TTF UK Ambassadors

Alain Desmier

Founder,
Contact State

Alain Desmier is an internet entrepreneur with a specific interest in data privacy and web based marketing technology. He draws on 15 years of online advertising, compliance and financial services experience, in which time he has founded and worked for businesses in the UK, Germany and the US.

Alain is a spokesman and advocate for fairer marketing practices within financial lead generation and regularly appears in the press. He was recognised by The Protection Review as ‘insurance personality of year’ in 2020 and his business Contact State has received a number of awards and accolades.

Alan Salamon

Managing Director,
CORPIAS (Corporate Pensions, Investment and Advisory Services)

For the last decade Alan has been an active and independent problem solver, and implementer, for pension service providers and employers wanting to improve their pensions and pensions investment propositions. To this end, he has been delivering improvement and change for companies across the sector. However, he is also a champion of financial well being, of which pension provision is a part, and the use of smart technologies (eg open data and artificial intelligence) as tools to equip everyone with their personal financial world, as they want it, on their phone.

Previously Alan was Pensions Manager at two of the largest private sector DB pension schemes of their time (Associated British Foods and Marks and Spencer) but identifying in the early 1990’s that DB schemes were unsustainable at realistic costs for private and public sector companies, and that employees were attracted to DC pensions for their transparency, ownership and transferability, even when they understood the relative long term financial differences in value between them, he joined Fidelity as they were beginning to introduce DC into the UK. Here he helped set up the business and led the client management and development structure and helped grow Fidelity’s business and governance credentials while representing the company in the trustee boardrooms across the UK and beyond.

He has worked in virtually every part of the corporate or workplace pensions sector and been close to the customers of the many propositions he has been associated with in order to improve customer experience and corporate efficiency throughout the product and proposition delivery chain. In voluntary work he has provided practical help to pension scheme members who were victims of the Maxwell company pension schemes collapse and was a member of the original TPAS volunteer force supporting members of any pension scheme to understand, or get redress, when failed in some way by their scheme. He has been a member of both the Manufacturing Industry and the Retail Industry Pension Managers Groups and of the PRAG (pension accountants research group) initiative, the Pension Administration Large Schemes Survey, a body examining operational efficiency, effectiveness, and unit costs amongst some of the UKs largest pension schemes.

Alan invites you to check out his profile on LinkedIn and connect at www.linkedin.com/in/alansalamon

Alison Edmonds

Director,
Epic Steps CIC and Epic Steps Careers+

Alison is an executive careers coach and social entrepreneur – passionate about supporting people of all ages to choose a direction that takes us towards a sustainable world. Founder and Director of Epic Steps CIC and Epic Steps Careers+, her passion is to help everyone have the self-awareness, courage and confidence to make choices that work positively for themselves, employers, wider communities and the environment.  Alison is an authentic, creative and collaborative leader, focusing on each person’s true value proposition and purpose.  The Epic Steps ethos brings leadership, careers and sustainability together for primary children to industry leaders.
Formerly founder and director of the Global MBA Careers Service at Alliance Manchester Business School, Alison designed and led a new, world-class career management provision for over 4000 blended-learning MBA students in 130 countries.  This included leadership of localised provision from the School’s international centres based in Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Miami.  Previously Director of the full-time MBA Careers Service, Alison worked with over 200 employers annually – from Fortune 500 corporates to regional SMEs – developing market-leading initiatives for full-time MBAs to transition successfully into new roles.  Alison has also led Alumni Relations for 40,000 alumni globally, operating at the most senior level, and designed and led the co-curricular leadership experience of the Global Executive MBA.

Alison is trained in executive coaching and NLP – with considerable experience of working with a wide range of EQ tools as part of her coaching experience over the last 20yrs.  Alison is a member of the PISCES TTF group, the TTF feminine values group and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  Alison also has Qualified Teacher Status in Science (11-18yrs) from the University of York and a BA and MA Hons in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

Andrew Clare

Professor of Asset Management,
Cass Business School

Andrew is the Professor of Asset Management at Cass Business School.  He is the co-author of “The Trustee Guide to Investment” and has published extensively in both academic and practitioner journals on a wide range of economic and financial market issues.  He serves as an independent NED for Legal and General Investment Management.  Andrew is a Trustee and Chairman of the Investment Committee of the £3.5bn Magnox Electric Group Pension scheme and is an independent member of Quilter Plc’s Investment Oversight Committee.  He delivers programmes on monetary policy; the interface between macroeconomics and financial markets; asset management; corporate finance; and investment strategy.  Prior to joining Cass Andrew was a Senior Research Manager in the Monetary Analysis wing of the Bank of England which supported the work of the Monetary Policy Committee. Andrew also worked as the Financial Economist for Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM), where he was responsible for the group’s investment process and where he began the development of LGIM’s Liability Driven Investment offering.

Anne-Marie Williams

Senior Analyst & Engagement Officer,
ShareAction

Anne-Marie is passionate about Responsible Investment and following a background in Asset Management and then Education, she joined ShareAction in 2015 as a Senior Analyst and Engagement Officer. As Investor Engagement Manager, she now focuses on engaging with institutional investors, primarily large UK and European asset managers and pension funds across all of ShareAction’s initiatives which cover the Food and Health, Good Work and Climate areas. She is also involved in the follow up engagement for ShareAction’s surveys which rank investors on their responsible investment performance. She developed her interest in Responsible Investment while working as a Treasurer of the charity Listening Books over the past 15 years. She holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.

Asha Singh

Founder,
Learning through doing

Asha Singh is a recognised specialist (to ExCom level) in collective leadership and development and cultural transformation. Through consultancy, facilitation and coaching, she helps senior leaders and their teams respond more effectively to complex, emerging conditions. With a unique approach to learning that includes inputs from sources as varied as complexity, systems and design thinking to depth psychology and creative process, she enables her clients to generate their own relevant, innovative solutions for their organisational and commercial challenges.

Asha has established a varied portfolio of private and public sector clients in Europe and Asia: multinationals, SMEs and family-owned businesses in aerospace, automotive, aviation, broadcasting, communications, FMCG, financial services, horticulture, oil and gas, property management and telecommunications; the air force academy, health and higher education.

Her work today focuses on expanding sense-making, holding real dialogue, harnessing collective intelligence, creativity and wisdom. Her clients learn to develop highly collaborative, trustworthy teams who make a clear contribution to value and adapt quickly to rapid-moving disruption. She is currently helping organisations get “back to work” and develop an effective hybrid organisational and operational model.

Asha is also a sculptor and performer who loves nature, yoga and meditation, good food, wine and company. She lives between Milan, Italy and Oxfordshire, UK.

 

Brenda Sullivan

Strategist in Risk Management, Sustainability, and Insights, Financial services, commodities, and supply chain.

Brenda has significant experience in risk management and strategy in the financial sector, and expanded that in manufacturing and supply chain. She became involved in sustainability and now has the ISSP-SA credential and deep involvement in improving society and the planet. As a supporter of TTF and especially PISCES since 2018, she believes in the importance for all to have good governance and fair financial access in a safe and thriving world. As ESG and social value become more mainstream, Brenda will bring some of her sustainability experiences back to the financial sector to help TTF in its aims.

Brian Basham

‘Start-up’ Entrepreneur,
Freelance

Brian is a serial ‘start-up’ entrepreneur. He founded and floated The Broad Street Group, which he established after an early career as a financial journalist with the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and The Times. He became an accredited fund manager to research an investigation into the connection between organised crime and the City’s money laundering activities. This then became dangerous and there were threats to his children.

He moved into corporate communications and eventually founded Broad Street specialising in takeover bid communications. He founded Primrose Care, caring for elderly people in their own homes, which was later sold to BUPA.  He founded Equity Development, providing research services to smaller companies, which he sold recently. He founded ArchOver, which is a unique crowdfunding marketplace lender, facilitating secured and insured loans to companies, which was sold to Hampden Group.

He initiated a report for Treasury on Smaller Quoted Companies and wrote the well-regarded publication Tomorrow’s Giants, with the former senior Treasury official Craig Pickering.

Brian’s charitable activities include re-stablishing Remembrance in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of World War II. The initiative enabled the Royal British Legion to raise £20m in that year, saving it from probable dissolution. Remembrance, once again, become a regular feature of British life. He conceived the appeal Coming Home to raise funds for seriously wounded military personnel, that also raised £20m. He stimulated the reactivation of the British Dyslexia Association and has run two marathons to raise funds for Prostate Cancer research.

Charlotte Tyrwhitt-Drake

ESG and Impact Investing,
Pensions for Purpose

Charlotte Tyrwhitt- Drake is a Director at Pensions for Purpose and lead consultant at Impact Challenger Ltd focused on impact investment, particularly working to get capital moving through the impact investment chain. Charlotte is also a member of the CFA Brain Trust initiative to bring impact investing standards to real asset investments.

Charlotte has over 14 years of experience working with well-known investment managers, and a consultant, including Jupiter Asset Management, Pictet Asset Management and Cambridge Associates. She started as a fund analyst and has built significant expertise developing advisory and fiduciary relationships with pension funds, with knowledge across public and private asset classes. Charlotte is a passionate advocate of ESG, impact investing and transparency. She has collaborated with the Society of Pension Professionals to co-author a white paper on Social Impact Investment and has spoken on the topic of cost transparency at PLSA and Transparency Taskforce events.

David Masters

Partner & Director,
Lansons

David Masters has worked in and around the asset management and wealth industry for the last 30 years.

During the last 20 years, as a director and partner of Lansons, David has been advising boards and senior management teams of asset managers, private equity firms, hedge funds and banks on key reputation and communications issues. He led the team that launched Vanguard into the UK and  is part of the team that saved the Co-operative Bank and has been rebuilding its reputation.

Previously David was a fund analyst with Standard and Poor’s/Micropal in London, Boston and New York.

David is a regular contributor on challenges facing the investment sector. As well as an ambassador for the Transparency TaskForce, he is also a member of its advisory board.

David Rich

CEO,
Accurate Data Services

With a background as a Lawyer, David has spent the last 20 years working in the Pensions and Financial Services Sectors. He is a champion of positive consumer outcomes and in that regard has been an advisor to the FCA, the Pensions Regulator, the Dormant Asset Commission, the Pensions Dashboard project, TISA’s BSI tracing guidelines, PASA Pensions Dashboard Working Group and Friends of Auto Enrolment.

David has been involved with The Transparency Taskforce since its inception and strongly believes it is a fantastic force for good.

For too long the consumer has suffered, often unknowingly, from industry sectors that fail to treat their customers fairly.

Dennis Waite

Coach driver,
National express

I am 54 years old currently single I live in Braintree Essex and work for National Express coaches which takes a large part of my life.  I consider myself to be an honest straight up person who unfortunately, has been and currently still am,  a victim of large scale financial fraud which sadly unwittingly or not was facilitated by the Government (HMRC /TPR). I transferred my pension from the Royal Mail to the CAPITAOAK pension scheme in 2012/2013 and I’m still fighting to try and get justice and recompense for the theft of my pension. If I can make even the slightest change so that innocent members of the general public can be protected from perpetrators of financial wrong doing then I would be honoured to be an ambassador of the TTF.

Edward Lucas

Senior Vice-President,
Centre for European Policy Analysis

Edward Lucas is a writer and consultant specialising in European and transatlantic security. His expertise also includes energy, cyber-security, espionage, information warfare and Russian foreign and security policy.

Formerly a senior editor at The Economist, the world’s foremost newsweekly, he is now a senior vice-president at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He writes a weekly column in the London Times.

In 2008 he wrote The New Cold War, a prescient account of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, followed in 2011 by Deception, an investigative account of east-west espionage. His latest print book is Cyberphobia. He has also written two e-books on espionage: The Snowden Operation and Spycraft Rebooted. He has contributed to books on religion, on media ethics and on the significance of Andrei Sakharov’s legacy.

An experienced broadcaster, public speaker, moderator and panelist, Edward Lucas has given public lectures at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and other leading universities. He is a regular contributor to the BBC’s Today and Newsnight programmes, and to NPR, CNN and Sky News.

For many years a foreign correspondent, he was based in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Moscow and the Baltic states. He now lives in London. He concluded his time at The Economist as the editor responsible for the daily news app Espresso. He also wrote obituaries. A weekly syndicated column has appeared in English and other languages since 2005. In 1992 he co-founded an English-language weekly in Tallinn, Estonia: the Baltic Independent.

His undergraduate degree is from the London School of Economics and he speaks five languages — German, Russian, Polish, Czech and Lithuanian.

He is married to the writer Cristina Odone and has three children. His father is the Oxford philosopher JR Lucas.

Gareth Roberts

Non Executive Director

Gareth has been involved in the Financial Services Industry for over 30 years . He has a wealth of experience in both the retail and corporate market and wishes to use that experience to help the TTF work towards an industry which is fit for purpose.

Gareth also acts as a Non Executive Director for several companies and provides Pro Bono technical advice to Insolvency Practitioners trying to recover client monies lost due to distressed or failed investment schemes.

In addition to the above Gareth sits as a Magistrate and has found this to be true eye opener and has help him gain  perspective which has been useful in all aspects of his life both business and personal.

Gavin Palmer

Founder,
SNAC Shareholder Nomination to the AGM Action Group and ShareSoc Association

Mr Gavin FL Palmer B.Eng (Mech.) Exon. is a former Director and London Regional Chairman of the UK Shareholders Association. In 2014 he won the Best Conference Paper at the House of Commons Corporate Governance Conference with a paper on Shareholder Nomination to the AGM Committees. He is Managing Director of four property and equity investment companies.

He graduated a year early from Exeter University with a 4 year general and Mechanical Engineering 2:1 Degree, inventing airline wingtips as a drag reduction device during his third year individual project in 1992.

He has been an angel investor in high end audio equipment. Active since 1991 for Corporate Governance reform, submitting a highly regarded Paper to a HM Government Corporate Governance review. He is a Founding signatory to the Shell Climate Change shareholder resolution working with Follow This Founder Mark van Baal for over 5 years, with the shareholder resolution going global and gaining the support of thousands of Pension Fund trustees worldwide.

For 8 years he created and taught Investment Principles Training, established in 1996 to teach business analysis and successful investing to hundreds of students mimicking the teachers of investment Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett. He has been invited to join a General Election policy team in the UK and assists actions for good governance in the UK.

 

Hari Mann

Professor of Strategy and Innovation,
Ashridge Business School

Professor Hari Mann has over two decades of experience in academia and business. His main interests are in strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. His research looks at how businesses develop the culture, environment, and infrastructure to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. Hari started his career at Goldman Sachs where he worked in the technology, media and telecommunications practice.  He then went to London School of Economics to undertake a variety of roles in consulting, research, teaching and the development of initiatives such as LSE-elab of which he was director. He is also the winner of the LSE Teaching prize.

He went on to become Director of Tomorrow’s Investor at the RSA where he published work around how to improve the UK’s financial system through new innovations to the pensions system. Alongside David Pitt-Watson, he has co-authored over five publications setting out how the pensions industry should look at adopting Collective DC solutions and greater cost transparency.  Since 2016, they have worked on the Purpose of Finance project which has brought together support from a wide range of institutions across the City and government.

In addition to his academic experience, Hari has been on the founding teams of a variety of start-ups involved in technology and renewable energy. He has sat on the executive boards of various national charities including the Citizenship foundation, Chance to Shine, St Olave’s and St Saviours foundation and Charity Trustee Networks.

Hari holds an MSc (with distinction) and a PhD from the London School of Economics where he was an EPSRC scholar.

Iain Mitchell KC

Member,
Tanfield Chambers

Iain G. Mitchell KC is a member of both the Scottish and English Bars, having been called to the Scottish Bar in 1976 and having taken silk in 1992. He was called to the English Bar in 2012. He has a wide and extensive practice in both Scotland and England, which ranges across all areas of civil law.

He is ranked in the Chambers Directory for IT Law and IP Law, and is ranked in the Legal 500 for Commercial Litigation and Intellectual Property, Information Technology and Media IT and IP Law.

He has a strong interest in Financial Services regulation, having frequently acted in both Scotland and England in banking cases, which include Grant v RBS and Glare v Clydesdale Bank plc in Scotland and Wellburn Care Homes v Clydesdale Bank plc in England. He also gave evidence on the regulation of Complex Financial Instruments to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking standards.

(See https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201314/jtselect/jtpcbs/27/27v_we17.htm )

He also has an interest in IT law, and represents the Faculty of Advocates on the UK delegation to the CCBE, served as the Chair of the CCBE Working Party on Surveillance and UK expert on the CCBE IT Committee of the CCBE. He is a member of the IT Panel of the Bar Council of England & Wales and is Chairman of the Scottish Society for Computers and Law, as well as being a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

He is an honorary lecturer at the Institut für Informations- Telekommunikations- und Medienrecht at the Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Westphalia. He frequently gives lectures  and speaks at Conferences. He is Joint Editor of the Journal of Open Law, Technology and Society (formerly the International Free and Open Source Law Review). His publications include contributions to Electronic Evidence (Butterworths), The Open Source Law Book (Open Source Press), Free and Open Source Software: Policy, Law and Practice (Oxford University Press) and Innovation and Future of the Legal Profession in Europe (Bruylant, Brussels), as well as frequent contributions to professional journals and general journalism.

He also has a particular interest in property law (having appeared as Senior Counsel in Moncrieff v Jamieson 2018 SC(HL)1), and Human Rights Law, including especially Legal Professional Privilege and the Rule of Law. He has lectured on Judicial Reform in former Soviet countries including Georgia and Kazakhstan and, on behalf of the CCBE frequently meets with and lobbies international bodies on this matter, including the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Interpol, The Council of Europe, the EU Institutions and the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, amongst others. He recently served on a Working party on Electronic evidence convened by the Centre for European Policy Studies.

Ian Beestin

Co-Founder,
Money Alive

Working with like minded industry professionals, who were committed to creating trustworthy financial communications, Ian is a Co-founder of Money Alive.

Money Alive’s founding objective was to provide consumers with ‘Better Information leading to Better Decisions and Better Outcomes’. Money Alive launched their Video Engagement Platform and range of interactive educational box sets for consumers in 2018. Since launch it has been used by financial professionals, who license the platform, to achieve over 230K video viewings with each viewing providing the platform licensee with a report of the individual’s engagement and understanding.

Earlier in his career Ian was Marketing Director of TIlney and before that founded and ran the ISA Shop Ltd, an information led discount brokerage.

Ian started his career with General Accident Life.

Ian is also an enthusiastic musician. His credits include performing at Glastonbury (and numerous other festivals) and writing the words and recording two recent pension pop hits ’50 Ways To Lose Your Pension’ and ‘Enjoy Your Wealth – But First Make Time To Think’.

Jacqueline Hill FRSA

Leadership Coach & Change Mentor,
Aspiring to Kind Activism

Jacqueline wants to make a positive difference by supporting people who are actively working to make the world a better place.

Professionally, she offers leadership coaching, change mentoring, reflective practice and connecting good ideas and people (www.jhillassociates.co.uk).  More personally, she is developing her approach to #kindactivism, as illustrated in her linked in profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/Jacqueline mhill/

Jacqueline’s career started in IT followed by sales and marketing roles in the oil and chemicals and banking sectors for an international decision support software company. After 4 years she joined a client organisation heading up a team delivering management information to foreign exchange traders in a bank.  That is when Jacqueline first saw the best and worst of behaviours brought about by deregulation of the markets “people were gambling with my mortgage and savings!”

Headhunted to join a start-up software company, Jacqueline spent the next six years leading teams and developing customer and partnership relationships. To satisfy her increasing curiosity about what makes organisations and people tick, she spent the following six years with Hay Group (now Korn Ferry) as a management consultant.

Jacqueline then experienced her first career cross-roads and first work with a coach who helped Jacqueline to get in touch with her values and identify her personal purpose. As a result, Jacqueline negotiated a sabbatical year from Hay Group and volunteered as a strategic planning advisor for a small not-for-profit organisation in Bangladesh – a life-changing experience.

Jacqueline realised that she could contribute best by sharing her skills with those actively working to make the world a better place and has found Transparency Taskforce to be full of such people!

Jane Farmer

Member,
Project Heritage

 

Jane is a member of diyLaw and campaigner against personal guarantees. She is also a developer/promoter of Project Heritage PG Resolution – an online system of redress for people evicted from their homes due to the abuse of personal guarantees and an advocate of Intellectual Capital as security for business lending.

Jane is working towards sustainable financial support for business which does not rely on security placed on people’s homes. She believes PGs are a barbaric, unregulated practice, often covert and in practice, they make it more attractive for lenders to force the sale of a third party’s home rather than recover funds from a business borrower – or indeed lend responsibly. Jane believes the only way banks will regain the confidence of the SME sector is when lenders fund SMEs more intelligently and honestly.

Jide Ajomale

Senior Investment Stewardship Analyst,
Vanguard

Jide is currently a Senior Investment Stewardship Analyst with Vanguard, covering both EMEA and APAC regions. In this role, he is responsible for engaging with companies on topical ESG issues with a view to ensuring their long term success.

Jide has over 5 years governance experience, joining Vanguard’s Investment Stewardship team from a position as Senior Governance Analyst at Grant Thornton UK’s Governance and Board Advisory team; providing Board evaluation and governance benchmarking services to some of the UK’s largest companies.

Jide began his governance career at the UK proxy advisory firm, PIRC and with time was tasked with leading the North American and UK Governance services in that order. He has an LLM in Law from the University of Aberdeen as well as Associate status (ACG) with the Chartered Governance Institute.

Kate Makuen Chartered MCSI, FRSA

Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer,
Startup2Exit Club

Kate is a co-founder and the Chief Marketing Officer of Startup2Exit Club, a management consultancy and venture fund created by three people who met through Tech London Advocates. With over 20 years of experience in senior marketing roles at American Express, J.P. Morgan Chase, HSBC, RBS and Deutsche Bank, her product knowledge extends across asset and wealth management, investment banking, payments, FinTech and RegTech.

Kate has been recognised as a tech evangelist, connecting with business partners to drive the adoption of new technologies, from e-commerce and SSL protection, to AI and machine learning.  She is also an advocate of good governance, risk management and compliance, having worked on a variety of regulatory and audit remediation projects.

A dual US/UK national, Kate studied strategy and innovation at Oxford and political economy at Yale and Cornell. She is a qualified Independent Non Executive Director in fund management and serves as a trustee of the Wentworth Africa Foundation and on the advisory board of RegTech Women. Her passions include diversity, mentoring, sustainability and transparency.

Kevin Albertson

Professor of Economics,
Manchester Metropolitan University

Kevin Albertson BSc MCom PhD FRSA is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, Policy and International Business at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a political economist with a background in public policy analysis, quantitative economics and the evaluation of criminal justice policy and social innovation. His recent past work has, amongst other things, considered the development of the social innovation market in the EU.

Kevin is widely published in the areas of marketisation and financialisation of public services particularly insofar as they relate to Outcomes Based Commissioning and Social Impact Bonds. His current research considers the impact on finance and the economy more widely of a period of zero-growth. For more information on Kevin’s research interests, and a list of publications, please go to https://www.mmu.ac.uk/business-school/about-us/our-staff/profile/index.php?id=882

Kim Schweitzer

Founder,
Time 4 Change London, Ltd

Kim has over 20 years of experience in all aspects of Total Rewards. Throughout her career, she has focused on increasing trust, greater fairness, equity and transparency in Reward systems, programs and solutions.   Her expertise includes pre- and post- M&A/integration and retention strategy; executive compensation and global total rewards; fair pay practices focused on eliminating gender and bias pay gaps; and designing and implementing programs addressing business, regulatory and legislative requirements.

Kim is committed to working as a force for social, moral and economic change, and promotes fairness, equity, integrity and authenticity.  She believes, with the world in crisis (fighting Covid, global environmental devastation, and years of racial injustice and discrimination), 2020 provided a trifecta that we can no longer ignore.  We have an obligation going forward to challenge entrenched thinking.  Business as usual will no longer work – it’s time to reset, reassess, reimagine!

To that end, Kim founded Time 4 Change London, Ltd.  While still in its infancy stage, Time 4 Change London helps companies attract and retain employees by fostering a workplace employees can be proud of – by helping companies to define a sustainable and meaningful purpose (beyond simply making short-term profits), live their values authentically, create a Total Rewards culture of fairness and wellbeing (focused on PROFIT AND PURPOSE), and promote an agile organization and culture where ALL STAKEHOLDERS can achieve a better future.

Kim has an extensive academic background as well. Most recently, she embarked on a study of Digital Marketing, London Business School’s Sustainability Leadership and Corporate Responsibility executive education program, and is currently completing Agility in HR and Leading with Agility certifications through ICAgile.  She earned her MBA from Tuck School at Dartmouth (New Hampshire), and a BA in Mathematics and minor in Spanish from University of Richmond (Virginia).

Kim is passionate about contributing to the Transparency Task Force’s global initiatives to rebuild trust and confidence in financial services.  As a force for social, moral and economic change, Kim is honoured to be an Ambassador for such an impactful and critical organization fighting for change!

Laura Lee BA (Hons), FRSA, Tech IOSH, AIIRSM

Health & Safety Advisor,
Bureau Veritas

Laura graduated from the University of Warwick in 2013 with a 2.1 Honours degree in German with French. During her time at Warwick she was awarded the Warwick Skills Portfolio Award, completed the Warwick Leadership Scheme and lived/worked in France and Germany. Whilst working as a teaching assistant at a German school, she set up a pen pal scheme with an English school and ran an English language club for German pupils.

After graduate jobs in Human Resources and general administration, Laura now specialises in Health & Safety Risk Management and has undertaken a variety of Health & Safety roles over the last 6 years. She is currently working as a Health & Safety Advisor for Bureau Veritas, a world leader in testing, inspections and certifications, and is a Technical Member of the Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (IOSH) and an Associate Member of the International Institute of Risk & Safety Management (IIRSM).

Laura was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in January 2019 and linked up with the Transparency Task Force via the RSA, as she strongly believes in the proactive approach the TTF is taking towards changing the current system that lets down victims of pension scams, and the implementation of all-important safeguards that prevent scams from happening in the first place.

Lynne Coombes

Director,
Security Bonds

I have worked in insurance for many years starting as a Claims Handler and Loss Adjuster.  Moving to HSBC to work with VIP and Commercial Insurance, I joined Dave West and Paul Holton-Frances in the bond schemes in 2003 becoming Manager of the Section.  The team headed up bond security for England & Wales, Northern Ireland and she was at the forefront of the launch of the scheme for Scotland.

Leaving Gallaghers and setting up Security Bonds Limited (SBL) in 2018 with Paul Holton-Frances, joined later by Dave West, the Appointee Bond was launched to market with the help of Sean Tyrer from Money Carer Foundation later that year, providing much needed safety for vulnerable people relying on benefits.

A new bond for Powers of Attorney was launched by us in 2020 for England & Wales, Scotland and a bond will shortly be available in Northern Ireland.

Being passionate about providing financial safety, the mission statement of TTF is close to our hearts and I am honoured to have been asked to be an ambassador, it was one of the easiest decisions I have had to make.

Making the financial sector more accountable and transparent will be an ongoing task for some time but the joined up approach that TTF offers brings like-minded people to the table and that can only make the message more powerful and difficult to ignore.

Matthew Steiner

Managing Director & Founder,
Aetas Partners Limited

Matthew is the founder and key driver in establishing Aetas Partners. He has over 20 years’ experience in the financial services sector.

Matthew originally trained as a financial adviser and is a passionate and motivated leader, with incisive vision and strategic skills. Matthew specialises in creating strategic connections within the private client ecosystem and is a pioneer in the development of tailored estate and inheritance tax planning solutions.

In his previous role, Matthew was a shareholder and director of a boutique asset management firm where he developed the firm’s multi-asset approach to estate planning and widened its service proposition. He developed an award-winning partner service programme which brought together the key professional services required for a holistic lifetime and estate plan for clients and their advisers.

In 2008, Matthew took a six-month sabbatical in Nepal where he volunteered as an English teacher at a local school in Pokhara. Based in an orphanage and working with the children, he gained a TEFAL qualification and learned some Nepalese in the process.

He joined Close Brothers Investment Limited in 2000 to help set up the property division. He later became the Senior Business Development Manager, where he cut his teeth distributing their range of tax efficient products which included venture capital trusts (VCT), enterprise investment schemes (EIS) and inheritance tax services (IHT) which used business relief (BR).

Michelle Thomson

Member,
Scottish National Party

Michelle is a member of the Scottish Parliament representing the Scottish National Party. She currently sits on the Finance & Public Administration Committee and the Economy & Fair Work Committee. In her current role she has been active in building awareness of the issues caused by corruption in the financial sector; and how this can impact Scotland’s global brand, especially opaque financial vehicles such as Scottish limited partnerships.

Michelle is also a former MP and member of the Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Select Committee where she came to prominence for the enquiry into the collapse of BHS. She also has a chapter of the latest version of Shredded by financial writer Ian Fraser named after a speech she gave about the behaviour of banks. A former Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Business Banking she continues as an ambassador for this group to the present day.

Michelle has written about the need for change to the culture and ethics at the core of financial services for outlets such as International Banker.

Prior to entering politics Michelle held a variety of senior roles in financial services, primarily  delivering large scale transformational change.

Nigel Dewar-Gibb

Founder,
cworks AI Limited

Nigel is an experienced commercial lawyer and advises on intellectual property. His work covers both contentious and non-contentious matters. He focuses on digital media/technology sectors and advises companies on the acquisition, production and securitisation of copyright assets including ‘fingerprint’ tech companies which track and report royalty income.

Because of the increasing complexity of copyright, Nigel set up a team to investigate copyright asset royalty income flows worldwide to promote transparent and accurate accounting. The team can identify issues which impact these assets and the accurate reporting of royalty income. He also works closely with the Corporate and Finance teams to service investor clients seeking to acquire copyright assets.

Nigel was previously a senior in-house Counsel for a number of multinational companies such as London Records (PolyGram), Virgin Records and Picture Music International, a division of EMI Records.

Nigel set up his own law firm in 1998 and his associate offices are located in New York.

Paul Smith

Forensic Accountant,
Paul Smith Consultancy Services

Paul is a former accredited financial investigator, confiscation officer and the holder of an MSc in Forensic Accounting, he has a very unique skill set. He has a long history of working in the law enforcement arena. He has used these skills to investigate major and serious and organised crime in the UK and internationally. He is skilled in the investigation of money laundering, anti-corruption, fraud, and wider financial crime matters. He has used a broad mix of legislation to remove the benefit from criminal enterprise. As an international investigator, he understands the full range of international cooperation mechanisms available. Paul also has a background in adult protection matters and is also a safeguarding expert, specialising in elder fraud, such as financial abuse committed by those holding a power of attorney or deputyship. This type of abuse is often uncovered by executors in a probate investigation.  He is able to act as an expert witness in any court setting, Civil, Criminal or Court of Protection. 

Peter O’Donnell

Director,
New South Law

Peter was a victim of a Ponzi scheme recommended to him by his bank manager in 2001, operated by a firm of chartered accountants in Leicester. He sued the bank but had to withdraw when threatened with bankruptcy. From this he became familiar with how banks and financial advisers work the system and its loopholes to defraud unsuspecting people into trusting but losing their entire retirement savings, generating billions for happy scammers who know they are inviolate.

For the first 11 years of his working life Peter was an army infantry officer serving in South Vietnam, the Australian Special Air Service and an instructor at the Officer Cadet School Melbourne. He left to join IBM as a marketing representative before starting his first business in computer industry search and selection.

He moved to the UK in 1991 and in 1994 opened the first European computer consultancy dedicated to Microsoft technologies for large firms. After selling the company in 1999, he worked as a management consultant for IT and recruitment companies until starting New South Law (solicitors) in 2013, specialising in pension investment mis-selling fraud litigation.

He has dedicated the remainder of his working life to helping victims of pension fraud and changing how large-scale white-collar crime is viewed and corrected.

Philip Miller

Co-Founder,
Fair Return

Phil is co-founder of Fair Return, a pension claims management company helping retirees get what they are owed. He has worked in financial services for over 20 years. He has been involved with the Transparency Task Force since 2016 and is a Transparency Trophy winner.

Phil believes that those who sensibly save for retirement should not have their pensions depleted by unjustified and unnecessary costs and risk.

Prof Dr Petra Molthan-Hill PhD, MBA, MDiv, PFHEA

Professor of Sustainable Management and Education for Sustainable Development,
Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University

Petra is Professor of Sustainable Management and Education for Sustainable Development at Nottingham Business School and Co-Chair of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) working group on climate change and environment.

She is a Fellow of the EAUC, Principal Fellow of HEA and a member of Business in the Community’s East Midlands Leadership Board. Business in the Community is the oldest and largest business-led membership organisation dedicated to responsible business in the UK.

Petra has led the Green Academy at Nottingham Trent University from 2013-2020, with the aim to include Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) related curricular and extra-curricular initiatives into the whole university, for example the internal online course offered to all 32.000 student at NTU: ‘Sustainability in Practice Certificate’ (Shortlisted Green Gown Award 2014, practical challenge day shortlisted in the Green Gown Awards 2017, now three topics on offer: Food, Energy and Clothing). She won the Sustainability Professional Award in the Green Gown Awards 2016 and ‘The Guardian University Award 2015 for Business Partnership’ (Greenhouse Gas Management Project) together with NetPositive Ltd.

Petra is the editor of ‘The Business Student’s Guide to Sustainable Management’ offering seminars and other teaching material in how to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals in accounting, marketing, HR and other subjects in management / business studies but also ideas on how to teach system thinking, corporate peace-making and the crowdsourcing of sustainable solutions. The second edition is part of the PRME book series and published by Routledge. Petra is also the Academic Lead for PRME in Nottingham Business School and was as NBS Sustainability Coordinator responsible for embedding sustainability and business ethics into the curriculum of the School.

Petra reconceptualised the Sustainable Development Assesment Tool (SDAT) of NHS England funded by, and accountable to, NHS England and Public Health England to work across the NHS, public health and social care system together with Dr Michael Hewitt from NBS and the Sustainable Development Unit (SDU). Recently, she undertook research with ‘Coronation Street’ – a popular soap in the UK – about their impactful carbon literacy training and has co-designed a Carbon Literacy Training for Business Schools based on this insight, which is currently rolled out as a PRME Champions Project.

Petra is keen to work with like-minded people in the Transparency Task Force to design a Carbon Literacy Training aimed at the Financial Sector and to develop other initiatives to address climate change mitigation.

Rachel Kay

Researcher,
High Pay Centre

Rachel is a Researcher at the High Pay Centre, an independent think tank campaigning for more responsible business with a focus on executive pay and intra-company inequality. The High Pay Centre aims to influence both business practice and policy-making in these areas. Rachel has recently written research reports on the new pay ratio disclosures for UK companies and on the use of employee metrics in performance-related executive pay.

She has a long-standing interest in work and pay: prior to joining the High Pay Centre, she was a researcher in Lord Robert Skidelsky’s parliamentary office, where she looked at the impact of automation on work and contributed to a report commissioned by John McDonnell MP, ‘How to Achieve Shorter Working Hours’.

Rachel is keen to continue working with like-minded people from the Transparency Task Force to hold employers to account on their social and environmental practices.

Richard Kent

Head of Structuring and Governance,
TontineTrust

Richard brings 20 years of experience in launching and developing investment platforms, product structuring and governance to the Tontine Trust Team. With a background in product development, due diligence and regulatory governance, and implementing operational infrastructures he has a wealth of experience in delivering best practice investment solutions for investors at tier 1 institutions. Richard is familiar with key legal and regulatory regimes including Irish Pensions Act, EU PEPP Regulations, AIFMD and UCITS.

Robin O’Grady

Founder,
The O’Grady Says Consultancy

Robin created The O’Grady Says Consultancy in 2018 to work with like minded individuals. He also assists IFA businesses with acquisitions and exit strategies through his introductory relationship with Phase 2 Consulting (More than just a Broker).

A highly experienced sales & marketing professional, he was actively involved in the IFA sector for 39 years. As Head of Business Development, he was a champion of DFM and managed sales teams at Christows/Williams de Broë, Saltus and Hawksmoor during his successful Sales career.

Robin began his career in financial services in 1975 when he joined Schroder Life’s Head Office in Portsmouth. 4 years in and too exciting to be an accountant, he was offered a sales role as Broker Consultant in their successful Broker Division and never looked back. An excellent man-manager, with strong inter-personal skills, he recruited & developed highly successful individuals & sales teams on a number of occasions.

Qualified at Diploma 4 Level, Robin also acted as an Examiner for the Chartered Insurance Institute’s Financial Planning examinations.

Professional appointments included; Chairman of the Life Insurance Association (LIA) Hants & Dorset Region in 2003 & 2004, Member Director of the Personal Finance Society (PFS) 2006/08 and Vice-President of the PFS 2007/08.

Robin is a keen sportsman, with a love for football, cricket & golf. He is a Pompey season ticket holder, Acting Chairman & Treasurer of Burridge Cricket Club and an Ambassador for the Lashings World Cricket XI. When Covid allows, he enjoys travelling to sunny places, real ales, wine, socialising & achieving the best in life.

 

Roger McCormick

Director,
Conduct Costs Project

Roger McCormick was a Visiting Professor in the Law Department of the London School of Economics during the  period 2004-2014. He was also, until recently, the Managing Director of CCP Research Foundation (the “Foundation”) and the Director of the Foundation’s Conduct Costs Project. The third edition of his book, “Legal and Conduct Risk in the Financial Markets” (now co-authored with Chris Stears) was published by Oxford University Press in March 2018.

Roger retired from full-time private legal practice in 2004, having practised law in the City of London (principally as a partner of Freshfields) for nearly thirty years. Roger has, since 2004, worked from time to time as a consultant and has also acted as an expert witness and as an arbitrator (having served on various arbitral tribunals appointed by the London Court of International Arbitration). He is a member of the P.R.I.M.E. Finance Experts Panel and is also a non-executive director of SMBC Derivative Products Ltd.

Roger is a past co-chairman of the International Bar Association’s Banking Law Committee and a few years ago contributed the UK chapter to the IBA’s Task Force Report on the Financial Crisis (October 2010). He is also a past Chairman of the Banking Law Sub-committee of the City of London Law Society. He was the founder, and General Editor, of Law and Financial Markets Review (originally published by Hart, now by Taylor & Francis), retiring as General Editor, after four years, in December 2010. He founded and, for several years led, Freshfields’ international project finance practice group, representing clients such as EIB, EBRD, JBIC, ECGD, the UK Government’s Home Office and numerous private sector clients.

Shortly after the transfer of the Foundation’s Conduct Costs Project to Cass (now Bayes) Business School in 2019, Roger became an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the Business School where his activities include assistance with the Project and the supervision of PhD students.

Roger Mullin

Founder,
www.TheBottomLine.scot

Roger is one of the founders of recently launched think tank www.TheBottomLine.scot which produces economic analysis related to the constitutional question in Scotland. He is also chair of the humanitarian organisation REVIVE Campaign CIC which campaigns on behalf of the victims of landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and which provides support to two APPGs at Westminster.

Roger is a former member of parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. During his period as an MP, Roger was a treasury spokesperson and led a range of parliamentary campaigns for greater transparency and ethics in the financial system.  He succeeded in moving the UK government to hold an inquiry and make some all too modest changes to Scottish Limited Partnerships which continue to be a vehicle for international criminality and money laundering. His parliamentary campaigning on SLPs is discussed in Oliver Bullough’s book “Butler To The World”. He continues the fight.

Roger has written on the need to tackle the culture of financial institutions including banks, addressing in particular failings in ethics.  He has written on such matters for the likes of International Banker , The Herald and The National.

Roger is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Stirling, where he has lectured on ethical finance as part of the university’s MSc in Strategic Sustainable Business.  He has also taught Applied Decision Theory and related ethical questions on a range of post graduate programmes. He is a former chair of the university’s joint departmental research ethics committee in which capacity he undertook ethical reviews of research proposals.

Roger is an experienced conference and after dinner speaker. He is happy to engage in discussion and can be contacted by email at roger.mullin2@email.com

Sarah Hutchinson

Treasurer,
The Elizabeth Foundation

A Chartered Accountant and Operations professional with proven experience of project managing change projects. Experience has been gained in various fields in the financial sector latterly focused on pensions, investment management and custody. Previously experience gained in outsourcing at a third party fund administrator, and stock broking administration including extensive experience of system selections and implementations.

Since leaving BA Pension I have had various adventures and have worked as an Independent Consultant on a number of projects including COREP reporting for brokers, raising awareness of securities litigation and promoting fund selection for auto enrolment.

I have been a Trustee of The Elizabeth Foundation since 2014 and am currently Treasurer.

Scott Housley

Non-executive director,
ALCO

Having spent many years in the financial services sector, Scott is passionate about ensuring consumers (personal and corporate) get a fair deal from their financial service providers, and are not penalised by fraudulent activity. He is also keen to ensure that issues of financial exclusion for whatever reason are addressed.

Scott started life in the late 1960’s as a government statistician working in HM Treasury for 10 years, including 2½ years at the OECD in Paris. From there he moved into financial services, working in Williams & Glyns, RBS Group, Girobank (when part of Royal Mail) and Bradford & Bingley when it was still a building society.

After Bradford & Bingley, Scott joined the LINK Interchange Network in 1999. He won a contract with the Post Office to enable individuals on state benefits to use their benefits card account to access cash at post office counters. This primed Scott’s fascination in financial exclusion and the treatment of customers by financial institutions generally.

His work in LINK on access to cash and the wider aspects of financial services brought him in to contact with a fintech start-up company, Monitise. In the early years of this century, Monitise was one of the very first companies to commence developing mobile banking services. Early business development included working in Uganda, to bring mobile banking to the country. This was around the same time that M-PESA was starting to take off in Kenya. Latterly at Monitise, Scott took on responsibility for corporate responsibility, ethical behaviour and regulatory relationships.

Semi-retirement has included work with the Open University, working with Helen Scott (a TTF Ambassador) at Eris FX to help obtain equity and transparency in the foreign exchange market, and a non-executive directorship at ALCO, a small technology company focusing on programme assurance and transit solutions. It has also provided more time for his other passion – walking. Following a catastrophic fall in the Yorkshire Dales in 2018, Scott was airlifted to the major trauma unit at Leeds General Infirmary. As a result, he is now an authorised volunteer for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance!

Stephen Kenzie

Executive Director,
UN Global Compact Network UK

Steve has managed the Secretariat of the UN Global Compact Network UK since 2008, connecting UK companies and other organisations in a global movement dedicated to driving corporate sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals. He also Chairs UNGC’s Global Network Council and sits on the UN Global Compact Board.

He was previously a Programme Director at the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) leading projects across a wide range of responsible business issue areas. Prior to joining IBLF, Steve was the founder and Managing Director of a successful retail sports equipment business in Canada.

Steve has a B.Comm from the University of British Columbia and an MSc in Business & Environment from Imperial College London.

Steve Casey

Chairman,
ILAG

Steve has over thirty years’ experience working in the life insurance market in the UK, Europe and the Far East. A Chartered Insurer, he has been responsible for some of the more innovative developments within the protection market specifically wrapping around the customer. Originally trained as an underwriter, Steve has extensive experience of working in product development, distribution management and risk assessment. He is the current Chairman of ILAG and also an Advisory Director for LegaCare, the legal charity based in the North East of England, whose aim is to provide peace of mind, dignity and quality of life to people diagnosed with life limiting/life threatening illness.

Stuart Woollard

Managing Partner,
OMS LLP

Stuart Woollard is Managing Partner of Organizational Maturity Services LLP and co-founder and Council member at the Maturity Institute (MI).

Stuart co-created OMINDEX® (Organisational Maturity Index) and leads pioneering work with the investment community to integrate ‘intangibles’ (e.g. corporate culture, governance, human capital, and management systems) into investment decision-making, engagement and stewardship activities.

Stuart also advises business leaders on whole, human system diagnosis of organisational health using OMINDEX®. He has published research on human capital in international mergers and acquisitions, on the management of people in global contexts and has co-authored a book “The Mature Corporation – a Model of Responsible Capitalism” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).

Tim Leighton

Managing Director,
The Portington Trading Company

I have personally suffered as a direct result of the kind of fraud, malpractice, malfeasance, misconduct and mis-selling by the financial sector that the TTF is dedicated to resolving.  I am therefore firmly aligned with the  values of the TTF and its aims regarding reform of the Financial sector.

I am keen and willing to assist the TTF and the wider related community to actively promote and drive reform of the financial sector so that it serves society in a better, fairer and more transparent way.

It is important that large and powerful institutions such as banks are held to account; and the same applies to the relevant Government departments and financial regulators that are supposed to provide oversight and governance of the financial system.

I want to help ensure that all SME’s and consumers are treated honourably and fairly, in a timely manner. I am passionate about obtaining transparency and fair disclosure promptly to reduce wasted time and costs and to uphold the law and regulations as they were intended to be enforced – properly. No bank should be beyond the reach of the law.

Tom Levitt

Consultant,
Sector 4 Focus

Tom Levitt is a writer and consultant on responsible business, a field he has worked in since 2010 following 13 years as a Member of Parliament. In 2015 he helped to found the anti-poverty social enterprise, Fair for You, and has held several positions as a charity chair and company director. His books include ‘The Company Citizen’ and ‘The Courage to Meddle’, a biography of FDR’s Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins. As a consultant his clients have included major businesses, think tanks, councils and charities, and he’s carried out ground-breaking research on the role of small businesses in the community.

He is an advisor to the Lloyds Bank Centre for Responsible Business at Birmingham University and sat on the British Standards Institute committee looking at the measurement of social value.

Until recently he was a member of the independent sustainability advisory panel for Walgreen Boots Alliance.

Starting his career as a science teacher in secondary schools, Tom lives in West London and is a season ticket holder at Brentford FC. He has written stage plays and, most recently, a political thriller.

William Lovegrove

Director of Innovation Strategy,
University of Surrey

William leads the University of Surrey’s Technology Transfer Office: managing and growing the pipeline of University-wide commercialisation opportunities through development of policy frameworks, governance structures and communication plans; raising finance; ensuring intellectual property is protected; exploiting University research/expertise to generate income & impact via licensing technology and creating spin-out companies.

Previously, in 2014, with financial support from Innovate UK (the UK Government’s innovation agency) William created an R&D project called ‘systemsync’ which harnessed cloud technology to reduce costs associated with transfer of business data between organisations. This lead to the creation of a technology start-up known as pensionsync which pioneered the electronic transfer of financial data between payroll software and pension providers. In August 2019 pensionsync was acquired by Australian cloud payroll provider KeyPay.

William has a Ph.D and a 1st BSc (hons) in Computer Science from the University of Nottingham.
He is a member of the Money and Pensions Service ‘pensions dashboard’ Steering Group, and has a lifetime achievement award from the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals.

Yariv Haim

Co-Founder and CEO,
Sparrows Capital Limited

Mr Yariv Haim is Co-Founder and CEO at Sparrows Capital Limited.

Mr. Haim’s broad experience spans strategic investing, risk and asset allocation, business development, market analysis and Enterprise Resource Planning systems implementation.

Mr Haim is an accomplished professional with strong presentation, technical, and management skills. He is a sought after lecturer in the area of wealth management, particularly on the subject of efficient and evidence-based investing strategies.

Under Mr. Haim’s leadership Sparrows Capital Limited provides world-class financial services focusing on long term liquid capital market investments, delivering high-efficiency beta and selective beta solutions including strategic asset allocation, hedging, risk management and systematic rebalancing.

Mr Haim is a graduate of the Recanati Executive-MBA Program and holds a BA in Economics, both with the Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Alistair Milne

Professor of Financial Economics at the School of Business and Economics,
Loughborough University

Alistair is Professor of Financial Economics at the School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, He previously worked at Cass Business School, the Bank of England; the University of Surrey, London Business School, HM Treasury and for the Government of Malawi.

Alistair has conducted policy focused economics research since the early 1980s, His PhD in economics at the Financial Markets Group of the London School of Economics highlighted on the macroeconomic consequences of financial constraints on corporate inventory investment. In his subsequent career his research has focused on bank risk and capital management, financial crises, disaster risk finance (including pandemic risks), development finance, financial infrastructure such as payment systems and securities clearing and settlement, and financial regulation. His work is characterised by close engagement with practitioners and policy makers, seeking to obtain economic insight into major policy and business questions informed by detailed understanding of the institutional arrangements and organisations engaged in financial intermediation and their historical development.

His current research is focused on the emerging financial technologies, including the economics of new payments technologies, the implications of widening access to central bank balance sheets, open banking, ‘peer to peer’ lending platforms and the application of AI, distributed ledgers and related data technologies in financial services. Here he stresses the complementary roles of government and the private sector. A key but too often neglected role of the public authorities in financial innovation is ensuring co-ordination of private sector effort, including agreement and adoption of technical standards and shared operational processes, overcoming private reluctance to collaborate on technical change because benefits are diffuse and innovation can undermine the market power of incumbents.

Alistair strongly supports the goals of the Transparency Task Force, arguing in particular that collaboration on developing and industry wide adoption of technical standards is a pre-requisite for overcoming information barriers and ensuring that senior management, customers and clients, advisers,  investors and regulators are as well informed as they can be about financial transactions, including their costs, charging and consequences for risk exposure.

Jan Floyd-Douglass

Director & Co-Founder,
The 9 Situations

Jan Floyd-Douglass’s career over the past 25+ years has comprised senior corporate roles such as Head of Zurich Corporate Pensions, Global Sales Director and Executive Committee member, Barclays Private Bank and Resident Vice President, Consumer Lending, Citibank. Her role accountabilities have included global strategic and propositional development, leading and embedding significant global change programmes and the planning, delivery and evaluation of high growth and turnaround strategies.

In addition, she has pioneered and led global equality and ethical management programmes whilst pursuing her senior leadership career and beyond. Her women’s leadership development work led to her being nominated as a UK Woman of the Year 2005. She was a Commissioner of the Women’s National Commission (WNC), with a special remit for its Women on Boards policy in 2009/10.

Jan uses her experience with clients with whom she works on their performance, growth and transformation strategies, with a particular focus on board effectiveness and leading through uncertainty.  Clients are from various sectors including the military, banking, charities, infrastructure, pharma, telecommunications, finservs, travel and utilities.

Jan is a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management and was cited as one of the ‘100 Best Global Coaching Leaders’ by the World HRD Congress in 2017. She became a Fellow of The RSA in September 2017, and a Member of its Fellowship Council in 2018, and participates in various elements of the RSA’s social change agenda.

Jan also enjoys the leadership development side of her business activity. She increasingly delivers her leadership workshops for both clients and other management consultancies, locally and globally. She has also lectured on board effectiveness to new senior officer recruits of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst on their Colonels and Generals’ Programmes.

Jan has been on the UK board of the International Women’s Forum and is a past speaker at the global IWF Leadership Fellows programmes in Vancouver, Miami and Atlanta; partnered with Harvard Business School and INSEAD. She presented at American Express’ 2020 Global Leadership Summit in Miami in February 2020.

Past third sector roles also include Vice President of UN Women UK and past-Chair of Rosa, the UK Fund for Women and Girls.

Jan was elected a Borough Councillor in the May 2019 local elections in Waverley, Surrey.

Sebastian Elwell

Director,
My Switchfoot Team Limited (Switchfoot Teams) & Switchfoot Wealth Limited

Seb has been working in financial services since 2004 and a regulated financial planner since 2007.  He launched Switchfoot Wealth in 2018 and Switchfoot Teams in 2019 with an ambition to improve financial planning for later life clients and support attorneys, court-appointed deputies and trustees in their important role.  Seb is working with the Transparency Taskforce to raise awareness of LPA abuse, the particular risks of drawdown pensions in this context, and what can be done to protect vulnerable consumers from harm.

Frank McGroarty

Professor of Computational Finance and Investment Analytics,
Centre for Digital Finance, University of Southampton

Frank McGroarty is a former fund manager who is now Professor of Computational Finance and Investment Analytics at the University of Southampton. He is the founder and Director of the Centre for Digital Finance which conducts research into the next generation of financial products, collaborating with academics from various disciplines and which hosts the annual Cryptocurrency Research Conference.

Frank has published more than 50 research papers in leading academic journals in finance and computer science, and has won multiple awards for his research. To date, his research has attracted around £4m in funding (17 research grants). His academic research builds on his investment analyst and fund manager background (UBS, Barclays, State Street), in which he utilised quantitative techniques for investment strategies to manage international investment portfolios. As an investment practitioner, he served on committees and working groups of the Institute of Quantitative Investment Research, the Global Association of Risk Professionals and the Fund Managers’ Association (Investment Association).

He has managed a number of academic research projects which were funded by industry partners and which produced decision support tools for fund managers and investment analysts. He mentors University of Southampton students who set up Silver Stag Investment Management, a student-run investment management venture. He supervises several PhD students and has previously supervised 10 to successful completion, who have gone on to develop careers in academia and in the investment industry.

He is a founding Director of the European Capital Markets CRC which is a collaboration between 8 European universities and 2 Australian institutions, aimed at promoting and facilitating research cooperation between member universities and industry in European capital markets. He chairs the Insurance Committee of the AI4people initiative of Atomium: European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy, which is tasked with writing a white paper on the social impact of the application of Artificial Intelligence systems within the insurance industry for the European Parliament. He is also a member of the AI4people Banking and Finance committee who have a similar brief for banking and financial services.

In recent years, Frank has worked with member of the Transparency Task Force on the issue of interoperability between platforms used by providers of pensions and personal insurance services. The lack of interoperability between these platforms stifles competition and masks costly, inefficient working practices.

He holds a PhD in finance from the University of Southampton, as well as BA and MA degrees in economics from University College Dublin.

Peter Young

Chair,
International Standards Organisation Committee on Sustainable Finance (ISO/TC322)

Peter Young spent many years working with businesses and governments on green and sustainability issues. He is chair of the International Standards Organisation Committee on Sustainable Finance (ISO/TC322), and the Strategic Advisory Group for the BSI programme of sustainable finance standards. Peter is also former chair and a trustee of the Green Purposes Company which holds the special share in the privatised Green Investment Bank (now Group) to hold it true to its green purposes.

He was a co-founder and chair of Aldersgate Group and remains an active individual member. He sits on the advisory board of Queen Mary College’s School of Business and Management, and on the UK climate change risk assessment (CCRA3) expert advisory panel. He is a Trustee and Council member of The Wildlife Trusts and a member of the Our Natural World Advisory Panel to Esmee Fairbairn. He is a trustee of the Broadway Initiative pushing for ambitious new environmental legislation. Peter chaired the Business Interest Group for the Valuing Nature Programme, and sat on the Programme Advisory Board.

Steve Hubbard

Retired,
Public Sector Education Management

Like many people I’ve always chatted about politics but became much more serious a few years ago. Politics always seemed to come back to money and so with a friend , John Hipperson, I set out to discover the fundamentals – what was money, who created it, when and why, how did it move – simple stuff – or so I thought!

I’m a retired academic and public sector lecturer and manager with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Physics which I gained part-time.

Coming from an engineering and science and background and thinking about macroeconomics is fascinating.

Listening to politicians and following the media I expected macroeconomics to be a coherent system but found major “holes”, loose ends and fundamental assumptions undiscussed and apparently unexplained. This was rather different from my experience in other fields so I investigated further and was shocked by what I found – or didn’t find!

Not being a professional I didn’t expect to understand all the subtleties – I don’t manage that in my own field, but I did expect some agreed basic principles – I’m still searching!

Part of the fun has been listening to and meeting people who are involved in macroeconomics in so many different ways including politicians and decision-makers, academics and of course many lay people. Also with John I continue to enjoy writing articles and contributing for instance to House of Commons Treasury Select Committees when they call for papers.

Despite still feeling something of an outsider I would like to contribute in assisting the general public as well as many politicians and policy-makers to acquire a more accurate understanding of macroeconomic systems which still too often seems absent. Among other benefits this would help spending decisions to be considered and explained against a more factual background, and open the way for new creative ideas on all sides.

It’s a great pleasure to be involved with the TTF and to work to try and make a difference in bringing transparency and awareness to as many people as possible.

Steve Clapham

Founder,
Behind the Balance Sheet

Steve is the founder of Behind the Balance Sheet, an investment research and training consultancy, which produces bespoke research and runs training courses for a select group of institutional clients. Steve’s Forensic Accounting Training Programme launched in June 2018, and over 250 professional investment analysts and portfolio managers at some of the biggest funds in the UK have taken the course, which has been enthusiastically received. The course is unusual in that it looks at the issue of financial manipulation from a practitioner’s perspective and has over 150 real life examples of accounting chicanery from around the world. Steve also runs a popular online training school.

Steve spent some 20 years as an equity analyst at different investment banks, covering various sectors, and was consistently rated in the top 10 in his sector in Extel, II and Reuters surveys. He moved to the buy-side in 2005 and was a partner and head of research at two multi-billion dollar hedge funds; he specialised in using a deep dive research approach to identify special situation opportunities.

Steve trained as an accountant and lives in London; he enjoys reading, yoga, and skiing and is interested in investment theory, wine and classic cars. He is regularly featured in the press, including the Financial Times, the Times, Sunday Times and City AM as well as on Real Vision, The Acquirers Podcast and the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, talking about accounting issues at quoted companies. He writes regularly on accounting and governance topics, both in his blog and in his free to access members’ community.

David Coe

Chief Executive,
The Fairbanking Foundation

David is Chief Executive Officer of the Fairbanking Foundation. He leads the charity’s strategy to increase the coverage of its Fairbanking Marks scheme and the range and impact of its growing advisory and research activities.

Previously David was Interim CEO of WAGGGS, the global movement for Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting. Before that David was Executive Director of Abbeyfield International (independent living and care homes provider), Director General of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and Executive Director of Orbis (blindness prevention organisation). Here he led the organisational transition from ‘Flying Eye Hospital’ to land-based blindness prevention programmes. He has also worked extensively as a Consultant and more recently, as an Executive Coach working with many charities and for-profit organisations on major change. He was also Chief Executive of the Soil Association, the organic food certifying and campaigning organisation.

 

Ben Constable-Maxwell

Head of Sustainable and Impact Investing,
M&G Investments

Ben is head of Sustainable and Impact Investing at M&G Investments, where he leads the firm’s strategy on impact investing as well as covering sustainability issues such as climate change and circular economy. Since 2011 Ben has played a central role in the integration of ESG within M&G’s investment processes and has supported the development of ESG solutions for clients across asset classes. He is co-Lead on the M&G Positive Impact fund which supports the UN SDGs through investments in businesses providing solutions to major social and environmental challenges.

Ben plays an active industry role promoting sustainable and impact investing, participating in initiatives and collaborating with varied stakeholders such as corporates, policy makers and NGOs in addition to organisations such as the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), Impact Management Project (IMP) and the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). He was a founding member of M&G’s Responsible Investment Advisory Forum, overseeing ESG-related activities at M&G, and is a member of the Investment Association’s Sustainability & Responsible Investment Committee.

Ben holds an honours degree in Classics from University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a certificate in Impact Measurement from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. He is a Trustee at Firefly International youth organisation, which provides educational and mental health support for young people in conflict-affected areas in the Balkans and Middle East.

James Markham

Managing Director,
SBC Systems

James is one of the founders of the group of B2E Associate companies and now leads the Technology side of the business. He is an ex-partner with Watson Wyatt, where he led the European e-HR Practice, having also held senior management consultancy positions with KPMG and Price Waterhouse. He has over 30 years international experience in organisation design, HR and Reward technology, change management, and facilitation.

Steve Keen

Professor & Distinguished Research Fellow,
Institute for Strategy, Resilience & Security, University College London

Steve Keen  is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, and rejects mainstream neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis forms the main basis of his major contribution to economics[1] which mainly concentrates on mathematical modelling and simulation of financial instability. He invented the monetary systems modelling program Minsky (https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/).

Keen was formerly an professor of economics at University of Western Sydney, until the closure of the economics program at the university.[2] In autumn 2014, he became a professor and Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University in London. His work on developing a realistic approach to economics is supported by patrons at https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen

Martyn Cuff

COO, Programme Director, Trustee and Coach,
Independent

Martyn is focused upon making financial services smarter and more effective for everyone. As such, he is very aligned to the mission of The Transparency Task Force.

He is a Chief Operating Officer, Programme Director, Trustee and Coach. He operates within Global Financial Services, particularly Investment Management, Wealth Management and Re/Insurance. He has worked in Industry and Professional Services around the world. He generates value through delivery of 1) large change programmes and transformations 2) M&A implementation 3) business operating models improvements 4) operational excellence 5) effective Board governance and advisory.

He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment, an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and has a MBA from London Business School. He runs his own blog www.transformationblog.net is a judge on www.themad33.com, is an exam moderator with the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment, is a Trustee of www.jst.org.uk and is currently studying with the Henka Institute to become a certified transformation coach.

Charles Fowler

Chair,
World Values Day / UK Values Alliance

For over 30 years Charles was involved in international asset management, for much of that time as a manager of funds invested in Asian and emerging stock-markets. He managed the largest closed-end fund investing in Asia at the time, together with other closed-ended and open-ended funds. He also helped set up a number of specialist direct investment and private equity management companies in the region.  He later became Co-Chair of Govett Investments and, after they were bought out, set up and led a listed boutique investment management business.

During his long career in investment he became keenly aware of the need for greater transparency in retail investment products and advisory services, and the urgent need for a cultural shift in attitudes and behaviours in the financial services industry as a whole.

Since 2003 Charles has been the Chair of an educational charity, the Human Values Foundation, which helps children’s social and emotional development through learning about and practising values. For the last three years has been a member of the Steering Group of the UK Values Alliance which aims to place values at the heart of society.  He is the main co-ordinator of the  World Values Day, an annual campaign which raises awareness of the fundamental importance of values in addressing the many serious individual, organisational and societal problems in the world today.

Simon Hardie

CEO & Founder,
Findexable

Simon is co-founder and CEO of Findexable – the new digital platform for fintech insight and benchmarking, and home to the Global Fintech Index.

As Ai and analytics re-shape business, Findexable’s mission is to make it easier to gather, interpret and benchmark fintech activity and enable unmoderated, real-time insight on the global fintech ecosystem.

Simon has two decades of experience producing financial intelligence content, research and events for global financial publishers including The Economist, Euromoney Institutional Investor and IFR (part of the Thomson Reuters Group), as well as boutique research publishers and media companies across Europe and the Middle East.

He was previously a director of banking events and publishing house VRL (now Global Data) before setting up Eurasia Insights, a regional communications and content creation business focussed on emerging Europe, the Middle East and Turkey.

In 2015 he joined MagnaCarta Communications to build the company’s research and analytics capabilities to help financial technology firms define their proposition and tell their story, before setting up Findexable in response to growing customer demand for an easier, more efficient means of gathering insight and analytics.

Kay Ingram

Director of Public Policy,
LEBC Group

Kay Ingram is a writer, commentator, conference presenter and broadcaster on personal finance. A Chartered Financial Planner and Chartered Insurance Practitioner, she has previously advised companies and individuals on all aspects of personal finance and employee benefits.

She is a passionate believer in the need for financial education and for financial services firms to design their services to promote good consumer outcomes.  She supports the goals of the Transparency Taskforce and would like to see every household being given access to financial guidance and advice which is clear, fair and relevant to their needs.

She wants women to avoid falling into the Gender Pensions Gap and has written a practical guide to help them plan for a secure retirement. She regularly contributes to the consumer press including Investors Chronicle, Express and Mail and specialist publications What Investment, Accountancy and Reward Strategy. She is keen to encourage employers to help their staff access good advice and guidance through the workplace and believes that employers will distinguish themselves by offering financial well being benefits which in turn will lead to greater productivity and retention.

Darren Cooke

Chartered Financial Planner,
Red Circle Financial Planning

Darren has been a financial adviser since 1992 establishing his own business in 2013 to provide full financial planning to a small number of clients and their families.

In 2016 a Panorama documentary on a pension scam spurred Darren to establish a House of Commons petition calling for a ban on cold calling for pensions as this was the primary method used by scammers to target their victims. He then spearheaded that campaign gaining support across the pensions industry, advisory profession and media.

The ban was then announced by the then Chancellor Phillip Hammond in his budget speech in the November of 2016. The battle did not end there and continued pressure was required on a government distracted by other issues before the ban finally passed into law in January 2019.

He is a regular contributor to FT Adviser and commentator in trade and high street press pushing for increased consumer awareness and engagement with financial advice and planning whilst also pushing for the profession to raise standards and the quality of advice.

Alex Varley-Winter

Investigative Journalist,
Freelance

I’m an investigative journalist with 10 years working in the media and – sometimes – in education; I write widely for locals, nationals and online publishers, and have stories in the Sunday Times, Times, Byline Times, Mirror, Computer Weekly and DeSmog. Subjects I’ve researched span governmental transparency, social justice, environmental sustainability, crime, climate risk, the impact of disinformation and organised crime. I adhere to the NUJ Code in all my work, including protecting the identity of confidential sources: https://www.nuj.org.uk/about/nuj-code/

In recent years observing complex cases in the High Court, I noted the kafkaesque impact of abuse of process by acknowledged ‘bad actors’ (lawyers who were later struck off, con-artists, and the like), against a backdrop of heavy justice sector cuts. The hardship this imposed on their – relatively powerless – victims was a stark reality that was drawn to my passing attention and kept repeating itself. I could not help but observe the extremely heavy toll on victims of white collar crime within that system. That interest drew me to Transparency Task Force’s engaging symposia, impressed by their anti-scam work. When Andy Agathangelou then asked me if I would like to do some investigations with TTF I said yes. I serve here as Head of Media Outreach and Investigative Journalism – voluntarily. It is a delight to collaborate with a group of public-spirited people advocating for consumers’ interests. If you have a tip or untold ‘story’ that TTF should research, on transparency, hidden truths, financial stability and improving financial services for consumers, please do feel free to reach out to me.

Andy Aitkenhead

Partner,
Axxelate

Andy has worked in financial services for 40 years, initially trading credit, over the last 20 years he has been innovative in the use of collaborative techniques to build high performing teams in the context of rapid change.  By building capability and capacity in the teams he has worked with, he has enabled enduring change.

Toby Corballis

Owner,
Story Positive

Toby is an Organisational Change expert and Agile Coach who works with leadership to implement Organisational Change using Agile methods through his company StoryPositive. His work focuses on organisational redesign and helping companies remove bottlenecks to achieve Flow.

He is an accredited Executive Coach, holds a Postgraduate Diploma from Saïd Business School in Organisational Leadership, and is an Affiliate Member of the British Psychological Society.

Toby has worked with leadership in Investment Banks, Exchanges, Insurance, and Fintech firms. He is especially interested in helping firms achieve profit and lower costs through proven Agile tools and with high standards of leadership and decency.

Toby is also the host of the Wicked Problems podcast, a look at the world’s seemingly intractable problems and the work of those trying to solve them, which is available on all good podcast players as well as at www.wickedproblems.fm

 

Rebecca Self

Director of Sustainable Finance,
South Pole

Rebecca is the Founder and Managing Director of Seawolf Sustainability Consulting and a Senior Sustainable Finance Advisor. The consulting company supports management teams in small and medium size businesses, aiming to help them move toward a more sustainable business model.  Rebecca has been a sustainability consultant to the financial industry, accountants and the C-Suite for over two years.

Formerly Rebecca was the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Sustainable Finance at HSBC Holdings plc. In this role Rebecca was responsible for the group-wide financials relating to Sustainable Finance products.  In addition, Rebecca was responsible for HSBC’s external ESG reporting and investor relations activity – including TCFD and corporate reporting on the SDGs.  Rebecca was the Chair of the European Banking Federation industry SDG working group and a member of other advisory groups to progress sustainability reporting. E.g. Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, World Economic Forum, etc.

Rebecca has approximately 20 years of financial industry experience, including leading HSBC’s response to the Enhanced Disclosure Task Force to aid greater transparency in banks’ disclosures immediately after the financial crisis.  Rebecca is a Chartered Global Management Accountant and obtained a BSc in Economics and Politics from the University of Southampton, where she now has the role of Deputy Chair and Trustee for the Student Union.  In 2020 she completed a Masters at the University of Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership.

Simon Males

Head of sales and marketing,
Emerging Markets Investment Management Limited (EMIM)

Simon Males is Head of Sales & Marketing at Emerging Markets Investment Management Limited, part of the Duet Group.  He is the Founder and Managing Partner of Carrick Roads Capital Limited, a consulting and investor relations business. Over the past 30 years, he has held leadership roles in senior institutional business management, distribution, client and marketing positions at: Muzinich, Legal & General Investment Management, PGIM, Pictet Asset Management and F&C Asset Management (now BMO).

He joined the North London Hospice, a charity which helps those with life-limiting illnesses with specialist needs, as a Trustee and Board Director in early 2020, and is a member of the board’s Finance Committee.  He is also an Advisory Council member of AIMSE Europe, a not-for-profit organisation representing the institutional asset management industry, since 2013.

He has also served as a Trustee of a £130m UK DB pension plan, with fiduciary responsibility for the long-term pension commitments to members and their dependents.

Simon received an MBA with Distinction from London Metropolitan University in 2005. He holds the Investment Management Certificate (IMC) from the CFA Society of the UK.

 

Alan Easter

Business/Management Consultant,
Freelance

Alan has been involved in the retail financial services sector ever since the bribe of a white XR3i company car tempted him away from his chosen profession as a Cartographic Engineer. After two decades managing and building distribution across the UK, Europe and a small time in the US, he crossed over into the advice world in 2006.

Since then he has held numerous senior positions, including being the founder of a planning and investment management firm, with a constant focus on ensuring that the drive towards improved consumer outcomes is always forefront.

He believes that there is a symbiotic relationship between price, transparency, simplicity and efficiency and a better served consumer. And those firms that embrace and adopt these key tenets will also benefit from improved financial performance.

Shareholder success should come from doing things better, not at the expense of the customer.’ 

Cliff Southcombe

Director,
Social Enterprise International

Cliff Southcombe is the Managing Director of Social Enterprise International Ltd.  For the past 20 years his company has introduced and developed the concept of social enterprise in over 45 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. Promoting the idea that best practice in all business is governance by ethics, values and social objectives and management should be through democratic and inclusive structures.

He leads a team of 20 leading experts based in Europe, South America and Asia. The Company has active Social Licences with a number of other international companies with shared values and objectives.  He is also a Founder of the FairShares movement and is currently developing a new Shared Wealth Social Enterprise model

 Born in India but based in the UK, Cliff is one of the founders of the Social Enterprise movement in the UK in the early 90s. Previously he was manager of England’s first Community Cooperative in the 1980s and was a founder of the community enterprise movement.  He set up a successful managed workspace company in the 1990s.  He has pioneered work on legal structures, social auditing and social licensing and new practices on social enterprise governance and management.  He designed and delivered the first accredited courses in social enterprise management.

He lives in Robin Hoods Bay in North Yorkshire where he helped his own community set up a successful broadband social enterprise.

Sunil Shastri

Director,
Ocean Governance Limited

Sunil Murlidhar Shastri is a consultant, expert and speaker in ocean and environmental governance. He found his passion for Pacem in Maribus in 1982 under the tutelage of Elisabeth Mann Borgese and has since made it his mission. He is best known internationally for his MasterClass and for his erudite analysis and candid opinions.

Sunil has attended, at various times, the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, International Ocean Institute, Aachen Technical University, Dalhousie University, London School of Economics and Harvard Kennedy School, supported throughout by prestigious scholarships.

Sunil has previously been a university academic, consultant and researcher in marine and environmental policy, and in mining and ocean engineering. He has served on several professional and public bodies as member, governor or trustee and is a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow. Sunil was born in India in 1955 and has lived in the UK since 1988 with his wife and son.

Shane Norman

Consultant,
Business Development for Fund Managers

Career:
Sept 1992 – Sept 1996: Self-employed in Hong Kong as a research and
management consultant to investment managers in Asia and Europe. Shane’s
most important achievements included:
• Advising a major European bank on the establishment of a US$2 billion
private-banking unit in Singapore
• Winning a total of >US$1.5 billion in new business for investment
management firms in Europe and Asia.
Oct 1988 – Aug 1992: Managing director of Pierson, Heldring & Pierson
(Hong Kong) Ltd, a Dutch universal bank, now part of Fortis.  Shane was
responsible for the group’s overall overall management, including
marketing, business development, budgeting, personnel, etc. The firm’s
activities included corporate and private banking, trust and corporate
secretarial services, asset management, and stockbroking.
Feb 1982 – Aug 1988: Investment director, then deputy managing
director, of N.M. Rothschild & Sons (Hong Kong) Ltd, the Asian branch of
the Rothschild private banking and financial services group. Mainly
responsible for investment research and recommendations on Asian
securities to the firm’s institutional and private clients all over the world.
Also managed US$400m in discretionary portfolios for pension schemes,
corporates, families, HNWIs, and a UK-authorised equity unit trust.
Oct 2010 – present (full-time): Independent consultant, advising fund
managers on the development/ marketing of their offering and introducing
them to professional and institutional investors.
Feb 2017 – present: UK Representative, part-time, Fuchs Asset
Management SA, a Luxembourg-based AIFM platform/ ‘supermanco’.
Oct 2010 – present: Senior Adviser, part-time, to MontLake Funds Ltd,
formerly ML Capital, owner of Dublin-based AIFM platform/ ‘supermanco’.
July 2008 – Oct 2010: Head of research and advisory services, based in
London and Malta, at ML Capital Ltd, a distributor of hedge funds.
July 2006 – June 2008: UK-based consultant on institutional asset
management, advising on business development and manager risk.
Sept 1996 – June 2006: Co-founder of RCP & Partners in Hong Kong,
Germany, and London. Developed Fiduciary Rating, measuring the risk of
entrusting financial assets/ responsibilities to third parties. Established and
managed a Hong Kong office, another in Germany. Compiled and edited
The FT Guide to Investment Managers in Asia, published by the Financial
Times. Shane also wrote a monthly newsletter on the asset management
industry. Conducted c.70 Fiduciary Ratings on asset management firms of
most types – traditional, hedge, private equity/ venture capital – in the UK,
Europe, and Asia. The business was sold in 2006.

Public bodies:

1984-92: Member, Executive Committee, Hong Kong Association of
Deposit-taking Companies, a self-regulatory industry body.
1986-92: Member, Committee on Unit Trusts, Securities & Futures
Commission, Hong Kong, the local industry regulator.
2002-06: Foundation governor, The Oratory Primary School, London

David Laity

  • 1st job laboratory technical in a photographic processing laboratory.
  • 2nd job South Crofty Mine; mining laboratory analytical scientist
  • Formal career; Medical Laboratory Scientific Officer, Penzance Hospital Pathology Laboratory.
  • Over 4 years gained ONC and HND, Medical Laboratory Science.

November 1979 joined Devon and Cornwall Police; experience in many departments over the next 24 years;

  • Nominated Probationer of year 1981
  • Emergency response, community officer, Acting Sergeant 3 years
  • Trained in General Police Duties, statement taking, self-defence, driving incident & interceptor vehicles; specialist 4×4 off road/adverse conditions.
  • Advanced Driving Courses, Devises Police Driving School; awarded top police driver of year, highest final marks:
  • Appointed Youngest to be made CID officer in Devon and Cornwall Police
  • Served as CID detective Hayle, Camborne, Redruth, St Ives & Penzance, Newquay, Helston working major cases with Drug Squads, Regional Crime Squads, Special Branch & Surveillance Teams setting up covert video and audio operations.
  • As an appointed Police Tutor, he trained numerous new recruits who spent 6 months under his supervision before he certified them as suitable officers.
  • For 5 consecutive years David acted as an ambassador for the British Police spending a week at a time in France in Police uniform at national events to promote international tourism and cooperation.
  • Currently in final semester of third year of BA Hons Degree in Television (Specialising as Director, producer, cinematographer, documentarist)

During his time in these various employments, David learnt to deal with new situations requiring quick decisions and responses, often under stressful conditions. He learned to cope with very heavy workloads with multiple simultaneous jobs all usually heavily reliant upon him finding an adequate solution within a short time frame and which satisfied various peoples’ needs.

David’s latest venture since 2015 was to develop 4 luxury properties which, due to criminal fraud by Lloyds bank employees attempting to defraud him of his assets for their financial gain, he now finds himself embroiled in numerous litigation suits and member of victim groups assisting similar victims.

Corinne Carr

Founder,
Peoplenet Ltd

Corinne Carr is an independent Remuneration Consultant based in London who specialises in ‘responsible pay’. She advocates that short and long-term incentives should extend beyond rewarding for financial performance to incentivising positive societal impact.

She is a leading voice in the field of responsible pay which forges a link between business, sustainability and remuneration strategies, ultimately in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Corinne’s bespoke E.A.R.T.H.® methodology (Evaluate, Ascertain, Realise, Tell, and Help) integrates ESG factors into incentive structures so that clients become investors, investees and employers of choice.

Corinne works closely with investors and corporates to promote better alignment on remuneration matters between asset owners, asset managers and corporates.

She established the remuneration consultancy, PeopleNet Ltd, in 1998 and her past clients include major international banks, asset managers and listed firms.

Bilingual in French and English, Corinne started her career with Bank of America in 1990 and holds an MBA from the EUA, San Francisco. She is a Fellow of the CIPD in London, the professional body for Human Resources specialists, and first studied HR in Paris where she grew up. Further details about her background and services can be found at www.peoplenet.ltd.uk.

Richard Emery

Fraud Investigator,
4Keys International

Richard Emery’s background is in Retail and Payment Systems, having worked for John Lewis Partnership and ICL Retail Systems.  He has run his own consultancy since 1990, working extensively in dispute resolution, primarily as an Expert Witness, for over 25 years.  His current focus is assisting individuals who have been the victims of bank fraud, helping them to manage their dispute with their bank and take their complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service and/or the courts.

He worked with FOS on the re-definition of Gross Negligence and he gave oral evidence to the Treasury Select Committee’s enquiry into Economic Crime: Consumer view.  His passion is to see a substantial reduction in the losses suffered by individual victims, and he sees this coming about through greater investment in catching and convicting the criminals, through the development of new systems and process by the banks, and through a programme of effective consumer education.

Mark Ormston

Director,
Retirement Line Ltd

Mark has worked in the pension income space for many years, it is an industry which he completely adores. His passion for helping consumers get the very best out of their pension savings whatever the pension income vehicle is being used is widely known, he frequently promotes best practice through his speaking, presentations and articles. 

The company he works for Retirement Line, has helped facilitate £160million+ pension saving transfers into retirement income products every year and the firm has a 5 out 5 star rating on customer review site Trustpilot. 

He worries that financial sector is in danger (at times) of losing sight of the end consumer and that financial services is for everyone, from the young to the old and everyone in between and as a result it must be honest, simple and transparent enough for everyone to use and understand. 

Mark is extremely proud to be a TTF Ambassador and believes that the TTF has the consumer in mind with everything it does and as a group it has the power to change the financial world for the better. 

Antonio Potenza

Executive Director,
AstonBlackstone International

Antonio is a graduate from University of Oxford, Said Business School MBA with main Focus on Social Impact, Impact Investments and Social Finance. Executive Education from University of Cambridge, Institute for Sustainability leadership, with a degree in High Impact Leadership.

He is a specialist in social and financial inclusion, building multi-asset strategies, debt/equity/blended finance and Impact Bonds across Europe, Latin America and South East Asia. He advises governments in social projects that build on the UN SDG’s in clean energy, education, social and financial inclusion initiatives in Sub Saharan Africa, Middle East and South Asia.

Antonio is committed to helping organizations deploy capital and innovative finance products in emerging markets that drive social change and fight social injustice and poverty.

Specialties: Investment banking, strategy, leadership, project execution, social impact, impact investments, blockchain/digital economy , interim management

Open to NED Roles in Financial Sector or Renewable Energy Sector

James Wellwood

Head of International Strategy & Business Development,
Eric Sturdza Investments

James currently runs the International Strategy & Development for the Sturdza Family Investment business. Prior to this he was Head of Institutional Distribution at Kairos Investment Management Ltd and part of the Global Distribution team at Cheyne Capital before that.

Prior to a career in finance James was a professional rugby player for London Wasps, representing the Premiership club in the First team and also gaining caps for England at U21 level.

James studied Political Science at Cambridge University where he gained two blues in rugby and also fought against Oxford University as the Cambridge University Heavyweight at the 2009 Varsity Match in Oxford.

Frances Gordon

Co-Founder & Director,
Simplified

For the past 20 years, Frances has championed the belief that transparency is key to building trust. During this time, she has worked with major financial services brands to make financial and legal information more understandable, usable and useful.

Frances is the co-founder of a consultancy and training company called Simplified.  Simplified has helped large organisations around the world to implement the plain-language requirements of Treating Customers Fairly regulations and consumer rights laws. The Simplified training course has helped over 8,000 professionals, including many legal practitioners, to write in plain language. Aside from the UK, Frances enjoys engagements in emerging markets such as Croatia, South Africa and Nigeria.

Her career has included tenures as Head of Content Strategy at Siegel & Gale, Senior Content Strategist (VP) at Barclaycard, and Head of Brand and Content at fintech, Oradian. Frances sat on the board of international plain language organisation, PLAIN (Plain Language Association InterNational).  She was part of the advisory committee of IC Clear, an EU-funded initiative that developed a post-graduate course in clear communication.

Magdalena Smith

Founder and CEO,
BehaviourLab

Magdalena Smith, brings her experience from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and as an academic at University of Cambridge where she taught governance and business ethics, together to contribute to solving the challenge of creating more and consistent alpha in the investment industry. Behaviour Lab’s mission is to improve the way the world makes investments, using behavioural science to capture more alpha, and ensuring world class governance, through clear transparency of robust decision-making processes.

Graeme Dewar

Ceo and Founder,
Marketßeta

CEO and founder of marketßeta where he is responsible for developing the business strategy, delivering client solutions via financial service consultancy and ETF services.

In addition to over 20 years of asset management experience, Graeme spent 3 years in Investment Banking where he managed regional sales teams and global delta one products.  Graeme began his career with Scottish Amicable Investment Managers.  He spent 7 years at Barclays Global Investors (now BlackRock) where he held a number of senior positions in the Index business and helped build the iShares product range.  Graeme launched and ran the first iShares products in Europe.  He joined JPMorgan in 2007 building a highly successful equity derivative sales team, with a strong focus on delta one products.  Most recently Graeme built and led the multi asset Transition Management Business for Legal & General and was responsible for their ETF Business.

Graeme was educated in Scotland with a Master of Arts from the University of Glasgow and a Post Graduate Diploma from the Robert Gordon University

Graeme brings a unique combination of both sell-side and buy-side industries with a focus on using technology to build scalable business and process for multi asset portfolio management and solutions.

Graham Turrell

Director,
Diligent Eye

Graham began his career as a qualified software architect and consultant analyst working with a list of blue chip companies including IBM, Marconi, Nortel and the Industrial Bank of Japan. His passion for intelligent, independent investing led him to found a brokerage for real estate and non-mainstream investments and discovered the massive challenges that industry faces in the UK. In response, in 2017 Graham launched a ground-breaking start-up, Diligent Eye (diligenteye.com) with a mission to change an industry for the better. Diligent Eye operates from the ground up by assisting investors and brokers to make intelligent and informed decisions about the quality of the investment choices they make every day.

John Dashfield

Owner,
Dashfield Coaching and Development Ltd/ Client Centred Advisers

John Dashfield is a highly experienced business coach and mentor to financial planners, owners of SME’s and key employees. He is author of the book ‘The client-centred financial adviser’, published in 2015.

At the core of his work is teaching and coaching clients in the principles behind healthy psychological functioning. This naturally leads to clearer thinking, increased well-being and spiritual integrity.

A significant amount of his time is spent working with financial advisers who want to move from a providing a transactional service to creating a transformational client experience. He has been privileged to work with some of the UK’s leading financial planning practitioners.

Prior to his coaching business John owned a thriving financial advisory practice which he founded in 1991 and sold in 2005. His working life began with a high street bank before moving to AMP Society in 1986. At AMP he was a pensions technical adviser and managed the personal pensions department.

Robert Lockie

Branch Principal,
Bloomsbury Wealth

Robert has worked in financial services since graduating in the 1980s in various technical and client-facing roles and is currently a branch principal at Bloomsbury Wealth, a small financial planning and wealth management firm based in the City of London.  He introduced graphical representations of the costs and charges that the firm’s clients were paying several years before such disclosure became mandatory and believes that better decisions about value can be made when people have clear data.

He served on the committee of the London branch of the Institute of Financial Planning and subsequently as a member and latterly Chair of its Education Committee.  He is now a member of the Editorial Panel for the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment.

In addition to having won several categories in the prestigious Money Management Financial Planner of the Year awards and twice being a member of the winning team in a national financial planning competition, he has contributed to numerous press articles including the ‘Money makeover’ series for the Financial Times.

He has held the internationally recognised Certified Financial Planner™ licence since 1997.

Claire Noyce

CEO and Managing Partner,
Hybridan LLP

Claire Noyce has been Deputy Chairman of the Quoted Companies Alliance since October 2019.

Claire is founding partner and CEO of Hybridan LLP, an AIM broker and adviser, dedicated to fundraising, share price support and providing market-driven corporate finance advice.

Claire was previously at Nomura in the UK Small Cap Life Sciences and Technology Sales and Trading team, where she sold equities to UK and Continental European investors. Prior to joining Nomura, Claire was an equity analyst at Lazard, with a significant  involvement in IPOs and capital market transactions. Claire started her career as an analyst and consultant at Datamonitor. Claire has a Double Honours Degree from Manchester University, where she also undertook some postgraduate studies. Claire is a mentor at Manchester University.

Ian Tyler

Senior Advisor,
Alvarez and Marsal

Ian Tyler is a Senior Advisor for Alvarez & Marsal with over 35 years experience in Financial Services, covering leadership roles in treasury for a number of major UK banks, before moving to professional services in 2011. Mr. Tyler is an expert in all aspects of capital management (from issuance through to capital planning and stress testing), and both policy and practical aspects of: liquidity risk, funding, interest rate risk in the banking book, non-trading FX, FTP, large exposures and intra group limits.

Some of Mr Tyler’s most recent roles include: Head of Non-Traded Market Risk and then Group Head of Capital in RBS Group; Group Treasurer of Tesco Bank (member of Executive Leadership); and as a Partner leading the Financial Institutions Treasury Advisory Team in Deloitte. Mr. Tyler has been involved in numerous complex projects relating to a treasury function, which include: (1) leading the Treasury work-stream formed by RBS, Santander and Fortis before, during and after the acquisition of ABN AMRO; (2) being seconded to Tesco from RBS to lead the Regulatory Business Plan and gain approval from the FSA so that change of control could occur for Tesco Bank in December 2008. Here, he built up a treasury function from scratch and was a member of the Executive Leadership and Board attendee for 4 years in what is one of the UK’s largest challenger retail banks; (3) worked for many of the UK’s established challenger banks on a wide range of projects including building a new FTP system for Virgin Money, helping Sainsbury’s Bank develop a new funding strategy and then execute an initial securitisation, strategic evaluation of M&S’s financial services partnership with HSBC, assisting Bank of Ireland UK to switch to the use of derivatives to hedge interest rate risk, reviews of IRRBB approach and Treasury Risk capability for Metro Bank.

Whilst the majority of his treasury work has been for banks, his list of advisory clients also includes Central Banks, Government departments, Supra-nationals, Insurance Companies, Asset Managers, Commodity Trading firms, Payment Services firms and various Corporates. Selected highlights from Mr. Tyler’s line-management and professional services roles include: (1) leading the UK’s first ever regulated mortgage securitisation issue and first ever USD preference share issue; (2) assisting a number of firms both in the UK and US as they have undertaken the detailed process to obtain a new banking license; (3) assisting a Supra-national significantly enhance its financial risk management framework including policies, risk measures and treasury operational capabilities to facilitate them accessing the Debt Capital Markets with an AAA rating

His body of work also includes working on numerous Due Diligence engagements on potential and actual acquisitions/disposals across the globe. He has led, or assisted on, a wide variety of stress testing projects for both UK and non UK entities covering both liquidity and capital related stresses and taken a lead role in producing a number of Working Capital reports for UKLA prospectuses.

Mr. Tyler is a member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and has a Master of Arts in Mathematics from Cambridge University. He is currently a trustee for two charities, a Non Executive Director for both a London based Fintech as well as a UK regulated global online trading platform. He is also the Chairman for a firm seeking a UK banking license to offer an enhanced customer current account proposition to students and workers coming to the UK from overseas.

Chris Head

Head of Business Development,
AMX

Chris is responsible for our business development, marketing and client teams. He has been in the investment industry for over 27 years at BlackRock and Bank of America / Merrill Lynch helping institutional clients achieve better outcomes.

Mikkel Bates

Regulatory Manager,
FE Fundinfo

Having started his career in investment at the London Stock Exchange during Big Bang, Mikkel spent many years in asset management marketing and IFA support roles at Fidelity, Prudential, Prolific (now Aberdeen Standard) and Société Générale (Man GLG), and was then founding Head of Marketing at the innovative residential property investment company, Castle Trust.  This all contributed to an understanding of good product governance and clear client communication, earning Plain English Campaign Crystal Marks for his client-facing literature.

Mikkel subsequently morphed into dealing with regulatory developments as the Regulatory Manager for fund data provider Financial Express (now FE fundinfo), helping them to provide document and data solutions that deliver greater disclosure under UCITS, PRIIPs, MiFID II and other UK and European regulations.

 

Professor Nigel Harper

Moody’s Analytics Awarding Body Board Member,
Moody’s Group Retail Banking Academy International

Nigel is a HMRC former Retail Banking Specialist. His role was to investigate banking egregious tax avoidance schemes and other bank criminal activity. There is a great deal.

FCIB, Qualified ACIB, FCBI,  Chartered Banker, MBA Banking, , and Awarding Body Board Member of Retail Banking Academy International and Examiner.

Since Nigel retired he is working as an independent Retail Banking Specialist and with the Police. He also meets in the House of Commons and Lords to promote his solution to the failed corporate governance in most banks. He has been in banking since 1971 and has witnessed the good, bad and plain ugly in banking.

Nigel has worked alongside Andrew Bailey, PCBS in 2012 where he gave evidence, and HMT.  His papers delivered to MPs have gained traction.

Nigel has recommended that a Controller for Banking and Professional Complaints Regulator are set up, with him leading. He has a lot of knowledge and hands of practical expertise about banking, regulation, corporate governance and lending and risk management.

He has spoken to APPG Fair Banking Committee and SME Alliance meetings and acted as an Expert Witness in the High Court for victims of Lloyds Banking Group.

FCIB, Qualified ACIB, FCBI,  Chartered Banker, MBA Banking, , and Awarding Body Board Member of Retail Banking Academy International and Examiner.

Roy Zimmerhansl

Practice Lead,
Pierpoint Financial Consulting Ltd

Roy Zimmerhansl is Practice Lead at Pierpoint Financial Consulting, a boutique securities finance consultancy.  Roy is a recognised expert with many decades’ experience in securities finance and collateral management with a strong custody and clearing background.

​One of Pierpoint’s key goals is to provide insights that result in improved transparency for investors, trustees and other key stakeholders.  Roy has taught public and in-house training sessions in 15 cities around the world and brought his robust approach to the conferences he has chaired, moderated or been a panellist at, for over two decades.

​He has been vice-chair of the International Securities Lending Association, a director of the Pan Asia Securities Lending Association, a member of the Bank of England’s Securities Lending and Repo Committee and has acted as expert witness in securities finance legal cases in both the USA and UK.

Matthew Priestley

Investment Oversight and Fund Due Diligence

Over 20 years experience in the asset management industry from: Investment Management and Risk Oversight; Financial Advice; Risk Management and Operational Policies and Procedures and Product Governance.  More latterly helping firms with their Governance Frameworks.

Matthew’s early career, after Gartmore, was spent as a wealth manager, at Barclays Wealth, UBS and HSBC Global Asset Management.  He started his oversight career, when he was asked at HSBC to set up and run a portfolio management team responsible for £2.4bn FUM.  This he did for five years before moving to head office to spend two years on a FCA Section 166 to give the business better oversight and controls over its investment management, financial advice and financial products.

From working through a number of regulatory issues with consultants and the FCA he realised that oversight and controls were becoming a key tenant that the FCA wanted to see firms spend a lot more time on and get right.  He understands how the FCA wants to see firms identify Conduct Risks from such sources as management information for senior boards to review.  Due to Matthew’s practitioner experience, he is adapt at giving senior management the necessary oversight, MI and controls that they need to prove the business is being controlled and all risks, especially customer risks, are being identified and monitored.

From that experience he become head of an Investment Management Oversight team at an Authorised Corporate Director, FundRock Partners, where he worked directly with asset managers, depositaries and the FCA.  His firm took on the regulatory risks of various asset managers running and selling various multi-asset class propositions.  It was therefore imperative that he could prove that his firm had the right level of oversight and that good customer outcomes were being achieved (he worked closely with the FCA).  Where these were not being achieved, as ACD his firm owned the product and so Matthew was tasked with working with the asset management firms to improve any area identified as a potential concern.

Matthew’s core areas of understanding and therefore ability to advise on: Investment processes for multi-asset class propositions, Volatility bands and Stochastic modelling.  Monitoring and Due Diligence Oversight in terms of Operational Controls and Procedures to incorporate Regulations, Risk Controls, Governance and Investment Management to deliver compliant and value for money investment services and products.

Matthew is a great believer in the finance industry producing good customer outcomes, which comes from offering appropriate oversight and protection for financial consumers, he set up his own company called Governance Connect.  His firm helps financial companies with their overall Governance Frameworks, Systems and Controls.  As a result he is passionate about the industry being transparent and so has become an ambassador for  the Transparency Task Force.

Jonathan Gain

Chief Executive,
Stellar Asset Management Ltd

Jonathan Gain is the CEO of Stellar Asset Management, a tax efficient investment manager. He has been at the forefront of tax-efficient investment in the UK since the early 1990s, when he joined Close Brothers. Close became market leaders in the creation and promotion of tax planning products designed for investors seeking income and capital gains tax relief.

In 2007, he formed Stellar Asset Management where he has continued to develop innovative and robust services that are underpinned by long-standing government legislation, with particular emphasis on the mitigation of inheritance tax.

Jonathan lives in Kent with his wife and three children and supports Manchester United -obviously.

I want to support the work of the Transparency Task Force as I fundamentally believe that, as custodians of investors hard earned capital, we have an obligation to disclose exactly what we do, how we manage and how we charge for these services. The industry has been opaque for far too long on these matters and I was delighted to step forward when asked by Andy. Transparency is one of Stellar’s core principals and the financial services industry will become more trusted if it continues to improve its accountability. The work and energy of the members of the TTF will facilitate this and I look forward to working with them.

Tomás Carruthers

Founder and CEO,
Project Heather

Tomás Carruthers initiated Project Heather as a platform to progress the social finance vision he developed whilst CEO of the Social Stock Exchange. Bringing over 25 years experience and a reputation as a pioneer in his field, Tomás draws on his previous entrepreneurial successes, including CEO of Interactive Investor.

As a recognised thought leader in the Social and Ethical finance sector, Tomás has been a prominent name on the global stage, speaking at over 80 events and was a participant and chaired one working group for the OECD Social Impact Investment Initiative. He recently won a Highly Commended award at the 3rd Scottish SME Business Awards 2019.

Tomás was educated at Newcastle, Edinburgh and Cambridge, where he also helped to start Electronic Share Information, the first website to publish share prices, in 1994. He is married and lives in Edinburgh​.

Stephen Millar

Managing Director, Client Relations, UK and Europe, EPOCH Investment Partners

Stephen is responsible for leading Epoch’s business development and consultant relations in the U.K. and Europe.

 

Prior to joining Epoch in 2015, Stephen spent five years at the Norwegian global equity manager SKAGEN Funds, where he oversaw their U.K. business. Before SKAGEN, Stephen spent five years at T. Rowe Price where he was responsible for their U.K. and Irish businesses as well as EMEA consultant relations. Previously, Stephen was a director in the institutional business development group at Insight Investment, a U.K. asset manager.

 

Stephen began his career in the industry at Schroder Investment Management. Stephen holds a BA (Honors) in Economics and an MSc in Finance from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, U.K.

Adrian Jones

Independent Non-Executive Director & Consultant, Owner, Athena

Adrian is a highly respected professional in the investment industry with nearly 30 years experience.  He is a Non-Executive Director (NED) to a number of investment funds in different jurisdictions following diverse investment strategies and also runs his own consultancy business, Athena Consulting Ltd,  advising firms on various operational aspects of establishing and running an investment business. Adrian was previously the COO of Charlemagne Capital, a boutique investment manager where he oversaw the operations across multiple offices.

 

Adrian has lengthy experience of sitting on the board of a UK listed company. In addition he has acted as chairman of investment funds as well as sitting on audit, and risk and governance committees.

 

He is a vocal advocate for improving corporate governance standards and diversity within the asset management industry. In particular. He believes that the transparency surrounding disclosure of directors background, conflict of interests and their true independence in Offering Memorandums is an area which needs to be addressed urgently. Adrian firmly believes that investors deserve to have all the relevant information and the tone is set from the board down.

Piotr Konwicki

Senior Lecturer,

University of Hertfordshire

Piotr has a combination of academic and business experience.  He specializes in corporate finance, valuation and alternative investments – having taught and worked in England, USA, Scandinavia and Poland. He is passionate about economics and finance, has a Ph. D. in Financial Economics and an MBA from London Business School.

 

His research interests include alternative investments, corporate finance, mergers & acquisitions, game theory, behavioral & Islamic finance and social media (value drivers and valuation approaches). Piotr is a stakeholder of All-Party-Parliamentary-Group on Islamic Finance.

 

Piotr is a Senior Lecturer at Hertfordshire Business School. He worked in senior roles in several international firms: Lazard Freres, Deutsche Bank, Intercontinental Hotels and Metsa Tissue Oyj.

Greg Davies PhD

Head of Behavioural Science, Oxford Risk

Greg is a specialist in applied behavioural finance, decision science, social impact investing, and financial wellbeing.

 

He started the banking world’s first behavioural finance team at Barclays in 2006, which he led for a decade.

 

In 2017 he joined Oxford Risk to lead the development of behavioural decision support software to help people make the best possible financial decisions.

 

Greg holds a PhD in Behavioural Decision Theory from Cambridge; has held academic affiliations at UCL, Imperial College, and Oxford; and is author of Behavioral Investment Management.

 

Greg is Chair of Sound and Music, the UK’s national charity for new music, and the creator of Open Outcry, a ‘reality opera’ premiered in London in 2012, creating live performance from a functioning trading floor.

James Pitcher

Consultant, Z/Yen Group

A senior securities operations manager, consultant and advisor, with over 35 years of investment banking experience. In the last 13 years specifically, James has worked closely with operations management at many top-tier (and other) organisations, helping them review and improve operating procedures and client management processes. These detailed insights have given him a unique perspective and overview of operational best practice with a keen focus on costs, operating models, location strategy, operational risk and efficiency.

James was an Associate Partner at McLagan until March 2017, in the Performance & Infrastructure team, having previously lead the Z/Yen team. McLagan acquired Z/Yen in 2007 and is a leading provider of market intelligence to the financial services industry. Client support was based on extensive experience in post-execution trade processing, operational efficiency, costs management, client management, client on-boarding and performance.

 

James joined Z/Yen in March 2003, within the financial services practice. His background prior to this was 20 years in Investment Banking, notably at Morgan Stanley, where he was an Executive Director. James served much of his tenure at Morgan Stanley as Head of EMEA Network Management, establishing and maintaining relationships with the Firm’s Agent Bank Network for Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India.

 

James had worked within Operations at Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking (and earlier Global Custody) businesses, with particular focus on Equities and Fixed Income products and played a key role in working with Morgan Stanley’s Agent banks to ensure a successful transition through conversion to the Euro and Y2K.

 

Prior to Morgan Stanley, James had worked in Operations at James Capel and W. Greenwell stockbrokers (now both part of the HSBC world) and Nikko Securities — where he played a role in developing the back office following their ‘Big-Bang’ membership of the UK Stock Exchange.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

CEO, Fundscape

Bella has 20 years’ experience in the research and analysis of the UK, European and Asian fund management industries. In 2010, she established Fundscape, a research house specialising in the end-to-end analysis of the UK fund industry. Fundscape is the publisher of the Platform Report, widely regarded as the platform industry’s official data source.

 

Bella is keen to promote transparency and information for all stakeholders, but especially end-consumers. She is the architect of the Gatekeepers database which assesses the quality of professional fund selection in the UK and also launched https://comparetheplatform.com/ to help consumers find the right investment platform for their needs.

 

Prior to setting up Fundscape in 2010, she worked for Lipper as Global Head of Research and Publications and was the author of numerous publications and reports including the popular European and Asian Data Digests, the Fund Market Profile report series and the UK Platform guide. Early in her career Bella worked in investment banking and then a London-based consulting firm where she specialised in market entry strategies for retail and institutional asset managers.

 

Bella has a master’s degree in International Business and is fluent in four languages. She is married with two grown-up children, fussy about grammar and punctuation, loves literature, the theatre, disco dancing and pub quizzes.

Ged O’Neil

CEO & Co-Founder, Auden

Ged has more than 25 years of diverse business experience with one common denominator: the intersection of finance, technology and law. This is the driving force behind Auden’s business model.

 

He has held senior positions in consumer finance, a tech-VC, private equity and the legal profession.

Brandon Davies

Non-executive Director, Lintel Financial Services & Obillex Limited

Brandon is a Trustee of the Responsible Finance Institute Foundation a Non-executive director of Lintel Financial Services Limited and of Obillex Limited and an advisor to Rosette Limited a Shariah merchant bank.

 

Brandon is an advisory council member of the Institute of International Monetary Research and is a member of the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics.

 

He currently lectures at Buckingham University on their Masters in Money, Banking and Central Banking degree course.

 

Brandon retired from Barclays Bank  in 2004 where he was Treasurer of retail and corporate banking and a member of the banks Executive Committee. Prior to this appointment he was Head of Structured Products at Barclays Capital

Julie Lord

Chief Executive, Magenta Financial Planning

Julie Lord is a Chartered and Certified Financial Planner at Magenta – a specialist Financial Planning company that helps its clients pursue their passions and build plans for future security and happiness.

 

She was an Institute of Financial Planning Board member for 15 years and is a former President.  She has been a member of the FSA Training Advisory Panel; Chairman of the IFP Education Committee and member of the ISO working party and is keen to ensure that all professional advisers are well qualified to deliver the best possible advice to the public. She is currently a member of the PFS Planning Practioner Panel.

 

As well as being a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments, and a Fellow of the Personal Finance Society, Julie has won numerous Financial Planning awards and is a regular writer and presenter of financial issues in the trade and public press.

 

She is very passionate about providing the best quality advice to clients and ensuring that Financial Planning businesses are embracing the best possible practices in order to deliver this effectively and profitably.

Sue Flood

Leader of the Ark Pension Scam Group, A leader of the Transparency Task Force’s Anti-Scams Special Interest Group, Director of Reborn Recycling

Sue Flood has worked in the Television Industry since 2001, starting out at Television Centre and progressing through a successful TV programme-making career that included various roles such as Researcher for Top of the Pops, Celebrity Guest Liaison, Location Sourcing, Production Budget, Sales and Promotions (including through BBC Worldwide with responsibility for selling all BBC Programmes to all 130 Global TV Stations Worldwide).

 

Her roles at the BBC meant she worked with a wide range of household name VIP celebrities including Muhammed Ali, Robert Redford, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, Terry Wogan, Chevy Chase, Joan Collins, David Bowie, Cher, Bob Monkhouse, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Tom Jones, Debbie Harry, Donna Summer, Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks, Van Morrison, Seal, Bryan Adams, Bette Midler, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Cliff Richard, Paul Weller, Bruce Springsteen, Jamiroquai, Robbie Williams, The Spice Girls, Rowan Atkinson, Kate Bush, Joanna Lumley, Queen, Elton John, UB40, The Who, Rod Stewart, various Presidents of the United States of America and many, many more.

 

Sue has also had senior roles at BUT Music Group, and her volunteer roles have included raising awareness for disabled models for inclusion in the Fashion, Industry and raising awareness for retired Polo Ponies with CEO Sarah Coleman.

 

More recently, Sue flood has become a key figure in helping to prevent people falling victim to pension fraudsters, having become a victim herself. Sue lost here entire pension fund; along with over 500 other victims of the Ark Pension Scandal. Her response was to set up a campaign group which she has tirelessly supported ever since. She is now also involved in supporting numerous other pension scam victims and pension scam support groups.

 

She has unique insight and experience in the pensions scam prevention and support space and her relentless campaigning has led to interaction with the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Financial Conduct Authority – watch this space.

Adrian Tupper

Consultant, Money Questioner

Adrian graduated in electronic engineering in 1984 but soon moved to work for James Capel & Co in the City in its IT function. In 1987 Adrian joined James Capel’s (later HSBC’s) Quantitative Techniques business in Edinburgh, specialising in index fund advisory services, indices and market data.

 

During the 1990s, Adrian was responsible for creating and maintaining index investments worth over £10bn, including some major pension fund clients and collective funds such as those administered by HSBC Asset Management.

 

Adrian also developed indices for smaller companies and in what became the smart beta sector, such as fundamentally weighted indices and low volatility indices. When the business transferred to Euromoney Institutional Investor plc in 2013, Adrian led the R&D function and promoted the Indices business at conferences and meetings globally.

 

After Euromoney pulled out of the Indices business in 2018, Adrian, already a qualified counsellor, has been spending time in private practice. He also chairs the investment function at the Scottish Episcopal Church and takes a special interest in responsible investing, and where he is working on a consultancy proposition.

 

Adrian runs the moneyquestioner.co.uk blog.

Bobby Riddaway

Senior Investment Consultant, CAPITA

Bobby is a Senior Investment Consultant who has over twenty years of experience in advising both the Trustees and Employers of Occupational Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution Schemes.

 

He joined Capita in 2013 and led the growth of the Investment Consulting Team until moving back to a full time client facing role in 2018. Bobby is a qualified Actuary and is a past Chair of the Association of Consulting Actuaries Investment Sub-Committee and has also served on the Finance and Investment Board of the Institute of Actuaries.

 

Bobby is a past winner of the Mallowstreet Most Influential Investment Advisor award and has also twice won the industry battle of the bands, as a Bass player. He is also a regular speaker on Investment issues at various conferences and has participated as a judge for a number of industry awards.

 

Outside of work, Bobby is a County Pool Player and keen runner and also managed the Bedfordshire Youth Pool team to a record 5 consecutive region victories.

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Ian Ashleigh

Risk and Compliance Consultant, Compliance Matters

Ian began his career in financial services in 1982 at a leading UK Building Society, having then trained as a financial adviser and worked for a direct sales force and an IFA, Ian joined the compliance team of a National IFA.

 

Following a period working for the Regulator and as Head of Training and Development for an employee benefits consultancy, Ian set up his own risk and compliance consultancy, Compliance Matters UK Limited, in January 2004. Since then, Ian has worked with a number of national and multinational asset managers as well as some regional and local advisory businesses helping them through the regulatory hurdles of the Insurance Distribution Directive, GDPR, MiFID II and pension freedoms.

 

Away from financial services, Ian pursues his love of many different genres of music, watches football and being born in Islington is a fan of Arsenal FC. Ian lives in West Sussex with his partner and has an adult daughter and two adult step-sons.

Laurence Wormald

Investment Manager, Random Performance

Since 1992, Laurence Wormald has held positions at several central banks, investment
banks and financial technology firms. He is now working as an independent consultant in
investment risk management.

 

Laurence started his career as a university lecturer in
theoretical physics, before joining an investment team at the Bank for International Settlements in Basle in 1992. He went on to work at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt
and the at the Bank of England (Monetary Analysis Division) until 2002, supporting the economic research and monetary policy committees at those central banks.

 

After a spell as chief risk officer for a London-based proprietary trading unit of Deutsche Bank until 2008, for 10 years Laurence held the position of head of research at FIS’ buy-side, valuation and trading businesses, responsible for the team which developed and maintains the widely-used multi-asset-class market factor risk model APT.

Risk management underpins all modern finance as the essential discipline for practitioners and financial product development. The integrity of the models which are used in risk management is critical to transparency and policy-making across banking, investment management and trading. Laurence has served on the councils of academic institutions such as the Centre for Computational Finance at Essex University, and with professional
societies such as Inquire UK, to try to develop the most intuitive and rigorous models for pricing and risk management.

Tom Baigrie

CEO, LifeSearch

Tom is 57, has had a moustache since long before facial hair became fashionable, rides a Triumph Tiger in London and a Harley Davidson elsewhere, rows 5km in 20 minutes on his machine most mornings and is a decade into learning the art of Tai Chi. He’s proud that LifeSearch customers rate it 4.6/5 on TrustPilot and that the whole business talks about their values of Care, Tolerance, Openness, Honesty and Excellence about 5 times more than they talk about profit, but he’s most proud of Angus, Patrick and Carolina and his 29 year and counting marriage to their mum Alison.

 

Tom Baigrie is the founder and CEO of LifeSearch, a business that every week helps over 2,000 people protect themselves and their families against the financial catastrophe that death or disability can cause. Tom started LifeSearch back in 1998 and called it that because it searches out the best covers from all the UKs insurers. Today LifeSearch’s 500 strong team is recommended by Money Saving Expert, Compare the Market, Moneysupermarket, Lloyd’s Bank, Which? and many others and is thus the largest protection intermediary in the UK. Since 1998, Tom and LifeSearch have seen more than 85 industry judging panels deem them the best at what they do, but the award that Tom is proudest of is LifeSearch’s third place, at the first time of entering, in the ‘Sunday Times Top 100 Companies to Work For’ listing.

 

Tom set up LifeSearch originally because he saw banks ripping off customers with policies he could arrange for far lower premiums by shopping around and giving customers proper protection advice. Ever since he’s felt that leading financial services retailers should shape their market and has thus long campaigned for better insurer and distributor practices. His statement that “The claim is our core product, not the policy” is amongst the most widely quoted in today’s UK protection market.

Gareth Morgan

CEO, Ferret Information Systems Ltd

Gareth is a leading expert on advice and technology, particularly applying to the relationship between state benefits and financial products.

 

After a number of years working on advice and technology projects for Cardiff Citizens Advice Bureaux and for the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, during which his project won the British Computer Society Award, he founded Ferret Information Systems, which is Europe’s leading specialist company providing social welfare advice technology and consultancy.

 

Amongst other leading-edge developments, Ferret produced the world’s first large scale roll-out of mobile technology in government and the world’s first WWW advice system in 1995.

Ferret works within the financial services area on tools for assessing sustainability and affordability and for holistic assessments of financial circumstances for customers.

Ferret produces the Future Benefits Model which models the effects of welfare benefits schemes on a rolling five year horizon and is widely used by researchers in academic and other organisations.

 

 

Gareth speaks, broadcasts and writes widely on welfare reform, social security, the practice and technology of advice work, and on the application of mobile technology, in the UK and abroad

Liz Murphy

Steering Group Member, UK Values Alliance

Liz’s work is centred around discovering and putting values into practice – at a personal level, in organisations and in society as a whole. She combines 20+ years’ experience in culture and leadership development in international financial services organisations with science-based mind-body practices to advise, mentor and develop leaders driving organisational change and developing values-driven cultures.

 

The UK Values Alliance is a non-profit collaborative group seeking to put values at the heart of society by helping individuals and organisations become more aware of, understand and live their values.

 

As a steering group member, Liz is part of the leadership team that co-ordinates World Values Day, a successful global campaign to bring attention to values and values-based action around the world.

Prof. Paul Moxey Bsc (Eng)

MBA, ACA, FCIS Professor of Corporate Governance, London South Bank University

Governance, culture and risk management consultant, expert witness, trainer and author

 

Paul is an acknowledged expert in corporate governance and risk management and for 13 years led ACCA’s (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) global thought leadership on these subjects.  He now works with boards and executive teams in assessing and improving their culture and governance and risk management practices to improve organisational performance and resilience.  He also writes and trains boards and others on governance, board effectiveness, risk, business ethics and corporate culture and recently wrote a text book on corporate governance for ICSA.

 

Paul is visiting professor of Corporate Governance at London South Bank University, co-chairman of the CRSA Forum, a network of practitioners established in 1994 interested in the behavioural and cultural aspects of risk, governance and organisational performance, a fellow of scenario and futures consultants SAMI Consulting, a board member of the UK Policy Governance Association and an editorial board member of a governance journal.  He is a trustee of a sailing club and has been chairman of a small housing charity, and started and sold a successful small retail and printing business.

 

Paul is a chartered accountant and a chartered secretary and earlier in his career was a company secretary and group financial controller of a small UK listed company and then a larger unlisted company with 5,000 staff.

 

His publications include:

 

ICSA’s Certificate in Corporate Governance 2018

 

Incentivising ethics 2016

Capitalism and the Concept of the ‘Public Good’

Culture and Channelling Corporate Behaviour Summary of Findings.

Creating Value Through Governance: Towards a New Accountability.

Risk and Reward Tempering the Pursuit of Profit.

Corporate Governance and the Credit Crunch

Siva Shankar

Interim Projects & Transactions Services, FTSE 250

Siva has 20 years international experience in senior roles in industry sectors including brand deployment / franchising / financial services / technology / professional services / construction / real estate / building materials in Fortune 500 and in private equity backed organisations.

 

He has lived and worked in the UK, Continental Europe & Asia Pacific.

 

He also dedicates time every week to pro bono / altruistic work to make a difference where possible and is a strong believer that every single person can make a difference for the better

Martin Rich

Co-Founder & Executive Director, Future-Fit Foundation

Martin Rich is a sustainability and impact investment specialist, with over 20 years’ experience in both mainstream and social investment.

Martin co-founded Future-Fit Foundation 5 years ago with a vision of helping create a society which is environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive. The foundation’s free-to-use tools enable businesses to take practical steps towards – and ultimately beyond – the SDGs, and empower investors to understand the total impact of their portfolios and thus direct capital accordingly.

Martin previously spent 7 years as Sales Director at Social Finance Ltd, where he focused on developing the investor base for social impact investments, including the first Social Impact Bonds. Before that he worked for 13 years in international investment banking on structured debt and derivative products for JP Morgan, HSBC and UBS.

Martin has a passion for sustainable development and poverty relief, focusing his pro bono efforts in both the UK and internationally with Access Foundation, Social Investment Business, Panahpur Foundation, and Christian Aid. He is also a former member of the Asset Allocation Working Group for the G7 Social Investment Task Force.

Sue Lewis

Independent Board Member & Financial Services Consumer Consultant

Sue is an independent Board member and consultant. She is a Trustee Director at The People’s Pension, a leading UK multi-employer scheme. She is also a Trustee of UK national charities StepChange debt charity, the FairBanking Foundation and Surviving Economic Abuse. Until December 2018, Sue chaired the Financial Services Consumer Panel, an independent statutory body that advises the UK Financial Conduct Authority on consumer issues in financial services regulation.

 

Sue is a member representative on the EIOPA Occupational Pensions Stakeholder Group, and was previously a member of of the European Commission’s Financial Services User Group. She is also a consultant specialising in financial education, financial inclusion and consumer protection regulation, working with international organisations such as the OECD and Alliance for Financial Inclusion.

 

Sue was previously a senior civil servant, working in HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office and Department for Education.

 

Sue has a B.Sc degree in Mathematics and a Masters degree in Statistical Methods.

Antony Elliott

OBE, FCIB, Founder, The Fairbanking Foundation

Antony Elliott is founder of The Fairbanking Foundation. He spent over ten years as Group Risk Director of a major retail bank having worked for UK and international banks previously.

 

He has been actively involved in researching the field of financial well-being (“FWB”) since 2004 and has many published reports. The Fairbanking Foundation was formed as a charity in 2008 to improve FWB through better financial products and services. It conducts research, provides advice and is the certification body for the Fairbanking Mark. The Foundation is the only accredited certification body for financial products in the UK.

 

He has worked on financial capability measurement and behaviour change with MAS and its predecessor body (CFEB), currently sitting on the Research and Evaluation Group.

 

Antony has a degree in Banking and International Finance from City University and a master’s in Operational Research from Imperial College, London. In 2014 he was awarded an OBE for services to bank customers.

Robert Dellner

Managing Director,
I3 Partners

Robert studied Economics and Business Administration in Stockholm and London respectively, followed by Finance and Investments Management at LBS and Clinical Psychology at ICP. More recently, Robert completed his PHD on Integral Development with Trans4M, Geneva which thesis led to the synthesis of his recent book entitled Integral Impact Investments, published in 2020.

With deep experience and expertise in finance and investments, he has been MD of Structured Products, UBS, Head of Market Sales and Credit Officer, Europe at Citigroup and Head of High Yield Sales & Research, Europe at BNPParibas. Subsequently he was made Global Head of the Client Solutions Group at Fortis Bank (now BNPParibasFortis) and member of EXCO where he also worked extensively on Organisational culture and business development and later with external bodies such as the FSA on culture impact within the finance industry.

Following this he worked as a Psychotherapist within the NHS and in private practice. He more recently was the Chief Credit Officer for the FinTech firm Assetz Capital and Head of Impact and Strategy at Lintel Capital where he helped to design a full spectrum Impact Investment strategy. He has always looked to engage with people and organisations of high integrity and who have the intention to develop and grow their firms and themselves in the process through a transformational journey.

Among others, he is a member of the International Bankers Association, (WCIB), the Society for Organisational Learning, (SoL), Institute of Business Ethics,(Ibe), the Chartered Institute of Credit Managers, (CICM), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, (RSA).

Joss Tantram

Director, WBCSD & Founding Partner, Terrafiniti

Joss is a Director of WBCSD’s Redefining Value programme, dedicated to the development of initiatives and tools to align finance, business and true sustainability.

 

Joss is also a founding partner at Terrafiniti LLP, a pioneering sustainability and systems consultancy and leads their innovation initiative, Towards 9 Billion.

 

Joss Tantram is an expert in sustainable strategy, reporting and management, with 26 years’ experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors in the UK, Europe and world-wide.

 

Joss is the author of a wide range of practical guidance for sustainability professionals as well as the Towards 9 Billion book series – presenting big, playful, hopeful ideas for a sustainable, equitable future. Available from Amazon.

 

www.terrafiniti.com

Mark Evans

Group Business Development Director, Tavistock Investments

Mark has worked in the Financial Services Sector for over 30 years.

 

Having worked for various Insurance companies and Fund Managers, he decided to form his own IFA brokerage in several locations across the UK. In 2000 he decided to scale down his operation which culminated in MBO’s for his advisers and then moved to work in the private client sector.

 

As well as running his own successful brokerage, Mark also has excellent experience of working with the expat community as he set up and ran a successful brokerage in Portugal as well as running his UK business interests . In 2012, he was recruited into major Financial Advisory group as a Business Development Consultant and was quickly promoted to Business Development Director. Six months later he was promoted to Managing Director. In 2017 he left to join Tavistock Investments PLC as Group Business Development Director.

 

Mark is a member of several Advisory and Steering groups within the Financial Services Sector and is a keen advocate of Transparency and Fairness.

Flora Coleman

Head of Government Relations, TransferWise

Flora Coleman joined TransferWise – one of the fairest, easiest and most transparent ways to manage money across borders – as global Head of Government Relations in early 2016. This followed a decade of senior political advisory work, including nearly three years as a Special Adviser to the Leader and Chief Whip in the UK Upper House.

 

Flora has worked most policy areas but has a particular specialism in European politics and financial services. She played a key role in delivering the Cross-Border payments regulation, pushing for global transparency and to secure a law in the EU which means that from Q2 2020 the 500 million people in the EU will know what it costs to make an international payment. This law will lead to an addition €4bn in the European economy from day one.

 

In 2019 she was awarded as a stand out top 5 policymaker and regulatory expert in fintech by Innovate Finance, as well as the 4th most influential woman in UK public affairs. Flora advises start ups on political relations and is on the Steering Board of Coadec – the policy voice of start ups.

 

In her spare time she is the National Deputy Chair of the Tory Reform Group – an independent group which brings together members and friends of the Conservative Party to promote the values of One Nation Conservatism. She is an advocate for diversity in business and technology companies, and speaks passionately about the power of mentoring.

Mark Turner

Managing Director, Duff & Phelps

Mark is a Managing Director within Duff & Phelps’ Regulatory Consulting practice, specialising in risk management, control, governance and accountability within the financial services sector.

 

He has over 20 years of experience working in the financial services industry, in professional services and regulation.
Mark has advised financial services firms on regulatory matters since 2013, prior to which he was a Senior Risk Specialist at the PRA and FSA, working within the Risk Specialists Division. During his time as a regulator, Mark reviewed the control infrastructure at several leading international insurers and banking groups. Before joining the FSA, Mark had a career within investment banking for over eight years and spent six years as an entrepreneur in the retail sector.

Mark has become one of the UK industry’s leading advisors on individual accountability and the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR), having advised some of the largest banks, insurers, brokers and other financial services firms on both implementation and the ongoing expectations of Senior Managers and individuals subject to the Certification Regime.

 

Advising a number of major financial banking institutions on SMCR implementation, including leading the implementation working with the Compliance function at one of the UK’s largest banks.

Advising one of the UK’s largest insurers on their compliance with the requirements of the Senior Insurance Managers Regime
(SIMR), including a review of Statements of Responsibilities and the Governance Map.

 

Designing a risk management framework, policy framework, governance arrangements, Compliance structure, three lines of defence model and policy and process implementation at a large financial services firm.

Leading a review of front to back controls at a European investment bank, following accounting irregularities and regulatory challenge. Recommending control improvements, and advising management of regulatory expectations and industry best practice.

Reviewing the governance, risk, compliance and control arrangements at a major general insurer, providing a report with findings and recommendations for improvements.

As a regulator, following a high profile rogue trading incident, reviewing the control infrastructure at a large European investment bank, advising the Supervision team on remediation actions; supported the FSA enforcement team in formal enforcement interviews with senior management.

 

Qualifications:

Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (FCA)

BSc (Hons), First Class, Mathematics, Imperial College

Romi Savova

Chief Executive Officer, PensionBee

Romi is Chief Executive Officer of PensionBee, the leading online pension manager she founded to simplify pension savings in the UK, following a harrowing pension transfer experience of her own.

 

Romi began her career at Goldman Sachs at the height of the 2007 global financial crisis in the Credit Risk Management and Advisory Division, working in New York and London. In 2012 she joined Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking Division to advise major banks, insurance companies and pension providers.

 

In 2014 Romi followed her entrepreneurial spirit to become employee number four and Head of Corporate Development at Credit Benchmark, which has subsequently grown to be one of the world’s most successful B2B data start-ups. Fascinated by the emerging world of financial technology, Romi incorporated PensionBee shortly thereafter.

 

Romi received an MBA from Harvard Business School as a George F. Baker scholar and graduated summa cum laude from Emory University.

 

In 2017, she was named Entrepreneur of the Year at computing.co.uk’s Women in IT Excellence awards.

John Howard

Former Chair, Financial Services Consumer Panel

John Howard joined the BBC as one of the leading voices on Radio 4. He presented documentaries, phone-ins and discussion programmes, winning several awards. He became best known as the consumer’s champion on the daily magazine programme ‘You and Yours’, which he presented for 14 years.

 

In 1997 he was invited to join the Mortgage Code Compliance Board as an independent director. He subsequently became a member of the Financial Services Consumer Panel, which he chaired for 3 years until 2008.

 

Between 2006 and 2008 he was a member of the Market Participants Group of CESR, the European committee of securities regulators, and he also joined the Treasury’s Retail Financial Services Group. On stepping down from the Consumer Panel, he joined the Board of the Financial Ombudsman Service and also became a Non Executive Director of the energy Regulator, Ofgem.

 

In 2010 he was appointed as an Independent Commissioner by the Treasury for the Equitable Life Payments Commission.  He served on the With Profits Committee and the Independent Governance Committee of Scottish Widows. He was a Trustee of the Thalidomide Trust. He is currently Vice Chair and Senior Independent Director of the Family Building Society and a Non Executive Director of the Banking Competition Remedies Company.  He is Chief Executive of the company he founded, Consumer Insights, which provides advice on principles based regulation and fairness in the financial, energy and water sectors.

Annemarie Borg

FRSA DES France, Founder and Director, Antara Project

Environmentalist, Educator and Speaker for Ocean Preservation, Climate Change and Education Reform.
Visual / Artist / Photographer / Composer / Musician / Singer / Performance Coach

 

Founder and Director of the Antara Project
French and Swedish extraction

 

DES in Business and International Comparative Law from the University Paris

 

Opera Performance and Music History (London)
Counselling and psychotherapy (London)

On the Antara Project and my work:
Antara means from the heart. This project relies on communication, imagination and transparency. It aims to raise awareness in many areas which affect us all today and
for the future. (Education, Information, Climate Change, Ocean Conservation, Digital Inequality, Poverty and Social Change in a Global Perspective.) I firmly believe that “creativity” has an important place in our education system in order to empower the next generations to face and create a brighter future.

CREATIVITY and EDUCATION To teach any subject needs to include allowing one who learns and one who teaches to be creative and imaginative…To learn to think for oneself is imperative.

creativity > self esteem > inner strength > focus > courage >
commitment > empowers us to tackle change and leads to a
happier state of being

In the stillness we seek there lies an inevitable motion called Change.

Peter Uhlenbruch

AODP Investor Engagement Officer. ShareAction

Peter Uhlenbruch currently leads investor engagement within ShareAction for the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP), which publicly assesses and ranks how the world’s largest institutional investors are strategically responding to climate change.

He is also the lead author of the ‘Winning Climate Strategies’ research report, which comprehensively reviews the leading climate strategies of 22 global asset owners including common features, barriers faced and practical advice for other asset owners.

 

He has a background in teaching business ethics at a range of Australian universities (including Monash University and RMIT) as well as industry experience in corporate governance research (at Ownership Matters), ESG ratings research (MSCI) and climate governance research (CDP).

Sital Cheema

Sustainability Investment Consultant, Jaanu Consulting

Sital has 15 years of investment experience across a broad range of disciplines including ESG and Climate Change Specialist, Chair of Global Thought Leadership Forum, institutional DB and DC business development, building strong investment consultant / client relationships as well as researching fund managers and monitoring their ongoing performance via due diligence.

 

Sital is responsible for publications, research and thought leadership, trustee training and advising institutional clients on how to genuinely integrate ESG into their overall investment strategy and underlying portfolios.

 

She speaks at conferences, sits on discussion panels and drives regulation forward through government consultation and draft reviews of new legislation.

 

In March 2019, she was appointed Steering Group Member to provide technical expertise on the BSI’s Sustainability Investment Management Standards Project to develop PAS 7341.

 

Sital is an advocate of enhanced transparency of both physical and transition risks associated with climate change. Her ambition is to encourage a collaborative standardised approach leveraging the existing TCFD framework, Cambridge Impact Framework, ClimateWise Physical and Transition Risk Frameworks and SASB’s model from the stock level upwards.

 

Transparency Task Force Ambassador (February 2019)

 

Member of the Sustainable Finance Network.

Johan Cras

Managing Director Kempen Capital Managment

Johan Cras is Head of Institutional Relations at Kempen Capital Management, a specialist asset manager with a sharp focus and clear investment philosophy, currently managing €59.9 billion of client assets (as per 30th June 2018). Kempen Capital Management offers comprehensive fiduciary investment solutions and a number of specific investment strategies.

 

Prior to joining Kempen as Managing Director for the London team in 2016, Johan was a member of the Executive Committee of Achmea Investment Management, where he was responsible for the fiduciary management business and before that, he held several executive positions at Russell Investments, serving most recently as Chief Executive EMEA in London.

 

Johan is a member of the Kempen Capital Management Executive Committee.

 

Press release:

 

https://www.kempen.com/en/news-and-knowledge/persberichten-2019/johan-cras-appointed-transparency-task-force-ambassador

Professor Michael Mainelli

FCCA, FCSI (Hon), FBCS Executive Chairman, Z/Yen Group

A qualified accountant, securities professional, computer specialist, and management consultant, educated at Harvard University and Trinity College Dublin, Michael gained his PhD at the London School of Economics where he was also a Visiting Professor.

 

He began his career as a research scientist, later becoming an accountancy-firm partner and a director of Ministry of Defence research. During a spell in merchant banking in 1994, he co-founded Z/Yen, the City of London’s leading commercial think-tank.  He has led Z/Yen from creating smart ledgers (aka blockchains) through the Financial £aboratory, Taskforce 2000, Long Finance, Global Financial Centres Index, Global Green Finance Index, and Global Intellectual Property Index.

 

Michael is an Alderman of the City of London for Broad Street, a non-executive director of two listed firms and a regulator, Emeritus Professor at Gresham College, Fellow of Goodenough College, and Past Master of the Worshipful Company of World Traders. His third book, The Price of Fish: A New Approach to Wicked Economics and Better Decisions, won the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards Finance, Investment & Economics Gold Prize.

Joe St Clair

UK Director, World Sustainability Development Forum

After a successful 18-year career as a Senior Executive at ‘Nationwide Building Society’ managing large projects and internal departments, Joe then enjoyed a second career as an ‘International Management Consultant’ for Logica/CMG working all over the world at Board level in some of the world’s leading Companies solving corporate problems.

 

His clients included Vodafone, M&S, DHL, Nat West, Prudential, EE, Thomas Cook, Morgan Stanley, The Environment Agency and many others.

 

In addition to his corporate work Joe is an established professional Writer and Conference Speaker with over 3000 articles published to date in leading magazines as well as the author of a number of books. He is also a fully qualified Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, ‘Reiki Energy Healer’ and Entrepreneur.

 

From 2014-2018 Joe worked closely with eminent philosopher, scientist and writer Ervin Laszlo and was the Managing Director of the ‘Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research’ (L-INPR) in Tuscany, Italy – a conference centre and think-tank which brings together world experts in the fields of holistic and alternative health, consciousness, spirituality, sustainability and world issues.

Joe is the author of the best-selling life-coaching book ‘100 Tips for Total Life Fulfilment’ with more books to be published in 2019 including ‘EarthPulse’ which analyses and attempts to solve the world’s most critical problems including climate change, pollution, poverty, corporate corruption, deforestation and human rights. In 2016 Joe was invited to take on the role of ‘Global President’ of ‘Eternea’ the US based organisation founded by the 6th man-on-the-moon, Astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Eternea is an organisation focused on research into Consciousness, Immortality and World Issues.

 

Joe is also the newly appointed UK Director of the “World Sustainability Development Forum” (WSDF) which is focused on meeting the targets of the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDG’s) and the ‘Paris Agreement’ on climate change, and works closely with WSDF Global President, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, former Chairman of the IPCC (Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change).

Wendy Addison

CEO, Speak Out-Speak Up

Wendy Addison began her career as a professional ballet dancer, qualifying as an Chartered Accountant in the 1980s after being laid off with an injury. Climbing the corporate ladder, Wendy became the only female executive in her team, operating at board level as the International Group Treasurer for a publicly listed company.

 

Standing up for the values that support her principles Wendy attempted to report malfeasance, committed by the joint CEOs, internally but was met with purposeful obfuscation. Demonstrating courage and a willingness to endure the danger of being exposed, Wendy took a moral stand against bribery and corruption and blew the whistle externally.

 

Wendy’s story is a human story of courage and endurance, of hope and justice. It covers many valuable teaching moments, including the psychological conflict of Speaking Up, the challenge for leaders to Listen Up, the importance of intra group dynamics and the long term emotional pain of shame and regret for those who feel disempowered to act.

 

Since securing justice in an 11-year war of attrition, Wendy has maximised her experience through studying the Social psychology and Neuroscience of Decision making at Stanford University in addition to being accredited to train for Courageous Conversations, a course developed over twenty-five years at Stanford by Professor Emeritus Philip Zimbardo and Dr Lynne Henderson Ph.D.

 

Wendy founded SpeakOut SpeakUp Ltd, a consultancy and training company in 2012 and provides training, lectures and talks to move people towards Courageous Conversations before they head for the exit marked ‘Whistleblowing’

 

Wendy is at the cutting edge of behavioural change, currently in collaboration with the University of East London‘s Virtual Reality Lab to develop Virtual Reality immersions for Courageous Conversations.

 

Additionally, Wendy is a lecturer at Surrey University and Warwick Business School, is a contributing member of the UNCAC Coalition, the Corruption Research Group of the Surrey University and sits on the advisory board of the Whistleblowing Research Unit which runs the International Whistleblowing Research Network at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. Wendy has recently written a white paper for and on behalf of the OECD, called Openness in Organisations. She will be presenting this paper to governmental heads, in Paris in 2019.

 

Wendy’s clients and engagements have spanned the globe and range from speaking at TED Tokyo, providing training for the Council of Europe to addressing the needs and goals of companies such as BP, Nationwide, Mubadala in the UAE and Massy in Trinidad.

Bob Compton

Managing Director, ARC Benefits Limited

Bob has over 30 years in strategic corporate pensions consulting at board level, having worked for leading actuarial firms, brokers and insurance companies, and established a number of different ventures. Managing Director and co-owner of ARC Benefits Limited, a specialist in pensions Management & Governance systems.

 

A long standing member of the East Midlands PLSA committee and a Fellowship Network Ambassador for the Pensions Management Institute, A Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute, and holder of the IIMR Certificate on Investment management.

 

Co-authored a book on Pensions Management, “108½ Tips to Tame your ‘Pensions Beastie’”, and contributed a section to an IoD handbook on workplace pensions.

 

Has provided input and Ideas in developing DWP and Pensions Protection Fund policy. Acted as the British Chambers of Commerce Pensions Policy advisor at the time Auto Enrolment legislation was developed, and instrumental in establishing the Association of Professional Pension Trustees.

 

Bob is a member of the Transparency Task Force’s Market Integrity Team, and a Transparency Trophy winner.

Andrew Mills

Founder and Director, Insight Financial Research

Andrew is an independent and expert analyst, commentator and writer on the financial industry. He works on a wide range of research-related projects, helping clients to understand and communicate the impact of economics, technology, demographics, behaviour and regulation on financial firms and the sector as a whole.

 

Andrew’s clients include world-leading companies in banking, asset management, research and consulting. He has worked for a range of national and international bodies, and been instructed as an expert witness.  Andrew works mainly in the UK and Europe, but also has extensive experience in Asia and the US.  He often speaks at industry events and is always ready to give his opinion!

 

With quixotic timing, Andrew founded Insight Financial Research in early 2008 and has been busy ever since. That followed a dozen years in professional services, first as a forensic accountant at Arthur Andersen and then in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Valuation & Strategy practice.

 

Andrew is a strong believer in the social value of finance, but – like many – feels that the industry has largely forgotten its purpose. He is a member of the TTF’s Financial Stability Team, contributed to the Team’s 2018 white paper on avoiding future crises, and was an expert participant in the RSA’s Citizens Economic Council project.

Mark Falcon

Founder and Director, Zephyre

Mark is founder and director of Zephyre, a regulatory strategy advisory firm. Zephyre is currently an expert adviser/witness on multiple complex competition and regulatory cases in financial services and technology.

 

Mark is also a policy adviser to Which? (the UK consumer representative body), an Associate Faculty member at Imperial College Business School, and has been a longstanding Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Committee.

 

Mark was previously an Executive Director at the Payment Systems Regulator, responsible for regulatory policy & strategy, and Head of Economic Regulation/chief economist at Three/CK Hutchison, the largest foreign investor in the UK, in multiple industries. Mark also helped to create Frontier Economics, Europe’s largest economic consultancy, establishing Frontier’s financial services practice.

Ruston Smith

Chairman, Tesco Pension Fund Trustee Board, Tesco DC Governance Committee, Tesco Pension Investment Limited

Ruston has over 30 years UK and international experience in the pension fund and investment industry.

 

Ruston is the Chairman of the Tesco Pension Fund Trustee Board, the Tesco DC Governance Committee and Tesco Pension Investment Limited (FCA approved investment business managing £14bn of Tesco’s UK DB assets), Chair of PTL and Chair of the Money Advice Service’s Financial Capability Strategy Workplace Steering Group.

 

He’s also a non executive director of JP Morgan Asset Management International Ltd, a non executive director of Smart Pension (Chair of their International Advisory Board), Director of Standard Life’s Master Trust Company, a Governor of the Pensions Policy Institute and the Chair of GroceryAid (charity for the grocery industry).

 

He was a Co Chair of the Government’s Advisory Board, leading on Engagement, of the 2017 Automatic Enrolment Review. Ruston is a former Chair and Non Exec Director of the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, former Trustee Director of People’s Pension and the former Group Director of Pensions and Insurable Risk at Tesco.

Sunil Chadda

Advisory Board Member, Association of Professional Fund Investors

Sunil is an Advisory Board member and Special Adviser to the Association of Professional Fund Investors (APFI).

 

Sunil has 32 years’ experience in the asset management sector and is regarded as a UK leader on the subject of investment costs and charges and the impact of regulation thereon.

 

Sunil is passionate about cost transparency and seeks better social and financial outcomes for consumers of financial services. An asset management subject matter expert with 32 years’ experience in the asset management sector here in the UK, and abroad.

 

Sunil has spent the last 17 years or so consulting at numerous asset management firms and was an Associate Principle, Investment Costs & Charges, at Grant Thornton.

Jon Spain

Treasurer, Law For Life

Jon qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (as it was) in 1977, since when most of his career has been in different aspects of DB pensions.

 

Having formerly worked at two large private sector consultancies for 16 years, he was employed by Government Actuary’s Department from January 1990 until May 2018.

 

Professionally, he was a member of the Pension Fund Valuations & Market Values Working Party (which reported in October 1999) and the Valuation Rates of Interest Working Party (which was terminated before work was completed), serving on Pensions CPD Committee from 2010 until 2016 and is currently a member of the SIAS Committee.

 

His focus is trying to explain why the long-term future is not at all well addressed by short-term measurements, a battle still being fought.

David Stripp

Proposition Manager, David Stripp Limited

David is a Lead on the Market Integrity Team (MIT) of the Transparency Taskforce. He has project managed the MIT’s 18 month project on Codes of Conduct & Codes of Ethics in Financial Services which has resulted in their White Paper released in July 2018.

 

With a background in pensions & benefits David spent over twenty years with Marsh and Mercer managing the SW region of Mercer Employee Benefits, and latterly in a proposition development and project & change management role.

 

Since 2011 David has worked with leading banks, insurance companies and national IFA firms developing propositions that have focused on aspects of governance and bringing change to the delivery of financial services. Projects managed have included developing and bringing to market a new workplace pension offering for SME clients of Mercer; building a product governance framework for a leading insurance company; defining an Operational Risk Management model for a national IFA firm; developing a governance proposition for Auto Enrolment clients of Barclays Corporate & Employer Solutions; developing a DB to DC proposition for a leading IFA firm; and developing a benefit package to sit alongside Auto Enrolment.

 

David also acted as Co-Chair of the Friends of Auto Enrolment Governance Task Force, playing a large part in the drafting of their Guide to AE.

William Price

CEO, D3P Global

William Price is CEO of D3P Global, a company dedicated to building better pension systems globally.

 

He is an international pension expert who has worked for the World Bank – for whom he still works as a consultant – UK Treasury, UK Pension Regulator and in collaboration with the OECD and International Organization of Pension Supervisors (IOPS).

 

He co-created the Outcomes Based Assessments (OBA) and Outcomes and Risk Based Supervision (ORBS) models for pensions and has published extensively including the recent book “Saving the Next Billion from Old Age Poverty”.

 

He is also a Program Leader and Advisory Board member for Insurance and Pensions at the Toronto Centre for Global Leadership in Financial Supervision and an Ambassador for the Transparency Taskforce.

 

He gained his first degree from Oxford University and has a Masters in Economics from University College London.

James Daley

Managing Director, Fairer Finance

James Daley has been a consumer campaigner and financial journalist for more than 18 years. Before launching Fairer Finance, he worked for the consumer group, Which?, where he campaigned for a better deal for customers of banks and insurers in the wake of the financial crisis.

 

James is frequently interviewed on national television and radio, and has regularly appeared on shows such as Watchdog, Rip-off Britain, Dispatches and Supershoppers.

 

Before working at Which?, James spent 10 years as a business and finance newspaper journalist, latterly as the The Independent’s personal finance editor and cycling columnist.

 

He lives with his wife and two children in Tooting, where he is also a local councillor.

Andrew Parry

Head of Sustainable Investing, Hermes Investment Management

Andrew Parry is Head of Sustainable Investing and a member of the Hermes Strategy Group. He joined the firm in 2009, initially as Chief Executive and Co-Head of Investment for Hermes Sourcecap, now Hermes European Equities, becoming Head of Equities in 2014 and taking on responsibility for developing Impact investing in August of 2016. In September of 2017 he became Head of Sustainable Investing to reflect the commitment of Hermes to building on their success in responsible investing.

 

In 2006, Andrew jointly founded Sourcecap with the aim of building a best-in-class investment boutique focused on excellence in European equity management.

 

Prior to this, Andrew established Pembroke Capital Management in 2003 and successfully launched the Magenta Fund, a global equity non-directional fund.

 

Before that, Andrew worked at Northern Trust Global Investments (Europe) Ltd as Chief Investment Officer of International Equities and was responsible for the management of global, international and regional portfolios.

 

He has also held a variety of senior investment roles, including Head of International Equities at Julius Baer Investments, Chief Investment Officer at Lazard Brothers Asset Management, and Head of UK Equities at Baring Asset Management.

 

Andrew holds an MA in Mathematics from the University of St Andrews. Andrew is Co-Chair of the UNEP Financial Initiative Positive Impact Steering Group and a member of the Investment Committee of the Trafalgar House Pension Trust.

 

He was formerly an independent investment advisor to the Investment Sub-Committee of the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme and a non-equity director of Aerion Fund Managers.

Mike Barrett

Consulting Director, the lang cat.

Mike is consulting director, and sole-proprietor of the lang cat Isle of Wight office.

 

A driver and survivor of platform mergers, migrations and RDR he held a number of senior roles at Skandia and Old Mutual Wealth, most recently Head of Platform Marketing.

 

His favourite platform is platform 4 at Southampton.

Mark Polson

Founder and Principal, the lang cat

The lang cat is a specialist platforms, pensions and investment consultancy.

 

From its Edinburgh base, the lang cat works with platforms, life companies, asset managers and large advisory firms helping them interpret regulation, develop new propositions, turn marketing strategy into action and articulate their services in such a way that people without a financial services degree have a hope of understanding them.

 

Bit by bit it aims to leave the industry just a little better than it found it.

 

The lang cat is also a strategic communications agency, offering PR and communication services to clients across retail investment, protection and fintech. The comms guys have access to the techy guys, and the techy guys are helped by the comms guys to communicate with impact. It’s a good mix.

 

Mark is a prolific writer, contributor to the trade press and international public speaker, even when people ask him not to be.

 

He doesn’t play guitar as much as he’d like and spends more time than is reasonable going to gigs aimed at people considerably younger and more tattooed than him.

Ian Peacock

Chief Client Officer, IG Group

Ian is currently Chief Client Officer at IG Group, a £3bn UK listed global on-line trading firm with offices in 20 countries.

 

Ian oversees a global team responsible for managing over £500m in annual client revenues. In 2016 he led the firm’s entry into the savings and investment by launching a digital wealth management platform, IG Smart Portfolios, in partnership with BlackRock. Ian is responsible for all aspects of the diversification strategy and serves as Chairman of the Investment Committee. He also served as Head of IG Group for the UK and Ireland.

 

Prior to joining the firm in 2015, Ian worked for Credit Agricole CIB as CEO of the Americas, based in New York, and later as UK CEO of their European Equity Franchise Cheuvreux. In parallel he headed their equity trading and distribution platforms globally. Ian was a member of the executive team leading various business launches, joint ventures and divisional turnarounds as well as launching one of Europe’s first MTF’s.

 

Ian’s other experience includes strategy and commercial roles at the London Stock Exchange, GE and various start-ups in the trading and investment space.

 

Ian serves on the advisory board of CoInvestor, an alternative asset investment company.

 

Ian received a BSc (Honours) in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Leeds and an MSc (Distinction) in Strategy and leadership from London Business School where he was a Sloan Fellow.

Philip Meadowcroft

Independent Shareholder Activist

Exposing the need for improved corporate and financial product transparency has been at the core of Philip’s campaigning activities which has grown out of his experience as chairman and investment trustee of his family trading company’s SASS. He came to prominence gaining wide media coverage during the 2012 Shareholder Spring through critical AGM comments on excessive boardroom pay.

He demonstrated that company AGM’s could be – and should and indeed have been – converted, where appropriate, into robust challenges from ordinary retail shareholders – the more so when institutional shareholders generally prefer to stay away from such meetings.

He applied the same relentless approach in pursuing and tackling Andrew Bailey at the FSA (then FCA) with particular reference to the way in which the regulator had found itself hamstrung by its application of the so-called principles of Maxwellisation (a concept which quaintly happens to immortalise one of Britain’s biggest corporate crooks) which seriously delayed publication of the FCA’s report into the collapse of HBoS. The FCA ‘s separate report, instructed by the Treasury Select Committee, into the suitability of the former HBoS directors to serve as company directors was eventually published, jointly by the PRA and FCA, in August 2022. The conclusion was not to pursue the investigation. No reasons were given for the decision. Given the amount of available evidence and the conclusion of other investigations it is unthinkable that the PRA/FCA August 2022 will not be challenged.

He is an Ambassador for the Transparency Task Force – a world-wide think tank and forum of financial commentators, academics, financial professionals, politicians – dedicated to improving transparency in financial services. He graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in Industrial Economics.

Rory Maguire

CEO Fundhouse

Rory has been in the investment industry since 1997. Prior to co-founding Fundhouse in 2007, he was CEO of a fund management firm. He has had various executive roles at large and small fund managers and has significant experience inside both active and passive fund management firms.

 

At Fundhouse he focusses his efforts on fund research, asset allocation and overall business strategy.  Fundhouse is an independent, owner-managed investment consultant providing manager research, asset allocation and portfolio construction to institutional investors and wealth managers.

 

Fundhouse is regulated by the FCA.

Steve Conley

Founder & CEO, Values Based Adviser and Principal Leader of TTF’s Market Integrity Team

Values Based Adviser is an international operation helping individuals connect with values-based advisers, organisations and investments, and helping social entrepreneurs in developing countries set-up values-based investments.

In addition to his role at Values Based Adviser, Steve is:

– Non-Executive Director, Workplace Pensions Direct

– Director of The Blair Project, using motorsport as a tool for engagement to enthuse and inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and digital industries

– Former Head of Investments of HSBC

– Former Head of Savings & Investment Strategy RBS Group

– Former Head of Wrap & Innovation at Santander

– Former Chair of British Bankers’ Association Bancassurance Steering Group

 

Steve has worked at a senior level in the pensions and investments sector since 1982 and is known for bringing the first wrap platforms and the first retail multi-asset funds to the UK. He has been a chartered insurance professional since 1989, twice Jubilee Prize winner at IIM and twice Broker Prize winner at BIIBA.

 

Steve is an active participant in several of the TTF’s Teams and is Principal Leader of the Market Integrity Team, which he initiated.

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TTF Press Release, Steve Conley appointed Ambassador
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JB Beckett

Non Executive Director & Author of “New Fund Order”

Affectionately known as JB, Jon Beckett was a well known and outspoken professional fund investor and analyst for two decades until he retired in 2018. His CV included assessing asset managers and the world’s largest single asset mandate (£109bn) for Lloyds Banking Group where he was also co-Lead if its Responsible Investing framework for the Insurance division.

 

As a Non Executive Director (NED) JB continues to be a vocal campaigner for better fund governance and value. A campaigner for professionalism and better standards in fund investing and due diligence; as Emeritus of the Association of Professional Fund Investors he previously led a global team to tackle issues arising from transparency, sustainability and technology. As Author of ‘#NewFundOrder’ and Co-Author of ‘The WealthTec Book’ and ‘Paytech Book’ JB has been a thought leader in the digitalisation and sustainability of asset management, speaking and writing globally.

 

A dedicated educator, JB is a guest lecturer at Stirling and Herriot Watt Universities and has written textbooks up to NQ Level 7 for the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investments, with which he is Chartered and a member of its disciplinary panel. He is a member of the Stirling Student Investment Managed Fund oversight committee and a NED for Royal London and SVM Limited.

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TTF Press Release, JB Beckett appointed Ambassador
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Markus Krebsz

FRSA, GCRP and Chartered MSCI, The Group of Experts on Risk Management in Regulatory Systems

Markus is a seasoned Risk specialist and Government advisor with 25 years’ experience in global financial markets, thereof almost 20 years in managing risk.

 

Executive director and Board member of a new UK challenger bank. Previously, as Interim CRO, instrumental in launching/ establishing a high-profile capital markets/ lending institution start-up for the UK government and playing a pivotal role in achieving its strong investment-grade ratings. Current member of a United Nations working party on risk & regulation; previously advising the World Bank, the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).

 

Co-Founder and acting Chairman of the Culture & Conduct Group, Chairman (ex-officio) of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI) FinTech Forum. Ambassador of the Transparency Task Force, member of its Banking team and contributor to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Fair Business Banking. Mentor/ member at Google Campus.

 

Well regarded thought-leader and lecturer with some of the world’s best academic institutions and frequent appearances at Industry’s top speaking circles. Published author/ editor of several books, incl. on the Global financial crisis as well as other technical publications. Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Ralph Frank

Co-Head of DC, Cardano

Ralph was part of the team that set up Cardano’s UK business in 2007. Prior to Cardano, Ralph was European Director of Consulting at Mercer Investment Consulting. Ralph is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. He graduated as a Bachelor of Economic Science from the University of Witwatersrand. Ralph is a leader of the TTF’s Costs & Charges Team and a Transparency Trophy winner.

 

Ralph is also on the Financial Conduct Authority’s Institutional Disclosure Working Group being Chaired by Dr. Chris Sier.

Dr. Anna Tilba

Associate Professor in Strategy and Governance, Durham University Business School

Dr. Anna Tilba is a researcher and a Lecturer in Strategy and Corporate Governance and a Director of Corporate Engagement at the Newcastle University Business School. She joined NUBS in 2012 from the University of Liverpool Management School where she obtained her PhD in corporate governance and where she was teaching Strategy both at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

 

Her research interests include pension fund investment, financial intermediation and networks, accountability, corporate governance and investor engagement.  Anna has an emerging record of publications in top tier academic journals. She also reviews papers for such scholarly journals as Corporate Governance: An International Review, Organization Studies, European Management Review, Business History and her papers appear at various international conferences.

 

Anna has been a member of the Advisory Committee on Fiduciary Duties of Investment Intermediaries for the Law Commission. The Consultation Paper on Fiduciary Duties is commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and arises from the Kay Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision-Making.

 

More recently, Anna has carried out research for the UK Financial Conduct Authority on the Effectiveness of the Oversight Committees as past of the FCA’s Asset Management Market Study

 

Furthermore, Anna is a member of the Transparency Task Force’s Costs & Charges Team and the International Best Practice Team; and she frquently participates at TTF events.

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TTF Press Release: Dr. Anna Tilba appointed Ambassador
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Con Keating

Head of Research, Brighton Rock Group

Con has been a member of the steering committee of the financial econometrics research centre at the University of Warwick. He has held senior positions at several international institutions including the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies, Societe Universitaire Europeene de Recherche en Finance and the OECD’s private pensions committee. Con has published widely on the regulation of financial institutions and pension systems and has developed new statistical tools for financial data analysis. Con is involved with many of the Transparency Task Force’s Teams and is a winner of the Transparency Trophy. He speaks frequently at TTF events.

Daniel Godfrey

Founder, The People’s Trust

For most of the last twenty years Daniel has held CEO roles at two trade associations. Firstly, as Director General of the Association of Investment Companies for eleven years and then, for three years, he was CEO of the Investment Association – the trade body for the UK’s £5.5 trillion investment management sector. At the Investment Association, Daniel drove forward the development of a client-centric set of Investment Principles. In addition to his role at The People’s Trust, he is currently a Non-Executive Director of Big Issue Invest Fund Management, the Investor Forum and the Ethical Capitalism Group. Daniel is a member of the Transparency Task Force’s Costs & Charges Team and a Transparency Trophy winner. Daniel is a frequent speaker at TTF events.

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TTF Press Release, Daniel Godfrey appointed Ambassador
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Catherine Howarth

Chief Executive Officer,
ShareAction

Catherine is CEO at ShareAction, the leading civil society organisation in Europe promoting Responsible Investment, transparency and good governance by institutional investors. Catherine holds a First Class BA in Modern History from Oxford University and an MSc in Industrial Relations from the London School of Economics. In June 2011 she was named a ‘Rising Star of Corporate Governance’ by Yale University’s, Millstein Center. Catherine was recognised by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2014 and is a Transparency Trophy winner. Catherine is a frequent speaker at TTF events.

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TTF + ShareAction Press Release, Catherine Howarth appointed Ambassador
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David Pitt-Watson

Visiting Fellow,
Cambridge Judge Business School

David is Co-Author of ‘The Purpose of Finance’, ‘What they do with your Money’ and several other books. He Co-Chaired the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, and led the Royal Society of Arts Tomorrow’s Investor Project. David is the Treasurer of Oxfam, a Board-member at NESTA and is recognised globally as a leading thinker and practitioner in the field of responsible investment and business practice.

 

David is a winner of the Transparency Trophy and his ground-breaking work on ‘Purpose’ was the initial inspiration behind the creation of Team PISCES. David is a frequent speaker at TTF events.

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