Barbara C. Matthews is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. She is a globally recognized public-policy and quantitative-finance leader. She is also the founder and chief executive officer of BCMstrategy, Inc., a data company that uses patented language technology to help portfolio managers and advocates measure public-policy volatility and anticipate public-policy trajectories.

In government, Matthews had the honor to serve as the first US Treasury attaché to the European Union (Senate-confirmed diplomatic rank: minister-counselor). As such, she was the most senior US Treasury official in Europe at the start of the Great Financial Crisis. She also served as senior counsel to the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee under the leadership of Chairman Michael G. Oxley. In the private sector, she founded and ran a successful policy-consulting business during the Great Financial Crisis. She was also the lead global strategist and advocate for the Institute of International Finance, Inc. in the 1990s and early 2000s, during which she worked directly with global bank chief executive officers, chief risk officers, their teams, and their counterparts in the world’s leading central banks and financial regulators.

She holds a political science degree from Georgetown University and two law degrees (JD with honors and LLM in comparative and international law) from Duke University Law School. A member of the Bretton Woods Committee and the Council on Foreign Relations, she is also a faculty/mentor at the Maxwell School’s National Security Strategies program at Syracuse University. She and her husband reside in the Commonwealth of Virginia; they have one daughter who is in college.