Speakers 2020

Stefaan is an entrepreneurial finance executive with a Big 4 audit background and extensive experience in scaling companies.

He started his career 20 years ago in audit at PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium, working on multinational commercial companies in a variety of sectors.

This was followed by a 6 year career at Chiquita Brands International, where he held several positions in Finance including Financial Analyst and FP&A Manager.

Stefaan has contributed to the diversification of the Chiquita brand in Europe by starting up a new Business Unit, involving M&A and creating the finance function from scratch.

In 2010 Stefaan joined Luciad, a privately held scale-up software company based in Belgium. He started as Group Controller before being appointed CFO in 2013.

He managed several due diligence processes leading a highly successful sale of the company to Hexagon in 2017.

Stefaan holds a Master in Commercial Sciences and is a Chartered Accountant.

As an entrepreneurial business leader, Pieter Geeraerts has a track record of turning around underperforming business units, starting up new departments as well as scaling up highly performing businesses.

In his current role as CEO of MobileXpense and its affiliates, Pieter has scaled up MobileXpense from an unknown startup with a strong product to an IDC recognized major player in the industry in 18 months time.

Throughout his career, Pieter has taken up a wide variety of senior roles covering product development, sales, project management, general management and finance. This exposure to the various parts of the business has resulted in a strong conviction of the need to have ‘just enough’ strong processes: without processes a company descends into chaos, while too much processes are stifling the company.

Pieter started his career as a PhD student more than 20 years ago and joined an Alcatel spin-off to help create the first VDSL system. At Alcatel and later Alcatel-Lucent, he took up senior roles in sales, product management, project management, general management and finance. He gained deep experience with procure-to-pay software at Basware and electronic payments at Worldline.

Pieter holds a degree of Master of Science of Electrical Engineering from Ghent University, and graduated from Vlerick Management School with an MBA few years later.

Christian Moraldo, Vice President Group Financial Control & Finance Operations is currently responsible of the Finance Transformation, Finance Operations, Financial Planning, Reporting & Analysis, Business Information Management and Internal Controls for the Group.

Christian has 30 years of diversified international professional experience in Europe and Asia Pacific. Prior to his current position, Christian held several responsibilities at corporate and operational levels in all areas of Finance and in several organisations such as PPG Industries, Gemalto (ex-Gemplus), PricewaterhouseCoopers (ex-C&L) and Crédit Lyonnais.

He has a graduate degree in Economics and a diploma from the Paris Business School of Management (Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris). He has three citizenships – Brazilian, French and Swiss.

Ranu is a young, ambitious woman who Heads up the International Operations and Technology Finance function at Vocalink, MasterCard.

She is a proud mother to a 4 year old daughter and a role model and mentor to hundreds of young youths.

As Ambassador of ‘Working Options’ and an active mentor at The ‘Girls’ Network,’ Ranu executes impactful motivational talks across London to help inspire and encourage young youths to realise their full potential and become the best version of themselves.

From Podcasting, to public speaking, from author contributions, to article writing, it is with great pleasure that we invite Ranu to speak at this year’s CFO Agenda. Ranu recently delivered a presentation on ‘What it takes to become an effective Finance Business Partner: Breaking the Accounting Stereotype’ and also participated in a panel discussion on ‘Women in Diversity.’ She also came 2nd place in the Global ‘Woman of the Year In Finance’ at this year’s Future of Finance and CFO Summit in London.

Liv Watson is a Senior Director of Strategic Customer Initiatives at Workiva, with a primary focus on monitoring and evaluating new market opportunities globally. She helped found XBRL International and is one of the original developers for XBRL.

Robin Owen is the Senior Finance Director, Global Business Services and Global Procurement, at AstraZenenca, a role he has held for the last 4 years. AstraZeneca is a FTSE 100, global science-led bio-pharmaceutical business with revenues of $25b and 50,000 employees. AstraZeneca’s purpose is to push the boundaries of science to deliver life-saving medicines.

Robin has a broad experience within pharma, having worked in Operations, IT and R&D prior to his current role, and a varied industry background, partnering business leaders in automotive, banking, consultancy and pharma.

Anant co-founded AppZen in 2012 to deliver the first world-leading AI platform for modern finance teams around the world. He’s responsible for the product vision and execution of the company’s broader mission. Previously he was the VP of Applications at Fujitsu America from 2009-2012, responsible for product management, and delivery of Fujitsu’s applications and infrastructure for the enterprise and, before that, served as Fujitsu’s Senior Director of Enterprise & CRM Applications. Earlier in his career, Anant was Consultant of ASI and served as Group Head of Corporate Planning at Nimbus Communications Ltd. Anant has 15+ years of experience in software development. He has an MBA and a BS in Finance and Engineering from Mumbai University.

Director of Finance Transformation in Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), leading the Finance Strategic Initiatives team. Primarily focused on large scale change management and transformational programs, driving increased efficiency and effectiveness enabling the Finance function to become a more customer centric focused business partner. This has included the set-up of an In-House Shared Service Centre (SSC) in Bulgaria along with an FP&A Reporting & Analytics Centre of Expertise (CoE). Currently leading a major transformation across the whole Enterprise, focusing on Enterprise Performance Reporting, touching Commercial, Supply Chain and supporting functions, the goal of which is to standardise, simplify and automate management reporting to drive increased business performance, adding value to the end-2-end processes across the organisation. Prior to joining CCEP, Daniel held a number of Commercial Finance roles across a number of sectors including Telecommunications, Financial Services and IT for EE, Avaya, Citigroup, 3Com and Fujitsu. Daniel is married and has 2 children, Hannah (13) and Kara (3). 

Bruce Burrows has been in Tetra Pak’s Global Leadership Team since September 2012. His main areas of responsibility cover Finance, Control, Business Transformation and Information Technology. Responsibility for Facility & Real Estate Management, as well as Supplier Management were added in 2015 and 2019 respectively. Bruce is the Secretary of the Global Leadership Team.
Bruce joined Tetra Pak South Africa in August 1995 and he has held Finance & Business Transformation roles in Switzerland, Sweden, Russia and the Middle East.
Before joining the Tetra Pak Group, he worked at Coopers & Lybrand for 3 years.
Bruce has a Bachelor of Commerce Degree, a Post Graduate Diploma in Accounting. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant (South Africa) & Chartered Management Accountant (UK).

A global leader in Finance, Guillaume de Pommereau excels in driving business value at enterprise level and leading financial organizations across complex multinational environments.

In leadership roles with Hitachi Europe, Takeda Pharmaceuticals Europe, Newell, and Dell Computer, he has delivered significant value while developing strong business partnership and maintaining the highest standards of compliance.

Leading a team of 70 finance experts at Hitachi Europe, he focuses as much on the revenue side as on the cost side, with a view that Finance is at the heart of a company’s performance ability.

Guillaume started his career in audit in PwC in Paris 26 years ago. He worked in France, Germany and is now based in the UK. His experience covers the technology sector at Dell and KPNQwest, the consumer goods sector with Parker Pen, Waterman, Papermate, the health sector with Takeda Pharma and Alliance Healthcare and the industry sector with Hitachi.

Guillaume is a graduate from EM Lyon Business School and holds a Master in Econometrics from Paris University. In 2009, he graduated from TRIUM, a Global Executive MBA delivered by NYU Stern School of Business, HEC Paris and London School of Economics.

Ian MacTavish is Risk Director of Save the Children a $2.4bn global International NGO working in over 100 countries targeting the most marginalised and deprived children in the world.

Ian is a CFO and Business Leader with over 20 year experience in pharmaceutical, FMCG, INGO experience gained in two of the most respected blue chip organisations (AstraZeneca and Unilever) and one of the world largest INGOs (Save the Children). He is highly experience in Finance transformation leading initiatives in all three organisations. Save the Children (where Ian was also Finance Director) is embarking on a cross functional digital transformation of all its core processes that will impact all of its 27,000 staff including 1,000 in finance over a period of 5 years. In AstraZeneca, Ian was head of Global Financial Reporting and Processes and led a $100m cross functional cross business information transformation (including Finance) to change the way leaders and systems access the cross functional information they needed to deliver.

Ian is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

Markus Kobler is Global Chief Financial Officer for Allianz Global Investors and a member of its Global Executive Committee.

Markus joined Allianz Global Investors in 2013 from Bank Julius Baer & Co where he was Global Head of Onboarding and responsible for the transfer of clients and staff in the integration of Merrill Lynch International Wealth Management into Julius Baer.

Prior to this, Markus was COO Asia and Deputy CEO Bank Julius Baer, Singapore. Based in Singapore for more than six years, he was part of a team that set up Julius Baer’s operations in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and Jakarta. He was responsible for building the bank’s platform with two booking centres and oversaw the support functions including IT, Operations, Finance, Legal & Risk and HR.

Before moving to Asia, Markus helped to coordinate the integration of SBC Wealth Management into the Julius Baer Group in 2005 and was in charge of the Business Line
Management function of Julius Baer’s Asset Management division.

Before joining Julius Baer in 2003, Markus was a senior consultant at McKinsey in Zurich where he managed client merger initiatives and strategic redesign projects in the areas of performance and product management for a number of asset managers and private banks.

Markus holds a PHD in Economics from the University of Basel in Switzerland.

A Chartered Accountant and also USA qualified, Paul started his career at Deloitte & Touche where he was a Senior manager in its USA practice. This was followed by a 13 year career at Exel plc where he held a number of senior finance and operational roles including Deputy Group Finance Director and was a member of the executive board of Exel plc and Chairman of their Acquisitions and Project Review Board. Paul was appointed Group Finance Director of Hays plc in 2006 and has helped transform the business into the preeminent global specialist recruitment business with operations in 33 countries.

Mike Lipps has been Chief Executive Officer of insightsoftware since its inception in June 2018. Prior to insightsoftware, Lipps served as President and COO of MercuryGate, a leading transportation management software company, and as CEO of the Legal Software division of LexisNexis, a global legal technology and research company. Lipps spent the first 14 years of his career at Intuit Inc, where he ran multiple business lines including QuickBooks Financial Software, the leading financial and accounting software product in the United States.

As SVP of Client Solutions at Proxima, Simon has responsibility for products and solutions for one of the world largest procurement consultancies. The role as understanding the sorts of challenges that current and prospective clients face and then calibrating Proxima solutions to solve them. Simon’s team is thus accountable for presenting Proxima in the market, what we do and how we talk about it. Simon is also a regular writer and speaker on all things procurement, digital and change orientated.

Day to day Simon spends his time with some of the world’s largest and most interesting companies, learning and advising on the supplier and procurement strategies helping them to become fitter, more agile and most customer centric.

Tim Wakeford is Vice President, Financials Product Strategy, EMEA at Workday, and is responsible for setting the strategic direction of Workday’s financial products in EMEA.

Prior to joining Workday in 2017, Tim served as Finance Director on the UK Boards of Cushman & Wakefield, and previously, Willis Towers Watson. Tim has held executive level positions in the finance departments of both private and public sector organisations.

Tim is a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) and holds a BA in Politics and Government from the University of Kent.