Samantha Vinograd

Head of Corporate Affairs for the Americas, UK, and EMEA at Airwallex

Samantha has spent nearly 20 years at the nexus of geopolitics and operations, navigating the highest levels of government and the private sector to analyze risk and deliver effective policy and communications strategies.

Leveraging a broad and deep global network, Samantha is an experienced leader who builds coalitions to drive impact. She has created and managed teams with multimillion dollar budgets across geographies and functions. Her unique understanding of the private and the public sectors inform her design and implementation of successful communications approaches — as have Samantha’s testimonies before Congress and years as a trusted expert in the media.

Samantha is currently the first Head of Corporate Affairs for the Americas, UK, and EMEA at Airwallex where she manages government relations and public affairs strategies across key markets. She also serves as a CBS News security contributor, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a trustee at Save the Children U.S.

Previously, Samantha led Brunswick Group’s U.S. geopolitical practice. In that role, she designed new geopolitical offerings for clients, advised C-suites to advance business objectives and drove millions of dollars in new revenue for the firm. Before that, she led Stripe’s global public-policy team and built public-private partnerships at Goldman Sachs.

Samantha has vast experience serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations. She was most recently the Biden administration’s Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism, Threat Prevention and Law Enforcement Policy at the Department of Homeland Security. In the Obama administration, she was the Director for Iraq, then the Director for International Economics at the White House National Security Council and later promoted to serve as the Senior Adviser to the National Security Adviser. Those roles further leveraged her experience in the energy sector and the Middle East, honed while serving as the Department of the Treasury’s Deputy Attaché to Iraq during the Bush administration.

She is fluent in French and studied advanced Arabic and Hebrew. She received her B.A. in Asian and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. in security studies from Georgetown University.