Romena Butanska

Romena is a seasoned public policy and strategic communications professional with more than a decade of experience advising multinational corporations on complex regulatory and political challenges. At Aretera, she leads public affairs strategy, stakeholder engagement, and coalition building, while overseeing political and regulatory analysis and providing early-warning monitoring of emerging issues. She assesses political and operational risks for clients across multiple industries and steers client strategy at high-level engagements with government, regulators, and industry partners.

With extensive experience across the finance, energy, defense, ICT, infrastructure investment and transport sectors, she provides counsel on navigating complex regulatory environments, crisis management, and market and competition analysis. She has deep expertise in digitalisation, platform regulation, consumer protection, and competition policy, having worked with some of the world’s most prominent technology and mobility platforms. Her work with international financial services and fintech clients has given her a nuanced understanding of payment schemes and the regulatory landscape at EU, regional, and national levels.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Integrated Social Sciences from Jacobs University Bremen with a focus on International Politics and Policy, Economics, Sociology and Mass Media. In addition to her interest in public policy, she is passionate about software development and holds several certificates in Front-end Development. She is fluent in Bulgarian and English, operational in Spanish and has basic knowledge of Korean.