Thorsten Pauli

Country Executive Switzerland, & Head Equity Capital Markets DACH

Bank of America

Thorsten Pauli is Bank of America’s Country Executive for Switzerland and Head of Equity Capital Markets for the German-speaking region, bringing well over 25 years of experience in financial services. He joined Bank of America in November 2019, where he established and leads the firm’s equity capital markets franchise across DACH from Zurich. In March 2022, he was additionally appointed Country Executive Switzerland, where he is spearheading the bank’s international growth strategy, including a significant expansion into the Swiss mid-market and a strong local hiring push. Prior to joining Bank of America, Thorsten spent over 20 years at UBS, working across London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Zurich. During this time, he held a number of senior leadership positions, including Head of Equity Capital Markets Switzerland for more than a decade. He led all UBS-led IPOs in Switzerland between 2004 and 2019, as well as a wide range of equity capital raising transactions, including the firm’s own issuance. He also served as Head of Real Estate ECM for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where he built a leading franchise in real estate, leisure, and lodging, and later as Global Head of Equity Capital Markets Wealth Management Distribution. He holds a BSc in Management and an MSc in International Accounting & Finance from the London School of Economics.

Speaking at

2:00–3:30pmThu 25 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Navigating the New Digital Order: Regulatory Divergence, Monetary Architecture, and a Path toward Coordination

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 3, Ground FloorOpen
About this session

Digital assets, programmable money, and AI-driven transactions are crossing borders at increased speed. But the rules governing them are being written jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with no shared architecture in sight. As the US advances GENIUS Act rules for private-sector stablecoins, the EU deepens MiCA and pursues a digital euro, and China scales its state-backed e-CNY, three major economies are building divergent governance frameworks around one underlying technology — with significant implications for cross-border payments, monetary policy transmission, and AI in the global financial system.
This policy divergence is a compliance challenge for market participants, but it is also the early stage of a structural buildup. When domestically rational policy choices generate internationally costly spillovers — and when no coordinating mechanism exists to manage them — fragmentation compounds over time until the cost of inaction becomes prohibitive. Digital currencies and AI governance are following this trajectory, and while the window to get ahead of it remains open, it is closing.
Against this backdrop, the Bretton Woods Committee will convene a closed roundtable at Point Zero Forum on Thursday, June 25th to bring together global policymakers, central bankers, regulators, and private sector leaders to stress-test the diagnosis. This discussion will directly inform the Bretton Woods Committee's upcoming work, with a focus on the defining digital governance challenge of the moment: whether coordination across jurisdictions can accelerate to match the digital rails being built beneath the global financial system.
The roundtable will be a 90-minute discussion featuring 10 minutes of scene-setting remarks from featured speakers, followed by an open exchange among the broader group. A brief framing paper will be circulated in advance. The core question animating the discussion: What are the costs of continued fragmentation — and what global coordination mechanisms are necessary to manage the associated risks and opportunities?

Featured speakers

Hosted by

Thorsten Pauli

Speaking at

Navigating the New Digital Order: Regulatory Divergence, Monetary Architecture, and a Path toward Coordination