Umut Balcı

Born in Ankara in 1993, Umut Balcı is an attorney and researcher with more than six years of progressive experience across Türkiye, Germany, Canada, and the United States.

From 2017 to 2024, Umut served as in-house counsel at the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, advising the payment systems and financial technologies departments. He took part in the Digital Turkish Lira R&D project and collaborated with MASAK and the FATF on financial-crime and AML matters. His areas of practice include national and international financial regulation, payments law, financial technologies, central bank digital currencies, corporate law, and criminal law.

Umut studied law at the Ankara University Faculty of Law, including an Erasmus year at the University of Mannheim School of Law and Economics. He earned an LL.M. in Public Law from Ankara University and has been a Ph.D. candidate in Public Law at Hacettepe University since 2020. He has served as a visiting researcher at the University of Minnesota Law School and as a visiting research fellow at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He is admitted to the Ankara Bar Association and speaks English and Turkish fluently, with working German.