Barbara C. Matthews is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. She is an accomplished global and transatlantic regulatory policy expert with significant experience in the public and private sectors.

Matthews was the first banking adviser and regulatory counsel to the Institute of International Finance (IIF) during the 1990s, until 2004. While at the IIF, she was an internationally-recognized expert regarding derivatives, regulatory capital, and cross-border regulatory policy. During this period, she chaired meetings with senior executives at global banks in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States while helping to craft consensus on global regulatory policy issues. She also negotiated with senior central bank and regulatory policy makers around the world.

From 2004 to 2008, Matthews served in senior US government positions both in Washington and in Brussels. In Washington, she was the senior counsel for international issues at the House Financial Services Committee under Chairman Michael G. Oxley. During that period, she pioneered the first appearance by a European Commission official before the Committee (Director-General Alexander Schaub) and the first visit to the Committee by the European Parliament’s ECON Committee.

In Brussels, Matthews was the first US Treasury Department attaché to the European Union with the US Senate-confirmed diplomatic rank of minister-counselor within the Department of State. During her time in Brussels, Matthews worked on financial regulatory policy issues in the Transatlantic Economic Council, participated in the Financial Markets Regulatory Dialogue, and organized the first visit by the House Financial Services Committee (under Chairman Barney Frank) to the European Parliament.

From 2008 to 2016, Matthews ran a boutique consultancy providing geopolitical and regulatory policy analysis to a broad range of financial market participants in the United States and Europe. During that period, she also created a process to quantify policy risk and anticipate regulatory outcomes. That process was awarded a patent in the United States in September 2016.

In 2016, Matthews joined KPMG to manage the firm’s internal regulatory policy think tank (the Americas’ Financial Services Regulatory Center of Excellence). She left KPMG in the April 2017 and re-joined BCM International Regulatory Analytics where she is pursuing patent development.

Matthews holds a JD and an LLM in comparative and international law from Duke Law School.  She holds a BScFS. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She is a member of the New York Bar, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bretton Woods Committee, and the Cosmos Club. She has been listed in multiple Who’s Who publications for over a decade. She is also a member of the GeoEconomics Study Group at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, which will present the outcome of its deliberations to the German G20 Presidency later in 2017. She served as part of the Expert Group on Capital Markets Union at the Centre for European Policy Studies during 2014 to 2015, which published its recommendations to the European Commission in 2015.

Matthews and her husband live in Virginia with their teenage daughter.