VAKT GLOBAL - Key Persons
Before joining VAKT, Bart was European Head of Oil Trading Technology for Morgan Stanley for 11½ years, followed by EMEA Head of Technology for Castleton Commodities, and most recently, Group CTO of Mercuria Energy Trading. During his 3 year tenure at Mercuria, he was instrumental in launching transformational change into the commodities industry through a range of blockchain solutions for different commodity market sectors; including being a founding member of the consortium that gave rise to VAKT.
Etienne has over 20 years experience in commodities trading. Most recently, he was Head of European Energy at Mercuria Energy Group. Before that, he was a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan and held a number of senior roles in trading, sales and principal investments over a period of 9 years at the bank.
Prior to that, Etienne was the Global Head of Commodities at Credit Agricole CIB. Etienne started his career at TOTAL as a power and oil trader.
Frances is a commodities specialist with 20 years of experience in the Energy Industry. She has experience in Finance, Corporate Social Responsibility, Business Transformation and Data Management.
Having spent six years as Head of Financial Operations at BP, her interest in blockchain technology was piqued by the increasing challenges around cyber security.
Richard James is a chartered accountant who trained at Price Waterhouse in Auckland, New Zealand before moving to the UK.
He spent 15 years in CFO and other senior finance roles in the junior mining in industry at companies with operations around the world including Africa, Central Asia and North America. He has managed a wide range of corporate transactions including IPOs, mergers, acquisitions and multiple fundraisings.
He joined VAKT at the beginning of 2018.
Stephanie started her career in the research department at Elf Trading in Geneva in 1994 and evolved in a marketing/trading position on the derivatives desk.
She went on to become CEO of ICE UK Ltd, providing electronic trading to the natural gas, power, metals and oil markets.
Stephanie participated actively in the take-over of the International Petroleum Exchange in London (where the main European crude oil benchmarck Brent is listed) by ICE.
She went on to a senior role at MF Global, before setting up her own consultancy, and joined VAKT in 2019.