Name:Gayan Benedict

Bio:

Gayan is an experienced technology leader with a proven record of delivering change and digital transformation, innovation, resilience, research collaboration and talent development. He is the CTO and Vice President of Customer Advisory for Salesforce, Australia and New Zealand and Vice President of Architecture and Industry Transformation for Salesforce Asia Pacific. He was previously CIO of the Reserve Bank of Australia where he oversaw the core banking modernisation of Australia’s federal government’s banking platforms, rollout of the RBA’s New Payment Platform and cyber operations uplift. He has held senior technology leadership positions at Westpac Banking Corporation and Oracle Corporation.

Gayan received his doctorate from UTS in regulatory control responses to decentrally governed DLT systems, and has honours degrees in Law and Commerce from the University of Queensland. Gayan chairs Standard Australia’s Working Group on Blockchain Governance for IT-041, is an Australian representative on the global ISO Technical Committee TC-307 on Blockchain and DLT Standards, and holds industry research fellowships at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research and UTS. In 2023, Gayan received a Fulbright Scholarship to research AI-enabled blockchain governance at Georgetown University’s CyberSMART research center.

Country:Australia

Affiliation:University of Technology Sydney

Research interests:Blockchain, DLT, Regulation, Governance, AI