Prof. Yesha Yadav

Board Member & Professor

Fintech Foundation, Vanderbilt Law School

Yesha Yadav is Board Member of the Fintech Foundation, Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Vanderbilt Law School. Her expertise focuses on market structure, exchange design, financial innovation and payments. She writes and speaks extensively on the oversight of crypto-markets, blockchains, decentralized finance, and stablecoin payment ecosystems. Before joining Vanderbilt's Law faculty, Professor Yadav worked as a legal counsel with the World Bank in its finance, private-sector development and infrastructure unit, where she specialized in financial regulation and insolvency, and creditor-debtor rights. Before joining the World Bank, she practiced in the London and Paris offices of Clifford Chance in the firm's financial regulation and derivatives group. As part of her work in payments regulation, she advised the European Payments Council on the establishment of the Single Euro Payments Area. Professor Yadav has served as honorary advisor to India’s Financial Services Law Reform Commission and on the Atlantic Council’s Task Force on Divergence, Transatlantic Financial Reform and G-20 Agenda. She has served as a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee, where she served as Vice-Chair of the Distributed Ledger Technology Subcommittee and was a member of the Algorithmic Trading Subcommittees. Professor Yadav is a current member of Nasdaq’s Hearing Panel and the Board of Advisors of the Digital Dollar Project. She is also a board member of the Fintech Foundation.

Speaking at

4:00–5:30pmTue 23 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpenModerator
Empowering Entrepreneurship

The Future of Standard-Setting in Fintech Regulation

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpenModerator
About this session

Countries worldwide are competing to attract fintech investment, talent, and innovation. But understanding the quality of fintech regulation remains a work-in-progress. Are rules and institutions working in lockstep to promote fintech? Are these rules findable, coherent, and comprehensive enough to give firms, consumers, and supervisors genuine confidence? Can they promote innovation, market access as well as economic opportunity?
The Financial Regulatory Futures Index (FRFI) is a joint initiative of the Fintech Foundation and GFTN designed to fill that gap. Structured around five analytical pillars, the FRFI will assess regulatory environments not by perception or reputation, but by reference to verifiable primary sources: statutes, supervisory guidance, licensing frameworks, and enforcement records. Its methodology is being developed by five specialist working groups comprising leading regulators, central bankers, academics, and industry practitioners from over 30 jurisdictions. An Executive Council – comprising globally recognized thought-leaders and experienced policy innovators – will oversee the development of this initiative.
This roundtable will offer one of the first public windows into the emerging draft methodology, including how the Index defines and scores: regulatory clarity and comprehensiveness, consumer protection and market conduct, innovation and market infrastructure, resilience and integrity as well as economic opportunity and market access.
It will open a moderated discussion on the Index's intended policy impact, the trade-offs embedded in any cross-jurisdictional benchmarking exercise, and how the FRFI can best serve as a tool for peer learning and reform rather than as a simplistic league table. Feedback from regulators, practitioners, academics and subject matter experts in this conversation will inform the methodology ahead of its launch at DC Fintech Week in October 2026.
4:00–5:30pmThu 25 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 1, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Beyond De-Risking: Are Stablecoins the Future of Trusted Cross-Border Payment Infrastructure?

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 1, Ground FloorOpen
About this session

Cross-border payments remain among the most expensive, slowest, and least accessible financial services globally. Stablecoins have emerged as a working alternative in the corridors underserved by traditional correspondent banking, processing significant volume alongside traditional rails, but questions of trust, reserve integrity, adoption, and systemic risk remain unresolved.
As regulatory frameworks mature across jurisdictions, this roundtable will explore the question of whether stablecoins are poised to graduate from a parallel system into genuine cross-border payment infrastructure, and what has to be true about their design, governance, and regulatory treatment for that to happen.
With payment-native banks, institutional settlement networks, and central banks at the table, the conversation will move beyond the technology debate to the harder questions of standards, coexistence, and who bears the risk when settlement infrastructure fails at scale.

Featured speakers

Hosted by

Prof. Yesha Yadav

Speaking at

The Future of Standard-Setting in Fintech Regulation

Beyond De-Risking: Are Stablecoins the Future of Trusted Cross-Border Payment Infrastructure?