Kati Suominen

Kati Suominen is Founder and CEO of an international trade policy research and platform firm Nextrade Group, LLC (nextradegroupllc.com), and Founder and CEO of TradeUp Capital Fund (tradeupfund.com), a digital financing platform for globalizing, export-driven companies. She is also Adjunct Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a leading Washington think-tank.

Kati has expertise in international trade, trade and development, digitization, and finance. She previously served as Fellow at the German Marshall Fund (2010-12) and Trade Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank (2003-10). She has also served as advisor to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) senior officials meetings on trade and market access issues (2006-09). She has published over 80 articles and 9 books with leading academic presses, and is now finalizing her 10th, Globalization 4.0: How Disruptive Technologies Reshape Business and Policy in the Hyperconnected World.

Kati chairs a global expert group on regional trade agreements for the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development and World Economic Forum, and is the idea woman of RTAExchange.org, a forthcoming global forum on trade agreements sponsored by the Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD). She is also member of global expert groups on Global Value Chains and on the Digital Economy, organized by ICTSD and World Economic Forum, and member of the G20 affiliate T20’s working group of thought leaders on the Internet.

She and her firm Nextrade Group have been hired to work on trade, development, finance, and digitization issues with such leading organizations as the World Bank, Brookings Institution, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, ICTSD, eBay Inc., U.S. Agency for International Development, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Carana Corporation, and ConnectAmericas, a platform for globalizing companies in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Kati has spoken widely on global economic policy issues in over 20 countries and at such venues as the World Trade Organization, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. International Trade Commission, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Commission, Eurasia Group, National Intelligence Council, Asia Society, Asian Development Bank Institute, USAID, United Nations, Organization of American States, International Telecommunications Union, United Nations, UN Conference on Trade and Development, and UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

She has provided commentary in such media as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, BBC, CSPAN, CNN, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, AFP, Politico, USA Today, Time, US News and World Report, and Investor’s Business Daily. She has been profiled in Global Journal and in Los Angeles Business Journal.

She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and American Assembly’s Next Generation Fellow. She serves on the advisory boards of trade-related groups GlobeTrade.com, New Markets Lab, and Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global, and National Law Center for Inter-American Free Trade. She started her career working on Western Hemisphere economic affairs at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

She received her MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, PhD in Political Economy and International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego, MA from Boston University, and BA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she held a full tennis scholarship in an NCAA division I team.