MR. LAMON RUTTEN
Director
Lamon Rutten has well over 30 years of experience in commodity markets, and in particular in the areas of public management of the commodity sector, commodity finance and commodity risk management. Since January 2017, he is CEO of the Indonesian Commodity & Derivatives Exchange, where he is tasked to grow the exchange and its two subsidiaries (a clearing house and a logistics/warehouse management company) and create a tangible impact on Indonesia’s economy.
Lamon started his working life setting up a warehouse receipt financing scheme for grain traders in Mali, to replace the storage role of the to-be-abolished government grain monopoly, This created a lasting interest in market solutions, which came to good stead when he joined the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1990. For the better part of 15 years, Lamon was responsible for building and managing UNCTAD’s programme on modern financial instruments for the commodities sector, with an extensive series of activities on commodity exchange development and structured commodity finance. In this period, Lamon was also Senior Advisor to the World Bank’s International Task Force on Commodity Risk Management, member of the advisory board of IIG Capital (a leading alternative investment fund specializing in trade finance), one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Global Network of Export-Import Banks and Development Finance Institutions (G-NEXID), and lecturer, for 5 years, at the Institute for Banking and Financial Management of HEC Lausanne.
In 2006, Lamon moved to the private sector, to become first Joint MD, then MD & CEO of the Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX), the world’s 8th largest exchange in 2006 when he joined and No. 2 (with a 2011 turnover of US$ 2.9 trillion) when he left in 2012, after having concluded an award-winning Initial Public Offering (IPO). His work to develop a Corporate Social Responsibility programme that leveraged the company’s core skills earned the company half a dozen awards. He also played an active role in the development of what was to become India’s largest collateral management firm, NBHC. During a quiet spell at MCX he managed for almost a year the leading collateral management company in Africa (as part of a planned corporate acquisition), supervising more than 1,200 staff in over 20 countries.
He left MCX in June 2012 to head operations at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development (CTA), an international organization headquartered in The Netherlands. There, among other things, he supervised the world’s leading programme on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs – in particular, mobile apps) for agriculture, and was responsible for a comprehensive series of studies on commodity exchange and warehouse receipt development in Africa. While at CTA, he held a number of Board positions, including as Chairman of the Bahrain Financial Exchange, and starting in 2013, as Chairman of the Global Markets Exchange Group, (GMEX) in the UK, and non-executive director of the London Derivatives Exchange and Global Derivatives Indices Ltd. In this period, he also was, inter alia, a member of the high-level Expert Committee on agricultural finance to the Leading Group on Innovative Financing for Development; and the Land Use Committee of the Climate Bond Initiative (where he helped define what would constitute climate bonds in the agricultural and forestry space).
Lamon holds a M.Sc. degree, with honours, in International Economic Management from Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He has published extensively, including more than 70 books and papers on commodity risk management and finance for international organisations such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. His book (with Emmanuelle Moors), Structured Commodity Finance: Techniques and Applications, was published in April 2014 by Euromoney.