Commonwealth Finance Ministers Meeting

Commonwealth Ministers of Finance will meet on 17 October 2019 for their annual summit.

The Commonwealth Finance Ministers Meeting (CFMM) will take place in the margins of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings in Washington D.C. It will be chaired by Cyprus, and will focus on the theme ‘Avoiding Debt Crises: The Role of Creditors and Debtors’.

Senior officials and central bank governors will meet before the finance ministers’ plenary on 16 October 2019.

Speaker profiles

  Mr. Harris Georgiades, Chairperson for CFMM
Harris Georgiades was appointed as Minister of Finance of the Republic of Cyprus on 3 April 2013 and was reappointed on 1 March 2018. MORE

 

  Mr. Constantinos Herodotou, Chairperson for CCBG
Since 11 April 2019, he is the Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus and a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank. MORE

 

Mr Kyriakos Kakouris, Chairperson for SOM
Mr. Kakouris is an Economic Director at the Ministry of Finance of Cyprus. Since 2016, he has been heading the Directory of Administration and Finance. He is responsible for project financing, procurement issues, financial management and administration issues and the International Financial Organisations. MORE

Dr Werner Hoyer, Keynote Speaker at CFMM
Dr Hoyer has been the President of the European Investmest Bank since January 2012. MORE

 

Professor Annamaria Lusardi, Keynote Speaker at CCBG
Annamaria Lusardi is the Denit Trust Endowed Chair of Economics and Accountancy at the George Washington University School of Business. MORE

 

Dr Franziska Ohnsorge; Keynote Speaker at SOM
Franziska Lieselotte Ohnsorge is Manager of the Prospects Group in the Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions Practice Group. MORE

 

Mr Damon Gibbons, Guest Speaker at CCBG
Damon Gibbons is the Director of the Centre for Responsible Credit, a dedicated policy unit focused on credit regulation, over-indebtedness, and financial inclusion issues within Learning and Work Institute in the UK. MORE

 

Ms Deborah Zandstra, Guest Speaker at CFMM
Deborah Zandstra is a partner at Clifford Chance LLP, where she leads the firm’s sovereign debt restructuring and advisory practice and has been at the heart of many of the policy innovations of the last few years in the sovereign debt space. MORE

 

Mr Jesse Griffiths, Guest Speaker at SOM
Jesse Griffiths is a specialist in development finance and the international development finance architecture. MORE

 

News

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Commonwealth finance ministers urge progress on taxing digital commerce to tackle debt

Commonwealth finance ministers have recognised the potential of technology to improve debt transparency while urging closer collaboration to resolve tax challenges arising from growing digital commerce. MORE

Finance ministers to discuss joint action to prevent future debt crises

Ministers will explore policy options and strategies by which debtor countries can work with creditors to prevent the recurrence of debt crises. Debt crises, as witnessed recently in Greece and Argentina, can devastate economic growth, increase poverty and derail global agendas. MORE

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Blog: How Commonwealth Meridian helps in the battle for debt sustainability and transparency

Commonwealth Meridian is the new state-of-the-art public debt management system, an essential tool for debt managers and policy makers. Commonwealth business analyst Joanne Allin provides a guide to the software and what it can do. MORE

Blog: Helping to level the playing field for regulators - Introducing the Commonwealth Fintech Policy Toolkit

The blistering pace of innovation in financial services has seen the emergence, in the past two decades of new technologies deployed into the market – and new companies using those technologies – in more than a hundred countries around the globe. MORE

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Blog: Blockchain – A promising technology for debt transparency

Jane Thomason will make a presentation to Commonwealth Finance Ministers at their meeting in Washington about the potential of blockchain technology to improve debt transparency – saving billions of dollars that can be channelled elsewhere. MORE