Ariadne Plaitakis leads efforts to promote evidence-based policymaking, regulatory innovation, and cross-sector research that can advance safe, equitable access to digital financial services in low- and middle-income countries.
Ariadne joined the Gates Foundation in 2022 as the team’s senior program officer for regulation. In that role, she managed grantmaking for regulatory and capacity-building efforts. She currently serves as deputy director for regulation, policy, and research.
Ariadne has more than two decades of international experience in digital finance and payments regulation, open banking, financial inclusion, data protection and privacy, e-commerce, competition law, and consumer protection. Before joining the foundation, she was a senior financial sector specialist at CGAP, where she led research on open banking, interoperability, and competition in digital financial services. Earlier, she served as a senior associate at BFA Global and as general counsel and head of regulatory affairs at Mondato, a digital finance consultancy.
Ariadne is a UK-qualified solicitor. She has an M.A. in jurisprudence from the University of Oxford and a B.Sc. in foreign service from Georgetown University. She is fluent in French, German, and Greek.
Roundtable Room 2, Ground Floor
Invite-Only
The problems that constrain tokenization at scale do not belong to one working group, one institution, or one regulatory perimeter. Cross-ledger settlement, stablecoin licensing fragmentation, FMI readiness in developing markets, and the legal enforceability of smart contracts are structurally connected with each a precondition for the next, each requiring actors across infrastructure and regulation to work from the same evidence base.
This session brings both working groups together for the first time in person. Working Group 1 (Interoperability and Infrastructure) and Working Group 2 (Regulation, Trust, and Governance) will each present their problem statements before presenting to the Oversight Panel. The purpose is to establish shared understanding of the initiative's full scope, test framing with peers who approach the same challenges from different vantage points, and sharpen the asks that each working group will direct to the Oversight Panel in the session that follows.
About the initiative
GFTN has launched _Tokenization in Finance: Evidence and Implementation Pathways_, a structured, multi-stakeholder initiative convening two working groups drawn from leading financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and market participants to assemble a practitioner-oriented evidence base spanning spanning digital money and payment rails through to tokenized real-world assets, securities, funds, and capital markets infrastructure. At Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2026, the initiative will publish a practitioner guide designed to give financial institutions a structured basis for sequencing their digital asset strategies, and to equip regulators and finance ministries in emerging and developing economies with implementation pathways they can draw on directly.