Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Michael Roberts
Chief Executive Officer
HSBC USA and Americas

Michael Roberts is President, CEO and Executive Director of HSBC North America Holdings Inc., and also serves as Chairman of HSBC Bank USA, N.A., and HSBC USA Inc. He is a Group Managing Director of HSBC Holdings plc and a member of the Group Executive Committee. His appointment to these roles took effect in October 2019.

Mr Roberts was appointed as CEO, Americas, with oversight responsibility for Canada and Latin America, with effect from April 2021.

He oversees HSBC Holdings plc’s Americas businesses which serve domestic and international customers across Wealth and Personal Banking, Commercial Banking, and Global Banking & Markets.

Previously Mr Roberts was at Citigroup, most recently as Global Head of Corporate Banking and Capital Management and Chief Lending Officer. In these roles, he managed 1,500 bankers across 100 countries, and was responsible for lending to institutional, private banking and retail customers globally. During his 33-year career at Citi, he held various senior leadership roles in the US and abroad, including Head of Global Financial Institutions, Head of Global Automotive and Industrials, CEO of Citibank Canada, and positions in France, Belgium and Turkey.

Mr Roberts holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Texas, Austin, and a master’s degree in banking and finance from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Lara Hood Balazs
Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, & General Manager of Strategic Partner Group
Intuit

Lara Balazs is Executive Vice President and the Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of Strategic Partner Group for Intuit, the proud maker of QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint. Lara joined in 2018 to lead Intuit’s Marketing and Communications community, responsible for driving company growth and building Intuit’s brands and corporate reputation in support of Intuit’s mission to power prosperity around the world. In 2020, Lara’s role expanded to include running the Strategic Partner Group, which includes identifying and integrating strategic partners with Intuit’s global platform to deliver the benefits that matter the most to our customers. In this expanded role, Lara also leads Intuit’s ProConnect group and Corporate Responsibility efforts which focus on diversity and inclusion, job creation and readiness, and making a positive impact on the climate. Lara serves as Chairman for the Intuit Financial Freedom Foundation.

Lara has a proven track record of building world-class businesses and brands including Amazon, Visa and Nike. As Vice President, Worldwide Prime and Amazon North America Consumer Marketing, Lara was responsible for driving growth of the Prime membership program globally as well as the North America consumer business. Before Amazon, she held a variety of roles at Visa including Senior Vice President, Visa North America Marketing where she was responsible for all aspects of marketing for Visa’s largest revenue-driving region. In 2019, Lara was named as one of Forbes’ 2019 World’s Most Influential CMOs and in 2020, she was recognized with AdWeek’s CMO Vanguard Award. Lara has a BA in pre-law from the University of Washington, from which she graduated magna cum laude with Phi Beta Kappa distinction. She has an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University.

Charles Best
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
DonorsChoose

Charles Best is the CEO and founder of DonorsChoose, the leading platform for giving to public schools. Charles launched the organization in 2000 out of a Bronx public high school where he taught history for five years. Teachers across America use the site to create projects requesting resources their students need, and donors of all sizes give to the projects that inspire them. To date, teachers at 85% of all the public schools in America have created classroom project requests, and 4.5 million supporters have given over $1 billion to those projects.

DonorsChoose is one of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate favorite things” and Charles made the cover of Fast Company as one of the “50 Most Innovative Companies in the World,” the first time a charity has received such recognition. In 2018, the New York Times covered Charles and the $29 million donation he secured to fund every DonorsChoose project in a single day, and ABC’s Good Morning America celebrated the funding of the first million DonorsChoose classroom requests in January.

As a former educator and the pioneer of crowdfunding, Charles has a wealth of knowledge on the power of connecting donors to classrooms in need, creating  movements, scaling an organization, and working with school districts. When DonorsChoose was founded in 2000, crowdfunding wasn’t yet a word. But as a public school teacher working hard to get the resources his students needed, Charles realized the core principle of crowdfunding: citizen donors around the country would want to help teachers like him, if they could see exactly where their dollars were going.

Charles has shared his story at a number of venues, including the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Fast Company Innovation Festival, and SXSW, including the 2015 keynote address at SXSWedu.