Dr. Kati Suominen
Dr. Kati Suominen is a renowned business and policy entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in Political Economy and International Affairs from UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, and an MBA from The Wharton School.
She is the Founder and CEO ofNextradeGroup, a Los Angeles-based company that helps multilateral development banks, governments, and Fortune 500 technology firms to enable world trade through technology. Nextrade Group is known for shaping the field of trade and development by implementing data-driven strategies, PPPs, proofs of concepts, and pilots to digitise and drive world trade. They use AI-driven and geospatial approaches in their analytical work.
Nextrade Group has worked with over 50 clients, including major companies such as MasterCard, Visa, eBay, Google, AWS, PayPal, TradeKey, IBM, FedEx, Magento, and several development banks such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, etc. Dr. Kati has ideated and architected many data-driven analytical products and organisational strategies for her clients. She has developed pilots with corporate partners to solve key pain points in trade logistics, finance, and ecommerce development in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Dr. Kati is the author and editor of ten books on trade and economics, and her latest book is ‘Revolutionizing World Trade: How Disruptive Technologies Open Opportunities for All’, published by Stanford University Press in 2019. She has published over 120 articles and reports on trade, technology, and globalisation, which have been featured in leading academic presses, including Stanford, Oxford, Yale, and Cambridge, and other publications including Ashgate, IABD, and Edward Elgar.
Dr. Kati has spoken at various events such as the World Trade Symposium, Davos, WTO, Global Trade Review, ICC Banking Commission, IMF, and World Bank. She has commented in leading media publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, Time, USA Today, and LA Times.
Dr. Kati has also ideated and built several global initiatives and public-private partnerships to further ecommerce development and digitization of world trade. These initiatives and partnerships include eTrade for All, Alliance for eTrade Development I and II, Digital Standards for Trade, and the Prosper Africa Tech for Trade Alliance. She serves as the Technical Director of the Alliance for eTrade Development, which is a partnership between 17 global companies and USAID to accelerate ecommerce development.
Dr. Kati is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she founded the Digital Trade program and an Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Anderson School, where she teaches MBA courses on international business economics and the economics of global digital disruption.
