Pankaj Alexander
Senior Manager Controller, FedEx

Pankaj Alexander is a Finance professional with 20 years experience in Finance spread over the EMEA region. His education has taken him from India to the United States and the United Kingdom. He holds a Masters in Finance from Bombay University, India and is a Qualified Chartered Accountant. Pankaj is also a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Fraud Examiner from the United States and has completed his Masters in Business Administration from Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom. His MBA dissertation was ‘Finance Shared Services and Outsourcing: Understanding its origins, current challenges and continued success’

Pankaj has worked in India, the Middle East and Europe starting with Price Waterhouse Coopers in Bombay as an Audit Senior during his three year training period followed by five years in Dubai as an Audit Manager with KPMG where he was responsible for a variety of multinational clients on diverse engagements and spread over different industries. He then moved into the express transportation sector with FedEx Express in Dubai for eight years in different roles from a Senior Finance Analyst to the Regional Financial Controller responsible for the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent, Africa and Eastern Europe. In the last four years Pankaj has been based in Brussels as the Senior Manager Controller responsible for the European Shared Service Centre. During his time here he has been closely involved in the set-up, outsourcing and in-sourcing of the Accounting activities in the Shared Service Centre.

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Jon Bell
Engagement Director for SKF and Tetra Pak,
Capgemini BPO Services

Jon Bell is a Chartered Accountant with 18 years Post Qualification Experience in Finance and Information Technology roles within the professional services sector.  He has held CFO and CIO positions in global professional service organisations, and was the operations manager for a European IT consulting practice specialising in global ERP implementations.

He is an Engagement Director for SKF and Tetra Pak and a Member of the Capgemini BPO European Management Team. 

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Kit specialises in the areas of outsourcing and complex technology transactions, advising both users and suppliers of IT and outsourcing services and in relation to all aspects of the procurement process. His work ordinarily involves him on business critical projects frequently valued in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Major clients he works for include UBS, Pearson Group/Financial Times, Dixons, TUI, Gulf International Bank, Lloyds TSB, GNER, Birds Eye Iglo, HCL Technologies, the British Council, Red Hat, Royal Bank of Scotland/ABN Amro and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as various major insurers and retail banks and other large corporates and providers of IT and outsourcing services.

He is identified as a leading outsourcing and technology lawyer by all of the leading legal directories, including the Legal 500, Legal Experts and Chambers. Recent editions of Chambers and the Legal 500 describe him as "a brilliant IT lawyer" with "a grand reputation". Kit is a Trustee of the Society of Computers and Law and chairs its Outsourcing Group. He is also a member of the Computer Law Group. A frequent speaker at industry and legal conferences both in the UK and internationally, Kit also writes for various journals on IT and outsourcing including IT Law Today, Computers and Law, and the Computer Law and Security Review, for which he is on the correspondent's panel. He is the author of two leading publications, on Computer Contracts (Sweet & Maxwell) and the Legal Protection of Computer Software (EMIS), and co-author of the chapter on IT Contracts in the Encyclopaedia of IT Law (Sweet & Maxwell).

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Adriano Cito
Region Controller Europe, Africa and Middle East & Director FSSC, JohnsonDiversey

Adriano is EMEA Region Controller at JohnsonDiversey Regional HQ in The Netherlands. He has 20 years of experience in finance, Audit, ERM, and Internal Controls in various multinational companies. In 2004 he joined JohnsonDiversey as Internal Control Director. In his current role of Region Controller he is also responsible for the implementation of the Regional FSSC and for the relationship with the BPO service provider.

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Bill Cowie has held various senior Finance roles in Manufacturing, Commercial and Corporate functions both within Tetra Pak and the BOC Group in London, Singapore, Sydney and Lausanne. He is responsible for the continuous improvement of the finance and control business processes, information technology investment prioritisation and implementation; and Finance transformation projects. He also leads Finance sourcing and service delivery models decisions and directs the shared service operations and transaction outsource contracts.

Recent activities include the SAP R3 single instance global roll out, and negotiating two outsource contracts for Finance transactions and VAT.

Bill is based in Lausanne, Switzerland; he is a qualified Chartered Accountant, an Alumni of Harvard Business School and personally enjoys Skiing, Rugby and Scuba Diving.

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Nathalie De Wachter
Finance Director for European Medium-Sized Affiliates, Eli Lilly

Nathalie De Wachter has been 18 years with Eli Lilly where she has held a variety of finance roles in Belgium (Brussels, Mont Saint Guibert), USA (Indianapolis) and France (Paris). She is currently European middle size countries Finance Director. Her medium term goal is to ensure that the company vision of improving outcome for individual patients becomes a reality. Short term goal is to help the organization become more customer-centric by partnering with the business and to deliver financial expertise and support in the most economical and flexible way while ensuring appropriate level of compliance.

Within her region finance operations are performed internally either by local teams or by one of the three shared service centres and externally by Hewlett Packard. The outsourcing of some financial operations to HP took place in mid 2008.  

Nathalie serves on the treasury Committee of the International Osteoporosis Foundation and is a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.
Her passions are individual patients and change. 

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Dr. Sören Dressler
Professor of International Management Accounting, University of Applied Sciences, Berlin; Director, Offshoring Institute

Soeren Dressler, PhD, is Professor of International Management Accounting at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and Director of the international Master in Business Administration & Engineering Program. He also is Visiting Professor at the Loyola Graduate School of Business in Chicago. Soeren Dressler is the founder and Director of the Offshoring Institute and has authored a number of books and articles around Shared Services, BPO and Offshoring. He is the President of the Institute of Management Accountants in Germany.

Prior to his current position Soeren was with A.T. Kearney Management Consultants in Chicago where he served as Global Head of the Finance & Accounting Consulting Service Offering.

Soeren Dressler is a PhD of the University of Technology in Dresden and holds a Diplom-Kaufmann (MBA) Degree of the Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg.

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John Hall
Senior Vice President, DSM Business Support

John Hall has a range of multi sector and cross-functional experience in the shared services arena.

In a career spanning some 27 years, John has held a number of Finance and IT positions, in the United Kingdom and Europe working for companies such as Digital Equipment, DHL, American Standard and most recently DSM. John has a background in leading change in finance teams and businesses including the implementation of large projects in areas such as processes, technology and organisation.

His current role is to define the strategy with the business and to implement and develop the business support organization at DSM on a global basis covering HR, Finance and Process organizations.

In his last role, John was responsible to negotiate and co-ordinate the design and implementation of shared services in EMEA. His role (which developed based on business needs) included the responsibility for negotiation and implementation of outsourcing deals plus managing: facilities, headquarters and corporate finance, HR transactional processes, travel, indirect procurement, data centres and the network.

Recently the role of building a shared services model altered when American Standard decided to break up the businesses and the role in recent months has been to break the SSC and outsourcing deals out into the three individual businesses.

John interests include Rugby, Cricket, Diving and Golf.

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Dr. Joachim Jäckle
Corporate Senior Vice President Financial Operations, Henkel

Joachim Jäckle is responsible for the finance organizations of Henkel Group in all subsidiaries worldwide. This role includes the responsibility for the captive shared service centers in Manila and Bratislava where mainly finance processes are off-shored. In his current role Joachim defines the Finance Transformation program within Henkel. This includes worldwide responsibility for sourcing strategy, process design and harmonization, IT setup and Talent Management within Finance Operations.

Joachim joined Henkel 1991. Since then he held different positions in finance. Among others he was group treasurer and regional CFO for the Asia Pacific region. He is married and has 3 children.

Liam Keys
General Manager GBS Financial Services Europe, GE

Liam is an Irish national, living with his wife and two children in Brussels, Belgium.

He graduated from Dublin City University with a degree in Accounting & Finance in 1988 and qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1990.

He worked for 8 years with KPMG in both their Dublin and Brussels offices. He has been with for 12 years in a number of different roles including CFO for Fleet Services Central Europe and Corporate Pole Controller for EMEA region. He started his current role as General Manager for GBS Financial services Europe in July 2007. He oversees a team of 300 people in 30 different countries who provide various statutory and accounting services to various divisions of the General Electric Company.

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Linda Kromjong is Senior Director HR, Europe and EMEA, for DHL Global Business Services. DHL Global Business Services is part of DPWN group. In this role she supports the GBS Service Lines managers in her region on Regional HR topics and projects with a strong focus on change. The GBS portfolio in her region includes: Procurement, Legal, Risk & Insurance, Real Estate, Finance Operations and IT Services. For the Finance Operations and IT Services organizations, with dedicated HR support, Linda ensures alignment on cross business unit topics.

She joined DHL in 2003 as Manager HR, becoming a member of the Senior Management team for the Regional Shared Service Center for Finance Operations Europe in Maastricht. This position developed into the Manager Support function for the RSCC Maastricht and Brussels, including HR, Communication, Facilities and IS. Since January 2006 Linda has supported the Finance Operations Europe Senior Management team as Manager HR for Finance Operations Europe.

Linda studied at the Hotel Management School in Maastricht and worked almost 15 years in the Catering Industry in the Netherlands, mainly with Sodexho, in operational, HR, finance and managerial roles. Her last position with Sodexho in the Netherlands was Vice Director Division North. Prior to joining DPWN Linda worked 3 years as HR Director for SNT, a call center organization. In this role she supported the merge and integration of different companies and aligned HR processes and organization.

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Luc Le Brun
Controller Business Process Optimization Finance,
Agfa HealthCare

Luc is currently Controller Business Process Optimization at Agfa HealthCare and is responsible for the redesign and the optimization of Financial Transactional Processes for the Healthcare business worldwide.

Luc gained experience with several SAP roll outs and Shared Service Center in-sourcing and outsourcing operations. He coordinated several re-engineering projects to improve efficiency of Payables, Receivables and General Ledger processes. Luc is continuing to promote Agfa HealthCare business process best practices within all regional operations of Group.

Jesper Lillelund
Director, CorporateLeaders

Jesper Lillelund, Co-Founder and Director of CorporateLeaders, has been engaged in building valuable business networks on the international scene for over 15 years. Jesper combines his in-depth industry knowledge, unique branding, networking and market development skills with his keen sense of business, focusing on making business transformation (shared services and business process outsourcing BPO) and corporate excellence part of the business agenda.

Prior to starting CorporateLeaders, Jesper was instrumental in building a leading independent business transformation association from an informal business community to a global player. He also served as the Marketing Director at The Wall Street Journal Europe where he was responsible for managing brand, direct and on-line marketing. In his career at the Journal Europe, Jesper was also responsible for developing new revenue generating businesses. This included launching The Wall Street Journal Europe’s conference operations starting with the highly sought after European CEO Summits to the regional Central European Economic Review conferences. Prior to the Journal Europe, Jesper held market analyst roles at MAN B&W Diesel and Danisco in Denmark.

Jesper holds an MBA in International Management from the University of Dallas and a BBA in Management and International Business from Baylor University in Texas

Mr. Lopez is based at the company’s office in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he previously served as Director of the Canton for the Neuchâtel Economical Development Agency (DEN). As Cantonal Director, Mr. Lopez negotiated business contracts with numerous companies in the high-tech, medical, manufacturing, R&D, finance and other fields, significantly expanding economic activity, jobs, and commercial tax revenue in the Neuchâtel region.
Prior to his position with DEN, Mr. Lopez served as Corporate Business Development Director for Merisant, Inc., where he designed and implemented go-to-market strategies, oversaw growth of indirect/partner channels, and contributed to overall revenue growth. He also served as Merisant’s Director of International Operations, responsible for manufacturing, engineering, logistics, customer service, planning, quality, and purchasing.

Before joining Merisant, Mr. Lopez was Operations Director at Silicon Graphics, based in Switzerland and covering EMEA businesses. At Silicon, he directed business development units responsible for P&L of nearly $60 million. Before joining Silicon, Mr. Lopez worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Paris, where he directed operational activities in DEC’s emerging European markets. 

Jürgen Maul
Head of Finance and Accounting Services, Bayer Business Services

Jürgen Maul is one of the finance experts within the Bayer Group. Since 2005 he is responsible for the business unit Finance & Accounting Services of the Bayer Business Service GmbH.

In his current role Jürgen Maul combines expertise for IT concerning group consolidation, group tools and SAP systems with his almost 30 years experience of Finance & Accounting. His global team enfolds around 250 employees mainly located in Germany, but also in North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Jürgen is also in charge of the global Accounting Center EuroServices Leverkusen and EuroServices Barcelona, which are the competence centers for accounting and reporting services.

Jürgen in former position took over responsibilities as head of Finance & Accounting for Bayer Venezuela and Bayer Argentina. The economist was also head of Accounting subsidiaries and head of Group Reporting for the Bayer Group.

In his time off he likes to spend time with his family and to go hiking.

Constanze is Senior Director Shared Services with UCB. Prior to joining UCB, Constanze was a senior Shared Services/Outsourcing executive with Pitney Bowes, Europe. At Pitney Bowes, Constanze ran the outsourcing process for eight Finance and Back Office functions across thirteen European countries since the year 2004. This has included vendor selection process, contract negotiation and migration to two BPO provider locations in Eastern Europe and Asia. Constanze was also responsible for establishing the new governance structure within Pitney Bowes and for managing post-go-live benefits tracking and continued process improvements. Before joining Pitney Bowes, Constanze spent eight years with Accenture and A.T.Kearney in UK and Germany, with a main focus on the areas of Finance Shared Services/Outsourcing.

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Neil Shepherd has over 10 years of experience of BPO in transformation, solutions, transition and delivery for a variety of clients providing a wide range of services. Neil specialises in improving the performance of BPO functions through effective organisation, processes and the use of technology.  He has particular experience and interest in developing the role of outsource providers to be a partner to the corporation and a creator of value for the business.
He is now Capgemini’s Head of Product Development for BPO and he leads the continuing development of our Global Process Model methodology and BPOpen^TM. Neil also acts as an Engagement Director for Syngenta and is a member of the Europe Management Team.
 

Karsten Soderberg
Director, CorporateLeaders

Karsten Soderberg has more than 15 years of international executive experiences. He has held various assignments in multinational companies in functions ranging from, Global Executive management and leadership, Business Process Transformation, sales & marketing as well as project and program management.

Through his various functional and administrative positions Karsten possess significant and comprehensive experiences in end-to-end business processes, sales management, strategic analysis, organizational revitalization, project management, business transformation, people supervision and coaching.

Karsten holds a Master of Science degree in business administration and management science and a Bachelor degree in the same field. He also holds postgraduate qualifications in The Balanced Scorecard, EFQM - European Foundation for Quality Management and TQM.

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Cathy Tornbohm has 11 years of experience with Gartner and 17 years in the IT industry. Prior to joining Gartner, Ms. Tornbohm has spent 6 years as market research manager at BT, where she provided strategic market and competitive analysis for the systems integration division, BT Syntegra, as well as 1 year as market research manager at Cable & Wireless, where she specialized in the transportation sector.

“Being an analyst at Gartner is like being a "personal shopper." I enjoy helping end-user companies analyze their needs and find the styles of BPO services that really suit them - all the while helping vendors understand what the market trends are for the next seasons collections!”

Ms. Tornbohm has a B.S. in Industrial Business Systems from De Montfort University and a M.S. Marketing and Product Management, Cranfield University. 

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Reginald joined Borealis in 1990 as Cost Accounting Manager for the Belgian subsidiary. After taking several functions within finance, he went on to become Change Programme Manager as from 1997 in very different areas such as logistics, maintenance & engineering and SAP implementation. In 2000 he returned to his roots in finance as Finance Manager in Belgium and from 2004 he has been leading the Shared Service Center for Borealis in Mechelen. Since March 2006 he combines the roles of Director Financial Processes & Services and Director Knowledge Sharing for the Borealis group. In 2008, Borealis received 2 European excellence awards for their financial service center: one for "Best process improvement and innovation" and one for "Thought leader of the year". 

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Harry Wauters
Director, Global Financial Shared Services Centers, International Paper

Harry Wauters has been director of International Paper’s global Financial Shared Services Centers (FSSC) since June 2007. In that position, he has responsibility for the centers in Memphis, Krakow and Guangzhou. Mr. Wauters is based at the company’s headquarters for the EMEA region in Brussels, Belgium.

Mr. Wauters joined International Paper in 1992. During his career with the company, he has held various roles in corporate treasury and credit & collection. Most recently, Mr. Wauters served as director, financial operations with oversight on the outsourced SSC in Krakow since 2000. 

Mr. Wolleswinkel specializes in helping executives understand and meet the challenges of finance transformation, shared services and business process sourcing. Having worked for over 13 years in benchmarking and consulting for multinational clients, he has extensive experience in current state analysis, future state design, and solution implementation. His experience spans various industries including Retail, Fast Moving Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Chemicals, Oil, Pharmaceuticals and Transportation.