Speaker Bios:  (back to Event Summary)

Dr. Horst J. Kayser is since 2020 serving as the Chairman of Siemens Portfolio Companies (POC), a selection of companies that are no longer in the strategic core of Siemens AG as industrial technology player. Siemens focuses on transforming the everyday for everyone combing the real and the virtual world in the Industrial Metaverse in order to drive productivity, flexibility and sustainability in industrial processes and infrastructures.
Horst Kayser and the POC management team are focusing on building independent futures for the diverse set of Portfolio Companies. Leveraging the entrepreneurial freedom inherent in the structural setup and fostering a culture of high-performance, the focus lies on identifying strategic areas for maximum value growth and executing opportunities swiftly and decisively. The commitment to rapid change and success is underlined by a collective passion for winning together.
Dr. Kayser was previously Chief Strategy Officer for Siemens.

Tyrone Smyth holds the Director of HR Business Development (Global M&A) position on IBM's Human Resources team. As Director of HR Business Development (Global M&A), Tyrone Smyth is an important member of IBM's leadership. Tyrone Smyth is entrusted with maintaining the happiness of employees, whether it be through perks, recognition and awards, or creating a work environment employees look forward to. Employees at IBM rate their leadership an A+, ranking them within the Top 10% in New York.

Cyrille has extensive experience in acquisition integration and change management within the Consumer Goods and Luxury industry. he is Author of the 400+ pages L'Oréal Playbook, 'The Art of Integration' He is also a speaker at L'École de Paris du Management (École des Mines & École Polytechnique)

Joost has experience in the USA, China, and Western Europe. He has 15 years work experience at Philips, Heineken, and Gibson Innovations across various roles.

He is currently leading the M&A integration and disentanglement process at Philips. Prior to that, he was the global Head of M&A Finance. Previously he was head of Audit for Asia based out of Shanghai. He has a master degree in Financial Management and a Global Chartered Management Accounting (CIMA)

Björn Leschny, based in Cologne Metropolitan Area, Germany, is currently a Deputy Head Region Apac and Latam - Corporate Office at Bayer, bringing experience from previous roles at Bayer. Björn is responsible for Post Merger Integration and the Asia-Pacific region at Bayer AG. In addition, he is passionate about the topic of sustainability.

Laurent Hatzopoulos, based in London, is currently a Acquisitions and Divestments Implementation Manager at Shell, bringing experience from previous roles at Shell and BP. Laurent Hatzopoulos holds a degree from London Business School.

Roland van Wijnen is a seasoned business leader with extensive experience in the global cement industry. Most recently, Roland served as Group CEO for PPC Ltd, the leading manufacturer of cement and building materials in South Africa. During his tenure from September 2019 to December 2023, Roland successfully led the company through a period of significant change. Under Roland's leadership, PPC implemented a strategic repositioning program aimed at addressing challenges stemming from changes in economic conditions and market dynamics. This included the formulation and implementation of a debt reduction program and a geographical repositioning. Prior to his role at PPC, Roland spent over 15 years at Holcim, a global cement company, where he held various country CEO positions across Europe and Asia.

With a proven track record of driving organizational change and delivering results, Roland now serves as a non-executive director and board advisor, providing strategic guidance to companies on topics such as capital allocation and the development of purpose-led and performance-driven cultures.

Kamil has15 years of experience across M&A strategy, and merger management, leading complex M&A integration projects across all geographical regions (EMEA, North America, and APAC). He is currently the Global Head of M&A Integration at Maersk, in charge of building the M&A integration capabilities and driving integration activities (10 ongoing integrations) to deliver the full deal value, with greater speed, insight and confidence. He set-up the M&A Integration Office (Centre of Excellence) at Maersk.

Meet Friederike, a 27-year SAP veteran with 4 years in Solution Management, 19 years in GTM and Sales and 4 years in Corporate Development. Today Friederike is leading the Go-to-Market Center of Excellence within SAP Corporate Development. The GTM Team plays a pivotal role in steering SAP's inorganic expansion through strategic acquisitions and partnerships, while also optimizing the product portfolio through divestitures always with a focus on GTM.

Amanda Scott is a Managing Director and Global Mergers & Acquisitions Consulting Leader at WTW (Willis Towers Watson). Amanda is also the CEO/Founder of Mike’s Mates, a mental health charity in the UK. Additionally, she is a Board Member for Global Women 4 Wellbeing (GW4W), on the Remuneration Committee for Pensions Management Institute (PMI).

Awards include Top 25 M&A Consultants & Leaders of 2023, Elite Women in Insurance 2023, Excellence in Leadership; and Amanda was awarded as one of the UK 50 Leading Lights for Leadership & Kindness. She regularly publishes industry thought leadership, provides commentary to the press and social media, and is an active public speaker.

Staci is currently Head of Post-Merger Integration at NOVOMATIC AG Group where she is designing and executing the Post-Merger Integration Strategy for the NOVOMATIC group of companies. Staci has been in M&A and Post-Merger Integration and Disentanglement for over 15-years, heading the Philips Post-Merger Integration & Disentanglement global team and executing on multiple deals and business transformation activities across Philips. In addition, Staci is a seasoned IT executive holding senior roles including Chief Information Officer, Business Transformation and Product Development in the publishing industry at Elsevier and WPG. Her multi-industry experience has given Staci a broad and unique view of PMI, its application and ensuring a clear focus on value creation and execution excellence.

Elena is currently Head of Partner Ecosystem and M&A, Strategic Business Field Lifetime Solutions at Schaeffler. She was the pioneer to built Corporate Venturing for the Schaeffler Group with a three-folded model: Schaeffler Technology Accelerator, Corporate Minority Investments in Startups & Strategic fund investments for strategic new business fields. In her past she was a seasoned entrepreneur building digital product for Automotive clients with Mulan Innovation Lab.

At Cognizant, Peter is building and leading a specialist M&A OCM team to deliver improved outcomes and value realisation for Cognizant as well more engaging, personalised experiences for their acquired associates. M&A is a strategic growth priority for Cognizant, with $1.5bn spent in 2020 on 10+ acquisitions, where they address all M&A triggered change including from target operating models, organisation design, culture and role alignment, as well as changes to policies and systems/processes. An early priority is to build out their OCM M&A framework, playbook and toolset for alignment and integration with Cognizant's overarching M&A / IMO framework, delivering repeatability and efficiency.

Across his career, Peter has led, directed, managed, and advised on over 100 projects and programmes. These cover a wide range of areas including M&A, Transformation, Business and IT Strategy, Process, Operating Models, PMO, Outsourcing, OCM, and HR.

Daniel is Head of M&A Integration at Endava where he has worked in a variety of roles before landing in the world of M&A and creating the M&A Integration team and developing the Business Integration Playbook from scratch. The team have successfully delivered integrations involving people in over 25 countries and are spread across UK, Romania, Australia and the US and work with workstream leads spread across the world.

Daniel has a career spanning 30 years across Australia and the UK working for a number of Tech and Finance companies in technical and non-technical roles before moving to specialising in M&A integration.

Matthias Homann has 10+ years of professional experience in Post-Merger-Integration at SAP focusing on sales strategy and sales operations for acquisitions varying from small-tuck-ins to integration of major software companies. Prior to his work at SAP, Mr. Homann worked at a strategy consulting company that was part of the BMW Group where he focused on strategy and process projects in the sales and services area.

After graduating as a Chemical Engineer from the University of Groningen in 1999, Thomas joined Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and held various Manufacturing roles before joining Shell in 2007. He moved to the Shell’s M&A team in 2017 after several different Project Management roles in Netherlands and abroad. He has supported over 30 divestment and acquisition projects as a Deal Implementation Lead preparing the carve-out or integration plans pre signing and subsequently to executing them post signing and completion. His particular area of interests within Implementation are Value Delivery Planning for acquisitions and spin-off divestments.

As an M&A Project Manager at Airbus, he manages and execute cross-border transactions and projects across the aerospace and manufacturing sectors globally. He has a unique skill set in completing complex due diligence, execution, carve-out, and post-merger integration/separation activities for Airbus Group, working with C-Suite executives and key stakeholders.

Joost studied at Delft University of Technology with a Master Degree in Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management.

He joined Unilever in 2011. He has worked across various operational and strategic roles in Supply Chain (factory, planning, SC Strategy) for roughly half of his time in the company, with the balance in different M&A roles: separating our global spreads (Upfield) and Tea (Lipton Teas & Infusions) businesses, with the last 2 years in their newly created M&A Integration and Separation team.

Jon is a Vice President at GoCardless where he leads M&A integrations and alongside other transformation projects. He led the integration of the Latvian Open Banking start up Nordigen, the companies first acquisition, and will lead the recently announced integration of Nuapay. Prior to GoCardless, Jon was the Integration Director at OVO Energy where he led the integration of SSE's energy retail business following the acquisition in 2020 where he had to integrate over 10k employees while having to navigate the covid pandemic and an energy crisis. An Integration Executive at Mastercard where he spent 8 years, leading the integration of Vocalink in the UK amongst other roles, followed five years at Deloitte in their M&A practice; Jon has now spent 20 years in the M&A space.

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