Jean Christophe Liaubet

Clare Adelgren is EY Global Blockchain Leader at EY (Ernst & Young), based in Armonk, New York. In this capacity, she leads sales, go-to-market strategy, and day-to-day product operations for EY Blockchain. Her recent activity includes participation in the CoinDesk Institutional Summit and engagement with the Consensus 2026 conference, with a focus on privacy in blockchain and digital assets.

Prior to her current role, Adelgren held a position at IBM as Vice President of Corporate Strategy, where she was responsible for developing IBM's future strategies for the Financial Services sector and new industry platform solutions using data and analytics, AI, and blockchain. During her time at IBM, she was a member of IBM's Leadership Academy and sat on the IBM Global Financial Services Sector Advisory Board. Before IBM, she worked at PwC. Across these roles, she accumulated over 25 years of business consulting experience serving large global enterprises in enterprise strategy, digital transformation, and software engineering programs. She has lived and worked in several European countries and Japan before relocating to New York in 2016.

David Byrd is a Partner and Global & Americas Digital Asset Assurance Leader at EY, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He leads the EY Digital Asset Research Center, a team that applies technical understanding of fungible and non-fungible tokens and underlying distributed ledger technologies to service the blockchain and digital asset sector. His client work spans financial statement audits, internal audits, audit readiness, agreed-upon procedures, SOC reporting, forensic services, and transaction services for clients holding and transacting in digital assets. He is also a member of EY's Financial Services Office.

Byrd has been a Partner at EY since September 2013. Earlier in his career, he served as a panelist and visiting faculty member at the Practising Law Institute between June 2016 and December 2017, where he lectured on topics including finance for lawyers, financial reporting, and deal-making in the new economy. In May–June 2013, he taught an Accounting and Finance course at the University of San Francisco School of Management. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Accounting from the University of San Francisco and a PhD in Philosophy with a focus on Cognitive Science from the University of California, Davis. He is a licensed CPA.

Muneeb Shah is Director, Technology Consulting at Ernst & Young LLP, and holds the position of Head of Digital Assets within Technology Consulting for UK Financial Services, a role he has held since August 2022. His mandate centres on leading the digital assets technology consulting capability for financial services at EY, with a focus on payments, tokenised cash, and digital currencies.

Prior to EY, Shah led market development and strategy at R3, where his work focused on payments, tokenised cash, and related products, applications, and SDKs for a global client base. Before R3, he spent approximately a decade at Wipro, where he established a payments centre of excellence and built and led a blockchain practice. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly five years at HSBC. His professional background spans financial services, payments, digital assets, and emerging technologies across multiple industry sectors. Across these roles, Shah accumulated over 18 years of experience in advisory, consulting-led sales, strategy, delivery, and product leadership. He is based in London.

Paul Brody is Global Blockchain Leader at EY, a position he has held since July 2016. He is responsible for EY's global blockchain business across tax, audit, and consulting, covering strategy, engineering, research, and operational management. He leads development of EY's Nightfall and Starlight platforms, and built the firm's first smart contract testing platform and first on-chain audit platform, EY Blockchain Analyzer. He also developed EY's first global SaaS platform, Blockchain.EY.com. EY was the first Big Four firm to embrace public blockchains including Ethereum and Bitcoin under his leadership.

Brody is also Chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a role he assumed in January 2024 having previously served as a board member from September 2022. He is the author of Ethereum for Business and describes himself as a public blockchain supporter and privacy advocate. He was introduced to Ethereum in 2014. In a notable transaction, EY became the first company to receive a B2B payment in the stablecoin PYUSD from PayPal, executed through a fully automated process involving SAP and Coinbase, eliminating the need for manual intervention by EY's accounting department. Prior to his blockchain role, Brody served as Americas Strategy Leader for the Technology Sector at EY from April 2015 to January 2017.

Stéphane Distinguin is Associé en charge de l'innovation at EY France, a position he has held since 2024, in which he sits on the EY France executive committee. He previously served as EY's partner responsible for artificial intelligence activities across the Western Europe zone. His presence at EY follows the 2022 acquisition of Fabernovel, the digital transformation consultancy he founded in 2003, which he built to fifty million euros in revenue and five hundred employees before the transaction. At EY Fabernovel, he has advised large companies on Web3 applications, including decentralised autonomous organisation models, NFT-based CRM tools, and blockchain-enabled traceability and reporting for environmental accountability.

Prior to the EY acquisition, Distinguin founded and invested in several start-ups including Digitick, KissKissBankBank, and Bureaux à Partager. From 2004 to 2010, he was president of Silicon Sentier, later renamed Numa, where he initiated La Cantine, described as the first European coworking space, and Le Camping, one of the first start-up accelerators. He served as president of Cap Digital, the French digital competitiveness cluster, from 2013 to 2019. In 2015, he was appointed by Prime Minister Manuel Valls to co-author the founding report for La Grande École du Numérique, which he subsequently chaired. From 2013 to 2016, he was a member of France's Conseil National du Numérique. In 2018, he was tasked with a mission on innovation funding for ministers Bruno Le Maire and Frédérique Vidal. In 2021, he was appointed to represent France in the selection process for the design of future euro banknotes. He is the author of Et si on vendait la Joconde ?, published by Éditions JC Lattès in 2022. He holds a degree from ESCP Europe, obtained in 1997.