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn. From 1992 - 1994, he served as the director of graduate studies at Indiana University's Department of Economics, where he also served as associate professor and an assistant professor.

Dr. Waller received a B.S. in economics from Bemidji State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington State University.

Susan M. Collins, President & Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Susan M. Collins is president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which is part of the U.S. central bank. She is a participant on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets U.S. monetary policy.

Collins oversees all of the bank’s activities – including economic research and analysis; banking supervision and financial stability efforts; community economic development activities; and a wide range of payments, technology, and finance initiatives.

Collins is a widely published international macroeconomist with a lifelong interest in policy and its impact on living standards. She has served as a provost, dean, professor, research scholar, and board member at a variety of universities and organizations, including the University of Michigan, the Brookings Institution, Georgetown and Harvard Universities.

Collins earned her doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her undergraduate degree at Harvard.

Tom Barkin, President & Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Tom Barkin is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. He has held this position since 2018.

Tom serves on the Fed’s chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee, and is also responsible for the Richmond Fed’s bank supervision and the Federal Reserve’s technology organization. He is “on the ground” continually in the Fed’s Fifth District, which covers South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, D.C., West Virginia and Maryland. His engagement in the region has brought real attention to areas facing economic challenges.

Prior to joining the Richmond Fed, Tom was a senior partner and CFO at McKinsey & Company, a worldwide management consulting firm, where he also oversaw McKinsey’s offices in the southern United States.

Tom earned his bachelor’s, MBA and law degrees from Harvard University.

Swati Bhatia, Head of Retail Banking & CEO of Openbank in the U.S., Santander US

Swati Bhatia is Head of Retail Banking and CEO of Openbank in the United States. She is responsible for leading the U.S. Consumer & Business Banking business and all related digital transformation initiatives, with a focus on building new capabilities, simplifying existing processes, and enhancing the customer experience to become a leading national, digital bank with branches.

Prior to joining Santander US in March 2024, Swati led the Marcus business at Goldman Sachs from 2021 - 2023 and previously served as the Chief Payments Risk Officer at Stripe from 2018 - 2020, where she was instrumental in building out the company’s risk and compliance infrastructure. She also held a variety of leadership roles at PayPal and Capital One, spanning digital banking platforms and products, marketing and customer experience, governance and risk management, and operations.

Swati has more than 20 years of leadership experience in financial services with broad P&L management and functional expertise. Recognized as an industry thought leader, she serves on the Board of Accion Opportunity Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides small business owners in the U.S. with access to capital, networks, and coaching.

Swati earned an M.S. in Finance from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

Amitay Kalmar, Co-founder & CEO, Lendbuzz

Amitay is the co-founder and CEO of Lendbuzz, a financial technology company based in Boston. Previously, he was a VP at Deutsche Bank’s Technology Investment Banking practice, leading M&A, IPOs and debt financing for tech companies. Prior to that he served as a Captain in the IDF, leading R&D teams developing digital communications systems.

Amity received his B.Sc., Computer Science & Mathematics from Tel Aviv University, M.Sc., Computer Science from Reichman University, and M.B.A. from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Stephany Kirkpatrick, Former CEO, Orum.io; Product, Stripe

Stephany Kirkpatrick is the former CEO of Orum.io and works on Product at Stripe. She is also a digital executive, Certified Financial Planner™, and entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience across startups and Fortune 100 companies. Stephany founded Orum in 2019 to make instant money movement a reality. Under her leadership, Orum created breakthrough infrastructure used by banks, fintechs, and enterprises for money movement and account verification. Orum joined Stripe in 2025 to help scale the financial infrastructure of the internet. Earlier in her career, Stephany played a pivotal role at LearnVest (acquired by Northwestern Mutual), where she is the principal inventor and patent holder behind the financial-planning software that helped millions of Americans improve their financial lives.Today, Stephany sits on multiple fintech boards and advises CEOs across the financial services ecosystem.

Anna Kovner, Executive Vice President & Director of Research, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Anna Kovner is the Executive Vice President and the Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. She advises the Bank's president on matters related to monetary policy and leads the Research department, which includes economic research, regional analysis, community outreach and development, publications, and economic education. Her research spans corporate finance, banking and macrofinance, with articles published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies, among others. Previously, she held multiple economic research leadership roles within the New York Fed’s Research and Statistics group, most recently leading work assessing systemic risk and financial stability as director of Financial Stability Policy Research. She received an A.B. in Economics from Princeton, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and her Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University.

Adair Morse, William A. and Betty H. Hasler Chair in New Enterprise Development & Professor of Finance, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

Adair Morse is the William A. and Betty H. Hasler Chair in New Enterprise Development, Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, and founding Faculty Director of the Sustainable and Impact Finance Initiative at Berkeley-Haas. Recent policy service includes serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Capital Access of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (2021-2022), co-founding the pandemic relief public-private partnership California Rebuilding Fund (2020), and serving on the Expert Panel for oversight of the Global Fund for the Ministry of Finance of Norway (2015-2020). She is an award-winning teacher of New Venture Finance, Impact Investing, and Sustainable Investing. She runs the Haas Impact Fund and Climate Solutions Fund investment management-as-curriculum at Berkeley. Adair’s research spans multiple areas of finance: household finance, FinTech, discrimination, climate finance, small business and venture finance, corruption, and pension management. Recent work includes papers on algorithmic discrimination, impact investment, and small business fiscal programs. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Michigan, masters degrees in statistics and agricultural economics from Purdue University, and a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University.

Nick Stanescu, Executive Vice President and Chief FedNow® Executive FedNow® Service, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Nick Stanescu is an executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the chief executive of the FedNow® Service. He leads the FedNow group that has responsibility for the Federal Reserve System’s round-the-clock real-time payment and settlement service that supports instant payments in the United States. In this role, he has responsibility for FedNow Core delivery functions that include technology, product, and program management. Most recently, Nick served as FedNow business executive since program inception in August 2019.

Before joining the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Nick held several executive and senior level roles within the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, including as the Head of Payments Product Management where he had business responsibility for Fedwire Funds and National Settlement Services on behalf of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks. Collectively, these services clear and settle financial transactions exceeding $4 trillion per day and are a foundational underpinning of the United States financial system.

Nick received a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University and an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business.

Joanna Stavins, Principal Economist & Policy Advisor, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Joanna Stavins is a principal economist and policy advisor in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. Her research and policy work focuses on understanding how and why consumers pay the way they do, and it includes all aspects of consumer payment behavior. While she was with the Research Department's Consumer Payments Research Center, Stavins analyzed the costs of alternative payment instruments and the demand for those instruments, and she estimated social costs and benefits of various payment methods. In addition to studying payments, she has conducted econometric analyses of pricing and market structure in several industries, including personal computers and airlines.

Stavins has served as an economic advisor to payments groups within and outside the Federal Reserve System and has worked on Federal Reserve payment-related policy initiatives. She joined the Boston Fed in 1995 after working as a senior analyst at National Economic Research Associates. She earned her BA and PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Paula Tkac, Executive Vice President & Director of Research, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Paula Tkac is the Executive Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The Research Division includes Research & Policy, Community and Economic Development, Regional Economic Information Network, Economic Research Survey Center, and the Payments Forum. Integrating quantitative and qualitative data for monetary policymaking and research and analysis is a focus in Atlanta, including the area of barriers to economic mobility, economic inequality and heterogeneity in labor markets and firm dynamics.

Tkac conducts research on various financial market topics including investor decision-making, the mutual fund industry, financial regulation, and the recent financial crisis and policy responses. Her research has won two William F. Sharpe Awards from the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Tkac frequently speaks to academic and practitioner groups and has appeared on C-SPAN and as an op-ed writer in the Wall Street Journal.