Natalya Thakur is the Founder and CEO of Knova, enterprise software that unifies traditional and tokenized assets into a single operating layer. She has held roles across leading financial and technology organizations, including BlackRock, Google[X], Celo, IDEO CoLab, Morgan Stanley, and the Hoover Institution under Dr. Condoleezza Rice. She also co-founded Stanford’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative, a partnership with the United Nations, and serves in leadership at the Bretton Woods Committee, helping advance its digital asset and future-of-finance agenda.
A frequent public speaker and active angel investor/LP, her work has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, American Banker, NYSE Floor Talk, CoinDesk, and BIS publications. She was recently named a finalist for the 2025 UBS Female Founders Award, and was featured in the 2024 Women in Fintech Powerlist, Standout 45 for Senior Leaders.
Thakur holds a BA (Honors) in International Relations from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Roundtable Room 2, Ground Floor
Open
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.