Juan Zarate

Juan Zarate General Information

Biography

Mr. Juan Zarate serves as Board Member at Guardian Space Technology Solutions. He is the global co-managing partner and chief strategy officer for the global consulting firm, K2 Integrity. He is also the co-founder and Chair of the Board of Consilient, an innovative new fintech. He is the chairman and co-founder of the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and a senior fellow at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. He was a visiting lecturer in law at the Harvard Law School for eight years and is a published author, including his books "Treasury's War" (2013) and "Forging Democracy" (1994). He has served as an independent adviser to Coinbase since 2014 and is an independent advisor to HSBC's Group Risk Committee. He sits on the boards of various organizations, including Northwestern Mutual, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) North America, Guardian Space Technology Solutions (GSTS), and the Director's Advisory Board for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). For over five years, he sat on the board of the Vatican's Financial Information Authority (appointed twice by Pope Francis as the U.S. representative to oversee the Vatican's anti-money laundering reforms). For seven years, he was the U.S. advisor on HSBC's Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee (overseeing remediation of the bank's anti-money laundering system and adherence with the U.S. DOJ deferred prosecution agreement). He served as the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism ("counterterrorism czar") from 2005 to 2009, where he was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats, including hostage-taking, piracy, anti-money laundering, kleptocracy, and transnational organized crime. He was responsible for conceiving and leading major initiatives in the post-9/11 period, including the establishment of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT). He was the first ever assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes. In this role, he led the post-9/11 anti-money laundering and sanctions regime expansion in the United States; helped develop the international standards for AML/CFT and proliferation finance; supervised the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the Treasury's Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF); drove the innovative use of the Treasury's national security-related powers and ultimately the establishment of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). He has also led some of the largest asset recovery ventures in history, including the return of over $3 billion in Iraqi assets. He is a former federal terrorism prosecutor, before 9/11, serving on the prosecution teams in the East Africa bombings and USS Cole cases, among others. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School. At Harvard College, he won the John P. Reardon Award, as the best male student-athlete.