Valerie Urbain, CEO of Euroclear, joins Hiten Patel and Nikolai Dienerowitz to discuss Euroclear’s role as a foundational global financial market infrastructure and the company’s strategic priorities. Valerie opened up about her journey from Senegal to her role as Euroclear’s CEO, emphasizing how culture, human capital development, diversity, and inclusion were at the core of her leadership philosophy and the organization’s ability to innovate responsibly. 

The conversation touched upon the importance of trust and interoperability in traditional and digital markets, the need to convert European savers into investors to finance growth and scale-ups, balanced and nuanced regulation, cautious but active engagement with distributed ledger technology (DLT) and digital assets, and practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve productivity and client services.

Key topics include:

• Euroclear’s role and scale: As a global financial market infrastructure, Euroclear manages securities settlement and safekeeping (including equities, bonds, funds, ETFs), acting as a digital notary and a connector between issuers and investors. Euroclear links Europe to more than 45 markets, settles about the equivalent of the world's GDP each month, and safekeeps over €41 trillion in assets.  
• Valerie’s leadership formation: Raised across African countries, Valerie had an early exposure to “being different,” and gained autonomy when she moved to Europe at the age of 16. Her career spans client-facing roles, banking, and then progressing through commercial, product and general management positions and a formative five-year stint as head of HR, which later shaped her enterprise-wide people perspective. 
• European capital markets: Valerie argues Europe must convert savers into investors to fund startups, scale-ups, and large financing needs, with Euroclear lowering costs through scale, supporting savings and investment union efforts, and enhancing market accessibility. 
• Digital assets and DLT: Euroclear has piloted DLT-based issuance with reputable issuers, but volumes remain small. Scaling requires broad market participation and interoperability between legacy and digital systems.
• AI adoption: Euroclear has widely deployed Microsoft Copilot and uses AI to review end-to-end processes for productivity gains. Valerie shares an early client-facing use case where AI is used to predictively identify likely unmatched trades ahead of T+1 settlement. To embed ethics and governance into AI adoption, Euroclear hired a professional with a background in philosophy. 
• Interoperability and trust as strategic assets: In a fragmented/geopolitical world, Euroclear positions itself as an interoperability glue between markets and traditional and digital assets, with a core strength being its ability to connect liquidity pools and enable collateral mobility. Valerie talks about trust as a scarce and crucial commodity and highlights Euroclear’s commitment to upholding that, helped by their scale and rules-based operations.

This episode is part of Innovators’ Exchange, a series that explores the financial infrastructure and technology landscape. Tune in for a captivating exploration of key themes and opportunities for both professionals and retail investors, touching on AI's transformative potential in financial markets.  

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