2010 - Speakers

Beth DeSimone
Of Counsel, Arnold & Porter, LLP

DeSimmone practices in the corporate and financial institutions areas, with a concentration in the consumer banking area. Her work covers all aspects of financial regulation. For instance, she structures and negotiates mergers and acquisitions of, and investments in, financial services companies. DeSimmone also focuses on establishing new financial institutions and nonbank subsidiaries and assisting institutions in strategic planning and charter review. Using new technologies, she negotiates business alliances to expand consumer product and services opportunities to new customers. She assists in structuring and resolving issues associated with card products, including international remittance cards, payroll cards, government benefit cards, health savings account cards, gift cards, and other prepaid card products. DeSimone is a regular contributor to the blog on consumer marketing legal issues. She assists in resolving regulatory issues, including those arising under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, and the Truth in Lending Act, and helps clients monitor the effectiveness of their fair lending programs. She helps clients monitor proposed legislation and regulation, and understand the implications of regulatory change. DeSimone received her JD from the College of William and Mary and her BA from Wheaton College.

Tom Joyce is a Director in Deutsche Bank's Debt Capital Markets origination group. His primary responsibility involves acting as a debt capital markets strategist focused on a broad range of topics that directly impact issuers in the U.S. investment grade bond market. Recent areas of focus have included the implications of the European sovereign credit crisis, as well as the outlook for U.S. financial and derivatives regulatory reform.

Prior to his current role, Tom worked within the Liability Structuring group of Debt Capital Markets with a focus on preferred stock and hybrid capital origination. He also spent a number of years within investment banking focused on equity capital markets, financial institutions and technology.

Tom’s educational background includes a year of study at Oxford University in 1991, a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Holy Cross College in 1993, and a MBA from Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University in 2000.

Kaplan advises clients on all aspects of bank regulatory issues, with an emphasis on corporate structuring, control, operations, problem bank resolutions, legislative and regulatory developments, as well as the electronic provision of financial services. His practice represents traditional and nontraditional financial services holding companies and financial institutions before federal and state bank regulatory agencies on a variety of matters, including structural, operational, enforcement and authority issues. Kaplan has extensive experience with issues pertaining to payment networks and electronic funds transfers and has been extensively involved in assisting clients navigate through the various government programs created under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program and Public-Private Investment Program. He served as a senior attorney in the Chief Counsel's Office of the Office of Thrift Supervision and its predecessor the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in both the Business Transactions and Enforcement divisions. After leaving government service, Kaplan served as an associate, of counsel or partner at three Washington, D.C. law firms. A frequent source for major media publications and financial news programs on banking matters, Kaplan also publicly speaks on bank regulatory issues. He has written numerous articles on financial services issues and co-authored a textbook chapter on online financial transactions and payment mechanisms.

Kaplan earned a Juris Doctor from The National Law Center of the George Washington University and an AB degree, with distinction, in economics and political science from The University of Michigan.

Rick Santorum is recognized as a steadfast leader and defender of the first principles upon which our nation was founded. Rick champions the intrinsic value of the human person as the founding principle of conservatism. From 1995 through 2007, Rick served in the United States Senate after defeating a heavily favored incumbent.

Rick is now a Senior Fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Friday host of Bill Bennett's 'Morning in America' nationally-syndicated radio program, a contributor on the Fox News Channel, and a columnist with The Philadelphia Inquirer. He also authored the 2005 New York Times Best Seller "It Takes a Family."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is considered by many to be the world's foremost thinker on probability and uncertainty. He has enjoyed widespread success as a writer, businessman-trader-risk manager, and university professor. Currently, he is a distinguished professor at New York University's Polytechnic Institute and Principal of Universal Investments LP.

His books have been published in 31 languages with more than 3 million copies in print. His first book, Fooled by Randomness:The Hidden Role of Chance in Live and in the Markets, was called, "one of the smartest books of all time" by Fortune Magazine. An articulate, wise, and humorous meditation on the nature of success and failure, Taleb used his own investing experience and examples of others' successes and disappointments to address the movement of money markets around the world.

In his second book, The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Taleb examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. A worldwide bestseller, it was named by the Times as one of the 12 most influential books since the Second World War. The Black Swan idea is currently inspiring research papers in philosophy, statistics, psychology, economics, medical research, epidemiology, political science, and engineering. Taleb specializes in uncertainty and errors in human knowledge, teaching us how to deal with unpredictability. He both predicted the economic crisis and made a personal fortune out of it.