The FS Club Podcast

A regular speaker at the FS Club, EU Regulatory Expert David Doyle is back to give a new year update on the EU financial services regulatory agenda.

He will be covering some of the most contentious and game-changing pieces of EU legislation in the financial services space, notably:

• Digital Operational Resilience Act - are we adequately covered in the financial services space?
• Reducing the reporting and disclosure requirements linked to ESG and sustainability
• New EU orientation; the EU Savings and Investment Union

Speaker:

Dr David Doyle is known across Europe as a leading expert on EU financial services regulation and long-standing speaker at the Financial Services Club. A former diplomat with over 20 years of service on mainland Europe at bilateral and multilateral level, he now acts as an EU Policy Advisor between Brussels and London, specialising in regulatory developments in banking, fund management and insurance.

He is a member of the Executive Board of the joint MEP-EU industry advocacy body, The Kangaroo Group at the European Parliament, holds a seat on the Board of Directors of the Genesis Initiative at Westminster that promotes entrepreneurship and SME policy, as well as being active in the Transatlantic Business Council on Capital Markets and the Conference Board Corporate Governance Council.

This critical webinar will explore how the UK can rebuild financial resilience and reimagine its social contract amid growing global volatility. Our leading experts will tackle urgent questions around innovation funding, national security, and long-term sustainability to explore how public finance must evolve in the face of significant fiscal restraints and how the entire economy must innovate to meet today’s challenges, tomorrow’s demands and reduce debt, working alongside large investment institutions.

In our next Esop Sofa webinar, the Esop Centre’s panel of experts will look at AGM notices, as published by UK listed companies, to see what changes are coming through in remuneration policies and share plan design to reflect the recent updated guidance from institutional investors – and look at how those updates may be shaping the development of share plan implementation.

Centre chairman Robert Pay will moderate and there will be plenty of opportunity to put your questions to the panel.

Carla Walsham advises on all aspects of incentive plans. Her area of expertise is in Global incentive plans and UK Corporate Governance, and primary focus is with global companies, helping them to navigate the various complexities they face when designing, implementing and operating their share plans internationally. Carla has experience working with many large listed companies advising on executive and all-employee share plans. Carla is known for her commercial and pragmatic approach supported by deep technical and market knowledge.

Gary Fereday is an experienced reward professional advising a range of listed and private organisations. His extensive expertise includes incentive design, development and implementation, governance of pay, and investor consultation. He brings a commercial and pragmatic approach supported by deep technical knowledge.

Panellists:

This webinar explores the strategic collaboration between two key elements of civil society organisations in the UK: charities and trade unions. While historically marked by cooperation, conflict, and indifference, recent literature increasingly advocates for partnerships to address shared priorities such as inequality and community support, amid challenges like declining union membership and heightened scrutiny of third sector governance. Drawing on this research, our recent study with 50 charities and 34 trade unions, offers fifteen practical guidelines, highlighting the importance of shared goals, political leverage, cultural understanding, and risk management. For UK financial services professionals engaged in ESG, CSR, or stakeholder strategy, the findings offer a framework for evaluating partnerships with organisations increasingly shaping policy and social impact.

Speaker:

Dr Sara Abdaless is an Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance at Northeastern University London, where she also serves as Deputy Academic Director of the Centre for Apprenticeships. She earned her PhD in Accounting from Henley Business School at the University of Reading and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Dr Abdaless has held leadership roles in higher education, including serving as Associate Dean for Education and Student Experience at London South Bank University (LSBU) Business School. Her research focuses on governance, management accounting, and sustainability, particularly within not-for-profit organisations and charities. Combining her research expertise and leadership experience, Dr Abdaless brings an integrated perspective to accounting education and practice.

In this webinar, we launch the eleventh edition of the Smart Centres Index (SCI 11). The SCI is designed to track the development of technology and financial centres across the world in their support for and readiness for new technology applications.

Investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, media, academics, governments, and regulators can attune their cities to attract innovation and growth in Science, Technology, Energy Systems, Machine Learning, Distributed Ledgers, or Fintech. Tuning a city for innovation is complex. Z/Yen began studying successful and unsuccessful business innovation clustering some 15 years ago, and published in 2018 the Smart Jurisdictions Index. Building on the results of that research we have created a novel factor assessment index based on three dimensions - innovation support, creative intensity, and delivery capability.

The SCI is designed to track the readiness of business centres across the world to support new technology businesses. The SCI uses assessments from private and public sector individuals, along with over 120 instrumental factors, to rate the centres. This important project that will grow substantially as more people pay attention to the ways centres can help globally innovative businesses thrive in rapidly changing times.

eCommerce in MEA is growing fast — but growth alone isn’t enough.
As eCommerce surges across the Middle East and Africa, payment leaders face a unique challenge — building infrastructure that’s as dynamic as the markets they serve.

From mobile-first consumers to regional preferences in payment methods, success in MEA means understanding the nuances of the ecosystem and being ready for what’s next — from real-time rails and embedded payments to smarter data use and social commerce.

Join FS Club for a 45-minute webinar featuring experts from Compass Plus Technologies, including Adil Ahmed (VP & Deputy Managing Director, MEA) and Eyad Almaaitah (VP, Global Product Management). Together with Hugh Morris, they’ll explore how fintechs, PSPs, and financial institutions can better support merchants, streamline experiences, and unlock growth across MEA.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital technology are redefining the global financial landscape, intensifying competition, and reshaping business models. With its robust technological foundation and highly integrated industry ecosystem, Taiwan is emerging as a pivotal hub for AI-driven financial innovation, digital transformation, and regulatory technology (RegTech).

This exclusive webinar will offer deep insights into Taiwan’s latest AI financial policies, banking sector digitalization, and the strategic deployment of AI in financial operations, risk management, customer engagement, and process optimization—driving the next era of financial excellence. We invite global financial leaders, industry pioneers, and decision-makers to discover why Taiwan is at the forefront of AI-powered finance and explore high-impact collaboration and investment opportunities in this dynamic market.

This webinar aims to explore the growing importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles in shaping the future of Mauritius' economy, financial sector, and corporate landscape. As global investors and regulators increasingly prioritize sustainability, Mauritian businesses, financial institutions, and policymakers must align with international ESG standards to remain competitive and resilient.

Background: In this webinar I'll be making the case that we should give more, not less, discretionary power to those who are in charge of implementing and enforcing rules in a firm or society. These are people like police officers, prosecutors, judges, and also doctors, nurses, and everyday workers. The argument rest on a case against Legalism, the political philosophy that job titles, roles, rules, laws, policies, and procedures must be detailed, explicit, and blindly administered to ensure an efficiently functioning and fair society. Instead, my view is that basic tenets of what makes for a good person and a society of good people requires that we build into rules and regulation the ability for people in charge of those rules to ignore or bend them.

Speaker:

Professor Barry Lam is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and host and producer of Slate's Hi-Phi Nation podcast, a documentary series about the connection between philosophy and the law, science, technology, and everyday life.

This talk is an introduction to John Kay’s recent book “The Corporation in the twenty-first century”.

In the industrial revolution, businesses were defined by their tangible capital. the iron works and the textile mills in which the routine assembly process was operated by minimally skilled workers. Modern business is no longer like this. Tangible capital is bought as a service from specialist suppliers who have neither interest or ability to control the business. The corporation is a collection of the capabilities of teams of people, and the workers, not the plant, are the means of production.

Speaker:

Sir John Kay is one of Britain’s leading economists with wide practical experience in business and finance. A Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Society of Edinburgh, he was the founding dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and held a chair at London Business School. He is a winner of the Senior Wincott Award for Financial Journalism for his Financial Times columns. Other People’s Money won the Saltire Prize for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His other books include Obliquity, The Long and Short of It, Greed is Dead (written with Paul Collier) and Radical Uncertainty (with Mervyn King).