Sacha Romanovitch

Why organisations work with Sacha Romanovitch

• She has actually done what most purpose-led leadership talks describe. As CEO of Grant Thornton UK she capped her own pay at 20 times the firm’s average salary, introduced firm-wide profit sharing, and gave 4,500 staff a stake in how the partnership was run.
• She left Grant Thornton having grown it past £500m in revenue and finished her tenure in the Glassdoor Top 50 CEOs with a 94% approval rating, two places behind Tim Cook. Boards listening to her hear an operator, not an advocate.
• She built Fair4All Finance from a standing start into the UK’s recognised body on financial inclusion, working across HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, regulators, lenders, and the voluntary sector. Few speakers can demonstrate cross-sector convening at that scale.
• She is willing to discuss the political and partner-level backlash she faced for refusing to back down on shared enterprise. That candour is rare from former CEOs and unusually useful to boards anticipating their own pushback.

Biography highlights

• First woman to lead a major UK accounting firm, as CEO of Grant Thornton UK LLP from 2015 to 2019.
• OBE awarded in 2020 for Services to Business, recognising her work on financial wellbeing through Fair4All Finance.
• Founding CEO of Fair4All Finance, the UK financial inclusion body backed by dormant assets funding, from September 2019.
• Member of the UK Government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council from February 2022, leading the Social Infrastructure working group.
• Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford; Honorary Doctorate, University of York; Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
• Independent Non-Executive Director of the Association of British Insurers; Non-Executive Director, LeapFrog Investments; inaugural Chair of Access Accountancy.

Biography

In 2015 the partnership at Grant Thornton UK voted in a CEO who told them their pay should be capped, profits should be shared with every employee, and the firm should drop clients whose work it could not defend. By the end of her tenure the firm had grown past £500m in revenue, was sitting in the Glassdoor Top 50 CEOs ranking with a 94% staff approval rating, and the same partnership that elected her had fractured over the cost of what it had agreed to.

That tension is the substance of Sacha Romanovitch’s leadership work. She is one of the few senior UK operators who has put a recognisable shared enterprise model inside a major professional services firm and then absorbed the partner-level resistance it produced. Boards that say they want a purpose-led culture often have not faced the moment when their senior earners discover what purpose costs them. She has, and she will discuss it directly.

Since 2019 she has been building Fair4All Finance, the body set up under the Dormant Assets Scheme to extend access to affordable credit, insurance, and savings for people in vulnerable financial circumstances. Under her the organisation has become the convening point for the financial services sector, HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and the voluntary sector on financial inclusion. She co-chairs the Inclusive Economy Partnership and served on the Government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council from 2022, leading its Social Infrastructure working group.

The thread across both roles is the same. Values claims are tested by the decisions a leader takes when those values cost something. Romanovitch is unusually credible on that test because she has been on both sides of it: as the CEO who held the line at Grant Thornton, and as the founding chief executive who has had to make the case for financial inclusion to commercial lenders, regulators, and ministers in turn.

Key speaking topics

• Purpose-led leadership in commercial organisations
• Shared enterprise and employee ownership models
• Financial inclusion and the social contract of financial services
• Inclusive leadership in regulated and professional services sectors
• Cross-sector partnership between government, business, and civil society
• Social mobility and access to professional careers
• Leading change against partner-level or shareholder resistance

Ideal for

• Boards and ExCos in professional services, financial services, and partnership-structured firms reviewing their culture and ownership model
• CEOs and CHROs designing reward, voice, and stake structures for purpose-led strategies
• Financial services leaders, regulators, and policy audiences working on financial inclusion and consumer vulnerability
• Industry social mobility programmes and DEI sponsor groups setting concrete targets rather than statements

Audience outcomes

• A direct account of what shared enterprise looks like when it is operating, costing, and contested inside a major firm
• A working model for testing whether a stated value will hold under commercial pressure before it is publicly committed to
• A clear picture of how financial inclusion gets built in practice across regulators, banks, fintechs, and the voluntary sector
• An honest reading of the partner-level and shareholder dynamics that derail purpose-led change, and the moves that protect it
• A sense of what the next decade of financial services accountability looks like from inside the policy conversation