Juan Zarate

Global Co-Managing Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, K2 Integrity; Chairman of the Center on Economic & Financial Power, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

The Honorable Juan Zarate is the global co-managing partner and chief strategy officer for the consulting firm, K2 Integrity. He is also the co-founder and Chair of the Board of Consilient, an innovative new fintech company.

Zarate 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 the Class of 1971 Senior Fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He is an advisor to the National Security Institute, the Harvard National Security Journal, FDD’s Center on Cyber & Technology Innovation, and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Zarate is a Trustee, board member, and Audit Committee Chair for Northwestern Mutual. He serves on the board of Guardian Space Technology Solutions, and since 2014, Mr. Zarate has served as an independent adviser to Coinbase, the largest U.S. virtual asset service provider.

He was a visiting lecturer on law at the Harvard Law School for eight years and is a published author, including his books “Treasury’s War” and “Forging Democracy.”

Pope Francis appointed Zarate twice to serve on the board of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority. He sat on the boards of Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Quantum Computing North America, and HSBC’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee.

Zarate has served on multiple commissions and task forces, including the CSIS Commission on Countering Violent Extremism; CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security; the Council on Foreign Relation’s Independent Task Force on North Korea; the Center for A New American Security’s Future of U.S. Sanctions Task Force; and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism.

Zarate served as the Deputy Assistant to President Bush and Deputy National Security Adviser for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009, the country’s fifth “counterterrorism czar.” He was the first-ever Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, where he was responsible for the national security mission and established the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He was a federal terrorism prosecutor prior to 9/11.

Zarate is 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. He was a Rotary Scholar at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain.