Theo Kocken
Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Cardano Development and Founder Cardano, Cardano
Theo Kocken founded Cardano in 2000 to take a broader look at risk and make the pension and insurance sectors more resilient to fundamental uncertainty. He helped set up TCX in 2007 to make developing countries less vulnerable to hard currency loans. TCX is now part of Cardano Development Foundation, which runs a number of initiatives aiming to reduce market failure in low-income countries and improve financial inclusion. He left Cardano in 2021 and is now Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Cardano Development. He is also a professor at VU University of Amsterdam and is involved in several initiatives in low-income countries. As a hobby, he enjoys making documentaries – one such documentary was ‘Boom Bust Boom’, which he produced alongside Terry Jones and Bill and Ben. Kocken started his career in finance in 1990 at BNG and worked for ten years in the banking sector. Among other roles he was Head of Market Risk at ING and Rabobank. He graduated in Business Administration (1990) and Econometrics (1993) and received his PhD at VU University Amsterdam (2006). He discovered that financial markets do not always follow the laws that his studies in econometrics had shown him.
