In the world of sports a 'deep bench' signifies a team with a large group of very talented players. At MSI we can draw on a deep global bench of sector and geographical specialists in the academic, public service and corporate sectors.

 

Our research work is collaborative by design and we always seek to bring diverse perspectives into the conversation.

 

With this team of teams approach we can go as deep and as broad as we wish on any subject that has captured our interest as well as bouncing our ideas around with some of the premier global thinkers and practitioners in any field. 

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Real insights are rarely discovery out of nowhere. It is often the result of fortuitous collisions, in which different fields of expertise that don't traditionally communicate come together. This is a process we are committed to and our global bench of contacts play a crucial role.

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MEET OUR ADVISORY BOARD...

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Alastair Winter:

Alastair has a long and proven track record as an advisor to international organisations on developments in geopolitics, macroeconomics and global financial markets and the potential impacts on their business. He is a regular contributor to the public discourse on matters pertaining to finance, business and politics in the media and as a speaker. He studied History and Political Economy at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he was elected President of the Student Representative Council and also a Vice President of the Scottish Union of Students. His professional career has included public service (Greater London Council), international banking (Chase Manhattan and Bears Stearns) and treasury management consultancy. Based in the City of London, he has served as a director and chairman of listed and private companies. As an entrepreneur he has over the years co-founded a corporate finance boutique, a specialist conference company, a treasury outsourcer and an Australian biotech company. Career highlights have been achieving market leadership in three different sectors: in UK NHS Trust treasury management, global securities safekeeping and international treasury management conferences.  Over the years, he has served as a trustee and fund-raiser for a number of charities. Descended from immigrants (Russia and the US) and married to an Italian, he has always determinedly advocated international understanding and cooperation. 

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Atsushi Saito:

Saito-san is currently the Commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). Prior to this role he served for as group CEO, President and Chief Executive Officer of Japan Exchange Group – the group was established from the combination of the Tokyo Stock Exchange Group and Osaka Securities Exchange.

 

He previously served as the President and CEO of Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), the holding company of the TSE and self-regulatory corporation of the exchange. In this capacity, Saito-san oversaw the merger of TSE and the Osaka Securities Exchange to form the JPX in January 2013. Prior to his time at TSE, he was the President and CEO of the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan (IRCJ), a government sponsored group focused on turnaround investments. While at IRCJ, Saito-san demonstrated strong leadership in the revitalization of several Japanese companies.

 

In addition to these roles, he was a CEO of Sumitomo Life Investment Co. He previously held various executive roles at Nomura Securities and was appointed as Executive Vice President of Nomura in 1995. During his 35 years at Nomura he was twice stationed in New York. Saito-san has been a Member of the Board of the World Federation of Exchanges. He holds a B.A. in Commerce from Keio University.

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Chase Taylor:

Chase is the founder of Pinecone Macro Research, an US based independent global macro research firm that serves family offices, hedge funds, investment advisors and individual trading professionals. Chase brings a unique vantage point to this work based around his experiences in the US intelligence community and the US Air Force. Within his various roles with the US Airforce he has worked on bomber avionics, geospatial intelligence and the procurement of space related technologies. He has worked with everything from B-1 Bombers to spy planes, to satellite thrusters and rockets and spend time deployed to Southwest Asia as an intelligence analyst. Chase has formally studied intelligence analytical techniques, military history and global business. He brings his diverse and distinctive perspectives to the MSI team, combining his understanding of defense, technology, geo-economics and financial markets.

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Grant Williams:

Grant began his career in finance in 1985 at the age of 18. Over his 35 year career, he has lived and worked in London, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, Singapore and The Cayman Islands. Grant has been an equity, derivatives and bond trader at Robert Fleming & Co. Ltd, Jardine Fleming, UBS, Credit Suisse, and Banc of America as well as a portfolio manager for Singapore-based hedge fund, Vulpes Investment Management.

 

He founded Things That Make You Go Hmmm…, a finance-focused research firm and is one of the co-founders of Real Vision Group. Both of those projects focus on bringing wider understanding of the financial world to those seeking truth in finance. He is a respected voice on all things macro and hosts a popular podcast series that brings some of the greatest minds in finance and business together for deep dives into global trends. Grant also serves as a strategic advisor to Vulpes Investment Management and Matterhorn AG.

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Jacob L. Shapiro:

Jacob is the Founder & Chief Strategist of Perch Perspectives. He oversees the company’s strategic direction and client engagements and has earned a reputation as a prolific researcher, writer, speaker, and analyst who embraces unconventional thinking and direct client collaboration. He believes in challenging traditional perspectives and ideas to give companies, policymakers, and executives the agency to proactively solve problems.

 

If you asked Jacob what career he wanted to pursue 20 years ago, “business and political consultant” would’ve fallen somewhere between “musician,” “rabbi,” “philosopher,” and “NBA commentator,” and certainly below “professional cheeseburger critic.” His seemingly wide-ranging interests and hobbies bely their fundamental commonalities. Music, theology, philosophy, culture, good food. These are just some of the many things that define us as humans, shape our respective worldviews and impact how we make decisions. It should be a surprise to no one, then, that Jacob believes the best way to advise business leaders and policymakers is the one that places humans at its center.

 

It’s a unique approach in a field that largely prioritizes determinism over human agency and universal methodologies over adaptable processes. In founding Perch Perspectives, Jacob is offering clients something new. He’s taking the lessons learned from a decade as an analyst and writer at Stratfor and Geopolitical Futures and building on top of them—finding a higher perch, one might say. His ultimate goal is to offer clients best-in-class writing and political analysis and, just as importantly, a different, more comprehensive perspective of the forces that shape the world and impact business or political decisions. That is an approach that we appreciate and embrace at MSI and Jacob, and his extended network, is a valued resource and he often provides the spark for great conversations on the world around us.

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Richard Field:

Richard is the Director of the Institute for Financial Transparency (IFT).  This Initiative awards its label to any investment which provides the required timely disclosures to enable investors to make informed decisions. Investments without its label are opaque, they have an investment story investors cannot trust, nor verify.  The IFT aims to bring the ability to trust and verify back to financial markets. Since the mid-90s, Richard has been a leader in defining and implementing transparency in the finance industry. Richard designed, developed and patented a low-cost information system to handle all of the complexity involved in making every structured finance security transparent. His solution uses a data warehouse to provide all market participants with easily accessible, standardized collateral level data on an observable event basis over the life of each deal.

 

Earlier in his career, Richard worked as an Assistant Vice President for First Bank System and as a Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Board. Richard has an MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Yale University. Richard has written extensively about transparency in financial markets.  In 2015, his book Transparency Games: How Bankers Rig the World of Finance was published.  

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Shaun Riordan:

Shaun is Director of the Department for Diplomacy and Cyberspace at the European Institute of International Studies, Senior Research Fellow at the Charhar Institute in Beijing and a Senior Visiting Fellow of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (“Clingendael”). He is a senior consultant with UNITAR on Digital, Public and Cyber Diplomacy and a member of the European Commission´s advisory committee on Encryption.

 

Shaun served 16 years in the British Diplomatic Service with postings to New York, Taiwan, Beijing and Madrid, as well as stints in the UN, Hong Kong, Counter-Terrorism and Balkans Departments of the Foreign Office. He teaches in Diplomatic Academies around the world including the Madrid Financial Markets Institute and the Rochat Business School. He has been a member of the advisory committees on Public Diplomacy of the Spanish Government and the UN Sustainable Development Goals Fund, as well as advising the UN World Tourism Organisation on geopolitical risk management. 

 

Shaun is the author of “The New Diplomacy” (Polity 2003), “Adios a la Diplomacia” (Siglo XXI 2005), “Cyber Diplomacy: Managing Security and Governance Online” (Polity 2019) and “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace: A Diplomatic Perspective” (Brill 2019). He is a co-author of “Futures for Diplomacy: Integrative Diplomacy for the 21st Century” (Clingendael 2012).

 

Shaun holds an MA (Hons) in Philosophy from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University.

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Velina Tchakarova:

Velina is Head of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) in Vienna. She has seven years of academic background and further ten years of working experience in the field of foreign, security and defence policy analysis. She is PhD Candidate at the University of Vienna, Austria and holds M.A. in Political Science/Political Science of South Asia in Heidelberg, Germany, as well as BA in International Relations and Macroeconomics in Sofia, Bulgaria.

 

Her work includes research, consulting, lectures and publications on Global System Transformation signals, trends and risks as well as the geostrategy of global and regional actors. She applies systems thinking, realpolitik and political economy approach to her analyses and research. Furthermore, she provides an expertise on geopolitical and geoeconomic due diligence as well as systemic risks. Lastly, she organizes and moderates expert workshops, webinars, and lectures for public and private clients.