John Sfakianakis Keynote Speaker

John Sfakianakis is Chief Economist and Director of Economic Research at the Gulf Research Center in Riyadh. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge and at Chatham House. He advises global corporations and institutions on oil markets and oil policy, regional economic trends, privatisation, fiscal management, macro-fiscal planning, and debt management, with a focus on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf economies, and the intersection of economics and geopolitics.

He has over two decades of experience in the Middle East, advising governments, sovereign institutions, and international investors on economic reform, fiscal strategy, and market dynamics. His work has focused extensively on Saudi Arabia’s economic transformation, including fiscal reform, privatisation, capital market development, and the Kingdom’s evolving role in global energy markets. He is widely regarded as a leading commentator on Gulf economic transformation and the geopolitical economy of energy.

Earlier in his career, he worked at EM Partners, a private equity firm specialising in the Middle East. He later served as Middle East Director at Ashmore Group in Riyadh and Chief Investment Strategist at MASIC, one of Saudi Arabia’s oldest investment companies, with interests spanning finance, banking, real estate, petrochemicals, energy, aquaculture, and asset management. He also served as Chief Economic Advisor to the Saudi Minister of Finance.

He has held senior banking roles including Group General Manager and Chief Economist at Banque Saudi Fransi, Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa at Crédit Agricole CIB, Chief Economist at SABB/HSBC in Riyadh, and Chief Regional Economist at Samba Financial Group. He also served as an advisor at the Saudi Ministry of Economy and Planning.

John writes frequently on Saudi and international economic affairs and was responsible for launching the first business confidence index and the first real estate price index produced by a Saudi bank. He has also worked as an economist for the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank. He was educated at the London School of Economics, SOAS, and Harvard University.