Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam is Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies. He is in addition the Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore's central bank and financial regulator.

Mr Tharman also leads the "SkillsFuture" national programme, which seeks to build the skills of the future, and empower Singaporeans to learn throughout life.

He was appointed by his international peers as Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the key policy forum of the IMF, for an extended period of four years from March 2011, and was its first Asian chair. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty, an independent global council of leading economic policy-makers, finance leaders and academics.

Mr Tharman has spent his career in public service, in roles mainly around economic policy and education. He served as Minister for Finance for eight years (until September 2015), and was Minister for Education for five years.