Taisiya Solovyeva is a co-founder and a managing director of IRT, Chair of the Organizing Committee and is responsible for the overall management of IRT affairs.  Prior to founding the IRT, Ms. Solovyeva worked for GARP Research Center at Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP), where she developed educational materials and focused on the successful launch of the Foundations of Banking Risk Program (FBR) with IFC in nine CIS countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Prior to that, Ms. Solovyeva was a member of Citigroup CEEMEA Investment Strategy team, focusing on a wide range of Research projects, including Russian and Easter Europe equities, Middle East, Africa and frontier emerging markets.

Ms. Solovyeva is a graduate of Samara State University of Economics and Zicklin School of Business at Bernard Baruch College.

Karl Schmidt is a co-founder and managing director of International Roundtable, Inc. (IRT). Karl Schmidt is also the President of Bristol Advisors. Inc., a financial consulting firm; one of its previous assignments was to list public foreign, primarily German firm, on the exchanges in the U.S, such as Aixtron.  Also, Karl Schmidt is very active with the New York Society of Security Analysts, just completing two years of chairing their Global Investing Committee, during which time he organized close to ten seminars on subjects, such as Mexico, Columbia, India, Russia, Frontier and Emerging Markets. Karl Schmidt spent most of his working career, from 1966 to 1996, at The Chase Manhattan Bank where he was a corporate finance officer, focusing primarily on  global automotive companies, such as VW, BMW, Mercedes, as well as Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. Karl Schmidt has a BA and MBA both from the New York University.