The Bank for International Settlements has appointed Beju Shah as the new Head of the Toronto Innovation Centre.
Supported by the Bank of Canada, the centre was opened in June 20224 to explore the development of emerging technologies, both in Canada and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Since 2022, Shah has led the Nordic Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub, where he was in charge of initiatives related to cyber security and cyber resilience, financial crime prevention, the future of money and payments, and artificial intelligence. Before the BIS, he worked at the Bank of England for 10 years in various roles, leading on large data, technology and business transformation programmes.
The Toronto Innovation Centre's initial focus is fon projects to explore next-generation financial market infrastructures, innovation for regulatory, supervisory and oversight purposes and open finance.
These are three of the BIS's six priority themes for its Innovation Hub. Others are cyber security, green finance and central bank digital currencies, and are the focus of other Hub centres.
The first facility to be sited in the Americas, Toronto is one of six other BIS Innovation Hub Centres located in Switzerland, the Eurosystem, London, the Nordics, Hong Kong and Singapore.