Author, Speaker, Professor, Adviser & Educator.
Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer has been instrumental in shaping the future of finance during her impressive career over more than 22 years. She operates at the nexus of data, technology, identity, finance and regulation, passionate about creating the digital
economy of the future and bringing back personal agency, putting us humans at the center of digital.
As a very influential female leader in the Fintech space, she is promoting the understanding, development and deployment of new business models for our digital future across payments, financial markets and processes.
With a diverse career across regulatory policy development, banking, Fintech/Regtech mentoring, investing and consulting she finds herself at the center of the evolving digital ecosystem of players with the ability to advise, accelerate,
promote and enable Fintech players to become an integral part of the new digital ecosystem.
After a distinguished career of over 11 years with Citi, Ruth is a renowned public speaker and runs her own consulting and training business. She is also a Visiting Professor at CASS Business School (now Bayes), where she gained her PhD,
teaching Fintech in Banking and Finance as well as providing Executive Training on topics such as Financial Market Infrastructures, Payments and the Future of Value in a World of Technological Change. She is also a Visiting Professor at the London
Institute of Banking and Finance and an occasional lecturer at Queen Mary London School of Law.
Since 2018 Ruth is also an independent Non-Executive Director on various boards ranging from regulated banks and stock exchanges to Fintechs in addition to being an active Angel and VC investor for years.
In the past she has been the Chair of the Statutory Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) Panel in the UK and board member of the London Stock Exchange Group, Gresham Technologies and Digital Identity Net.
Furthermore, she advises the City of London Corporation, the British Standards Institution and the European Third Party Provider Association (ETPPA).
Ruth was named as one of 2010s ‘Rising Stars’ by Financial News; named in Management Today’s 2011 ‘35 Women under 35’ list of women to watch and identified as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Finance 2012 by the Treasury
Risk Magazine. She received the ‘Women in Banking and Finance Award for Achievement’ in 2015 and in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 she was named on the global ‘Women in Fintech Powerlist’ of Innovate Finance (Senior Leader in
2020, 2021, 2022).
So far, she published three books: “EU Payments Integration” (2010), “Transaction Banking and the Impact of Regulatory Change” (2014) and “Redecentralisation: Building the Digital Financial Ecosystem” (2023). She balances this extraordinary career while raising her two children and championing for a better work life balance for single parents and more support for women entrepreneurs.
