Risk Management speakers

Why organisations work with Nicholas Hopton A serving British Ambassador to four of the region’s most sensitive postings inside a decade: Yemen, Qatar, Iran and Libya. That working contact list is not replicable from outside government. Reopened the British Embassy in Tehran as the first UK Ambassador to Iran since 2011, giving a first-hand reading of how Iranian decision-making actually functions under sanctions and confrontation. Runs Belmont Advisory, a private geopolitical consultancy, alongside the Middle East Association: advice is shaped by what clients have actually done with it, not by think-tank distance from the deal. Chairs the Middle East and Mediterranean Advisory Board at Cambridge’s Centre for Geopolitics, alongside fellowships at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and RUSI, so the analysis stays tested against serious peer scrutiny. A regular broadcast and print commentator on Middle East affairs, appearing on BBC News, Bloomberg, the New Statesman, and The Spectator, with a column in The i Paper. A board briefing lands without needing translation from policy register. Biography highlights British Ambassador to Libya, 2019 to 2021; Iran, 2015 to 2018; Qatar, 2013 to 2015; Yemen, 2012 to 2013. First British Ambassador to Iran after the embassy’s reopening, following the 2011 closure. Director General of the Middle East Association and founder of the geopolitical consultancy Belmont Advisory. Chair of the Middle East and Mediterranean Advisory Board, Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge. Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, Distinguished Fellow at RUSI, and Honorary Professor at St Mary’s University, London. Led the drafting team for the UK’s first National Security Strategy in 2008; Private Secretary to four UK Ministers for Europe, 1998 to 2000. Ambassador for the HALO Trust, the landmine and unexploded ordnance clearance charity. Biography The reopening of the British Embassy in Tehran in 2015 closed a four-year diplomatic break with Iran. Nicholas Hopton was the ambassador who walked back in. Running a mission in a country that had just expelled the previous one is a particular kind of education in how power, sanctions and personal access actually interact. That posting sits inside a 35-year career in the British Diplomatic Service that ran from junior roles in Paris, Rome, Morocco and Mauritania to four ambassadorships in under a decade. Yemen during the early collapse, Qatar at the moment Gulf finance reshaped global asset flows, Iran through the nuclear deal years, then Libya. Each post was the kind of brief in which the embassy is the analytical asset, not a passive observer. In Whitehall he led the team that drafted the UK’s first National Security Strategy in 2008 and served as senior UK official at the 2011 Perth Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. He spent 1998 to 2000 as Private Secretary to four successive Ministers for Europe. The London grounding matters for clients: he understands how the British system actually decides, not just how it appears to. He now runs the Middle East Association as Director General and founded the geopolitical consultancy Belmont Advisory. He chairs the Middle East and Mediterranean Advisory Board at Cambridge’s Centre for Geopolitics and holds fellowships at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and RUSI. The combination gives boards something most political-risk providers cannot: a practitioner who can still place the phone calls, whose reading has been tested in real negotiating rooms. Key speaking topics Iran: politics, sanctions and the post-Khamenei trajectory The Gulf states and the geopolitics of capital Libya, North Africa and Mediterranean security UK and European policy towards the Middle East Political risk and market access in conflict-adjacent economies The mechanics of British and European decision-making on foreign policy Ideal for Board and executive committee briefings on Middle East exposure Chief risk officers and heads of government relations in firms with regional operations Investor and family-office audiences weighing Gulf capital allocation Foreign-policy and defence audiences in think tanks, universities and policy fora Audience outcomes A working map of where power actually sits in Tehran, Doha, Riyadh and Tripoli, separated from media shorthand A clearer view of how sanctions regimes affect commercial decision-making in practice An informed read on the UK and European policy posture toward the region, and where it is likely to move Direct answers to the questions a senior team would otherwise be unable to ask in the open

Why organisations work with Nick Bostrom He authored Superintelligence, the text credited with bringing AI existential risk into mainstream policy, technology and boardroom discussion. The vocabulary leaders are now using to debate frontier AI traces back to this work. He led the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford for nineteen years, a research programme whose alumni now staff AI safety teams at the major frontier labs and policy units in Washington, London and Brussels. His simulation argument and work on anthropic reasoning have made him one of the few philosophers whose primary papers are read inside technical AI research, not just adjacent to it. Deep Utopia, his 2024 follow-up, addresses the strategic question most leadership teams have not yet started on: what an organisation is for in a world where AI systems can perform almost any cognitive task better than humans. He treats AI governance as a question about the shape of the future, not a compliance exercise, which is the register most senior leaders need but rarely get from technical or regulatory briefings. Biography highlights Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, 2005 to 2024. Founder and Principal Researcher, Macrostrategy Research Initiative. Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, New York Times bestseller, Oxford University Press. Author of Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, Ideapress, 2024. Twice named on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. Recipient of the Eugene R. Gannon Award; ranked on Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list as the highest-placed analytic philosopher. Biography Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies arrived in 2014 with a thesis few mainstream readers were ready for: that advanced AI systems would, on plausible development paths, present a control problem of civilisational importance. A decade later the book sits on the desks of frontier lab leadership, AI policy officials and the boards of companies whose products now depend on the technology it described. The work came out of the Future of Humanity Institute, which Bostrom founded at Oxford in 2005 and led until its closure in 2024. FHI built the early academic infrastructure for what is now a global field, training researchers who now sit inside OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and the UK AI Safety Institute. His earlier paper on the simulation argument, published in The Philosophical Quarterly in 2003, became one of the few philosophical works to be taken seriously by technical AI researchers and physicists. His 2024 book, Deep Utopia, turns the lens around. The question is no longer whether humanity survives advanced AI, but what people and organisations do in a world where machines can perform almost any cognitive task. For executives whose strategic plans assume scarce human cognitive labour as their basic input, this is the next problem to think about, and very few credible voices have started. Bostrom is now Founder and Principal Researcher of the Macrostrategy Research Initiative, continuing the long-range work on technology, governance and the human future that began at Oxford. Foreign Policy has twice named him among its Top 100 Global Thinkers; Prospect ranked him as the highest-placed analytic philosopher on its World Thinkers list. Key speaking topics Frontier AI and existential risk AI governance and alignment under uncertainty Long-range technology strategy The simulation argument and the limits of knowledge Post-AGI economics and the meaning problem Anthropic reasoning and decision-making under deep uncertainty The future of human enhancement Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting AI strategy and risk posture for the next decade Heads of state, regulators and policy units shaping national AI governance Frontier technology leadership and corporate venture teams Investor and asset-allocator audiences thinking about exposure to AI-driven structural change Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for talking about AI risk, capability and alignment with the same precision used inside frontier labs A clearer view of which AI governance questions are tractable now and which require long-range thinking A grounded sense of how to plan for a post-instrumental economy where human cognitive labour is no longer the scarce input Recognition of how anthropic reasoning and scenario thinking apply to corporate decisions under deep uncertainty Familiarity with the arguments shaping how regulators, AI labs and national security communities are now framing frontier AI

Why organisations work with Nick Leeson He is the named primary actor in the most studied operational-risk failure in modern banking history, which means his account of how account 88888 was opened, fed and hidden carries weight no consultant can replicate. He breaks the polite fiction that rogue trading is rare. Subsequent losses at Allied Irish, Societe Generale, UBS and others have proved his core point that the conditions which produced Barings are still live in trading-floor and middle-office design. His 2023 appointment to Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit puts him on the investigator side of financial misconduct, giving compliance and audit audiences a rare voice that has worked both sides of the control line. He addresses the human variables that risk frameworks assume away: pressure, ego, fear of admitting a small loss, and the speed at which a contained problem becomes terminal. For boards and senior leaders, he is the named cautionary case, sitting in the room and answering questions, rather than a slide in an audit deck. Biography highlights Caused the £827m collapse of Barings Bank in February 1995 through unauthorised futures and options trades booked to error account 88888 on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange. Convicted in Singapore and held at Changi Prison from December 1995 until July 1999. Author of Rogue Trader (1996) and co-author of Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress (2005, with psychologist Ivan Tyrrell). Subject of the 1999 film Rogue Trader, starring Ewan McGregor, with rights optioned by Sir David Frost. CEO of Galway United Football Club, 2007 to 2011. Investigator at Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, the London corporate intelligence firm, since 2023, working financial misconduct cases for investors. Biography A 25-year-old derivatives trader on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange held the positions of chief trader and head of settlements at the same time, and used that conflict to bury an initial £20,000 error inside an account numbered 88888. Three years later, that account held £827m of concealed losses, and Barings, the bank that had financed the Louisiana Purchase, was insolvent. The mechanics of that failure remain the most cited operational-risk case study in financial services. The point of hearing it directly from Leeson is not the drama. It is the precision. He can describe the specific control breaches, the cultural signals that allowed them, and the day-by-day choices that kept the losses hidden, including the short straddle on the Nikkei placed the day before the Kobe earthquake of 17 January 1995. Risk and compliance teams use that detail to test their own supervisory architecture. The post-Barings career adds the second half of the argument. Six and a half years in Changi, a colon cancer diagnosis served out in prison, a psychology degree, the CEO seat at Galway United, and the books Rogue Trader and Back from the Brink with Ivan Tyrrell. The last of those titles is the one risk professionals tend to underestimate. Pressure, isolation and the fear of admitting a contained loss are the human inputs that no governance framework prices correctly. In 2023 Leeson joined Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, the London corporate intelligence firm that investigates financial misconduct on behalf of wronged investors. For audiences in banking, insurance and regulated industries, that role is the salient point: the man who once defeated the controls is now being hired to detect the people doing it next. Key speaking topics Operational risk and rogue trading Compliance, supervision and the limits of policy Corporate governance and board oversight of trading risk Internal controls, segregation of duties and concealment behaviour Organisational culture in high-pressure environments Resilience, stress and decision-making under pressure Financial crime detection and investigation Ideal for Boards, audit committees and risk committees in banking, asset management and insurance Chief risk officers, compliance heads, internal audit leads and operational risk teams Regulators, supervisors and financial crime units Senior leaders in any business with material market, trading or treasury exposure Audience outcomes A first-hand account of how concealment actually works inside a trading operation, beyond the textbook description Specific signals that supervisors, risk teams and auditors should treat as warnings rather than reassurance A clearer view of the human conditions, pressure, ego, fear, that turn a recoverable error into a terminal loss A sharpened sense of where a control framework on paper diverges from the behaviour on the desk Renewed attention to segregation of duties, error-account governance and exception handling

Why organisations work with Nigel Taberner His “Level 2 listening” framework – drawn from 10 years of operational hostage negotiation, not from theory – gives leaders a named, structured method for building trust and influencing outcomes when positional power and concessions are unavailable. The “negotiating when you have nothing to give” argument maps directly to the situations most commercial and leadership teams actually face: a resistant enterprise client, a difficult board conversation, a supplier who holds all the terms. An operational record of more than 130 high-risk incidents – armed sieges, suicide interventions, and international kidnap situations – resolved without loss of life at any incident he attended gives his principles a level of practical validation that is genuinely rare. He contributed to the national training programmes that produced negotiators for forces in the UK, Finland, Australia, and the FBI, meaning the frameworks he teaches have been tested and refined across different cultures and high-stakes operational contexts. His interactive masterclasses give leadership and sales teams direct practice in the specific listening and influence techniques – not a theory of why they work, but structured repetition of actually applying them. Biography highlights 30-year career with Greater Manchester Police, rising from Police Constable in Moss Side to Detective Inspector 10 years as an operational hostage negotiator, attending more than 130 armed sieges, suicide interventions, and international kidnap situations States that no incident he attended ended in loss of life Detective Inspector for counter-terrorism policing operations at Manchester Airport and Liverpool John Lennon Airport Member of the national negotiator training team responsible for programmes delivered in the UK, Finland, Australia, and the FBI Founder and Managing Director of Level2Communications Featured speaker at AICPA and CIMA events on commercial negotiation and leadership communication Biography Nigel Taberner joined Greater Manchester Police as a constable in Moss Side in the early 1990s. Three decades later, he retired as a Detective Inspector, having led counter-terrorism operations at Manchester Airport and Liverpool John Lennon Airport. In between, he spent 10 years as an operational hostage negotiator. During those 10 years, he attended more than 130 high-risk incidents – armed sieges, suicide interventions, and international kidnap situations. He states that no one died in any incident he attended. From that experience, he drew a precise argument: what separates a resolved negotiation from a failed one is almost always the quality of listening, not the strength of the opening position. He calls this Level 2 listening – attending fully to what the other person is actually communicating, rather than preparing a response. The commercial application is direct. Most business negotiations happen without meaningful leverage. A sales team pursuing a reluctant client, a leader managing a team through unwanted change, a CFO trying to hold a supplier to terms – each faces the same dynamic a hostage negotiator faces when they hold no cards and can offer nothing in return. That is where the framework Taberner developed applies most sharply. He was a member of the national training team that developed new generations of negotiators for forces in the UK, Finland, Australia, and the FBI. Since founding Level2Communications, he has brought those same principles to corporate audiences, including events run by AICPA and CIMA. Key speaking topics Negotiation without leverage High-stakes communication Active listening and influence Trust-building under pressure Crisis communication Leadership under pressure Emotional intelligence in negotiation Ideal for Senior leaders and executive teams facing difficult internal or external stakeholder conversations Sales and commercial teams whose negotiations depend on relationship and trust rather than pricing power Risk, security, and crisis management professionals HR and people leaders managing conflict, sensitive conversations, or organisational change Audience outcomes A named, structured framework – Level 2 listening – for influencing outcomes when leverage is absent Practical techniques for building trust quickly in unfamiliar or high-pressure conversations A clearer understanding of how professional negotiators approach conversations most people find difficult, and why their methods work Greater confidence in handling conflict, resistant stakeholders, and high-stakes decisions A reframed view of listening as a strategic tool rather than a passive courtesy

Why organisations work with Nik Gowing A research base built from hundreds of confidential interviews with corporate, political and military leaders, distilled in the book Thinking the Unthinkable, which gives boards a vocabulary for the failures of imagination they recognise but rarely name. Forty years of front-line international reporting, from martial law in Poland to 9/11, that lets him press senior audiences on geopolitical and operational risk without flinching or flattering. A moderator’s authority earned at BBC World News and across hundreds of senior international forums, used to host board offsites, ministerial roundtables and CEO summits where the conversation has to go somewhere uncomfortable. Standing inside the institutions buyers trust: Distinguished Fellow at RUSI, Visiting Professor at Kings College London, former council member at Chatham House and ODI. A track record of making leaders engage with what they have been avoiding, rather than rehearsing the slide they came to deliver. Biography highlights Main news presenter, BBC World News, 1996 to 2014. Diplomatic Editor, Channel 4 News, 1989 to 1996; bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw with ITN. BAFTA, 1981, for coverage of martial law in Poland. Co-author, Thinking the Unthinkable: A new imperative for leadership in the digital age (John Catt, 2018), and founder of the Thinking the Unthinkable project. Author, Skyful of Lies and Black Swans, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Visiting Professor, Kings College London; Distinguished Fellow, Royal United Services Institute; Honorary Doctorates from the universities of Exeter and Bristol. Biography The leaders Nik Gowing has spent four decades interviewing, in studios, at summits and behind closed doors, share a pattern. They saw the signal. They had the data. They did not act. Thinking the Unthinkable, the project he founded in 2014 and the book he co-authored with Chris Langdon in 2018, is built on hundreds of confidential conversations with senior figures in business, government and the military about why that keeps happening, and what could change it. The credibility for that conversation comes from the years before. Gowing was a main news presenter on BBC World News from 1996 to 2014, on air for the announcement of Princess Diana’s death and through the live coverage of 9/11. Before the BBC he spent 18 years at ITN, as bureau chief in Rome and Warsaw and as Diplomatic Editor of Channel 4 News. A BAFTA followed his coverage of martial law in Poland in 1981. That broadcast career left him with a particular skill that boards now buy: the ability to chair a difficult conversation in front of senior people, on the record, without losing control of the room or the argument. He moderates regularly for institutions including the World Economic Forum, RUSI and Chatham House. The academic and institutional scaffolding is genuine, not decorative. He is a Visiting Professor at Kings College London’s School of Social Science and Public Policy, a Distinguished Fellow at RUSI, and a former council member at Chatham House and the Overseas Development Institute. The Reuters Institute at Oxford published his earlier study, Skyful of Lies and Black Swans, on institutional vulnerability in the modern information environment. Few moderators bring that depth into the room with them. Key speaking topics Leadership under disruption Anticipating the unthinkable in board strategy Geopolitical risk and the rules-based order Crisis communication and decision-making under pressure Institutional resilience in the digital information environment Senior conference moderation and panel chairing Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees confronting strategic shocks they suspect they are under-rehearsing. Risk, strategy and corporate affairs leaders working on scenario planning, geopolitical exposure and institutional resilience. Convenors of senior international forums, ministerial roundtables and CEO summits who need a moderator who can hold the room. Audience outcomes A direct account of why senior teams systematically miss disruptive signals, drawn from confidential interviews with leaders who lived through it. A sharper read on geopolitical and information-environment risks, from someone who has reported them at first hand. The questions a board should be asking itself before the next unthinkable lands, not after. A working sense of what conformity costs at the top of organisations, and what it takes to break it.

Why organisations work with Nina Khrushcheva A primary read on Russian political culture from a scholar who has travelled and reported across the country’s eleven time zones, not a Moscow-watcher working from secondary sources. Author or co-author of three books on Russian power, including In Putin’s Footsteps (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) with Atlantic contributing editor Jeffrey Tayler, and The Lost Khrushchev, both grounded in original interviews and field research. A standing column at Project Syndicate, where she edits the Russia series, and a publication record across the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Newsweek that boards and investment committees already read. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former director of the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute, with the institutional standing expected for closed-room conversations on sanctions, geopolitical exposure, and political risk. A family inheritance, as the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, that she uses as a lens on Soviet and post-Soviet authoritarianism rather than a biographical talking point. Biography highlights Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York. Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Princeton University; former research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Author of Imagining Nabokov (Yale University Press) and The Lost Khrushchev (Tate); co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps (St. Martin’s Press) with Jeffrey Tayler. Contributing Editor at Project Syndicate; bylines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Newsweek. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations; former director of the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute. Recipient of the Carnegie Corporation’s Great Immigrants Award and the Trinity College Dublin Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage. Biography The Kremlin is not best understood through Western political vocabulary. It runs on a logic shaped by Russian literature, Soviet bureaucratic instinct, and a long memory of empire. Reading it from the outside, on quarterly briefings alone, has cost organisations real money over the past decade. Nina Khrushcheva works that gap. A professor of international affairs at The New School, with a Princeton doctorate in comparative literature, she teaches courses on comparative propaganda, international media, and Russian contemporary politics. Her academic register is unusual: she reads the Kremlin the way a literary scholar reads a text, while also reporting from inside it. That dual method runs through her books. In Putin’s Footsteps, written with Jeffrey Tayler of The Atlantic, is the product of travel across all eleven of Russia’s time zones. The Lost Khrushchev draws on her family inheritance as the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev to read the Soviet project from inside its own argument. Imagining Nabokov preceded both, with Yale University Press. She edits the Russia series at Project Syndicate and writes regularly for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Newsweek. She sits on the Council on Foreign Relations and previously directed the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute. The Carnegie Corporation named her among its Great Immigrants in 2013, and Trinity College Dublin awarded her its Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage in 2019. Key speaking topics Russia under Putin Authoritarian governance and propaganda Post-Soviet political culture Geopolitical risk and sanctions exposure US-Russia relations Russia, China and the contested global order Soviet history and its modern uses Ideal for Boards and investment committees with direct or indirect Russia exposure, including energy, commodities, and dual-use technology Chief risk officers, general counsel, and government affairs leads weighing sanctions and political risk Policy audiences, foundations, and academic institutions briefing on the post-Soviet space Senior diplomatic, defence and foreign-policy convenings on Russia, Ukraine, and the wider rules-based order Audience outcomes A read of current Kremlin behaviour rooted in Russian political and literary tradition, not Western projection A clearer sense of where Putin’s regime is brittle and where it is durable, with implications for sanctions and exposure Context on how Soviet history is being repurposed in present-day propaganda and policy A sharper map of where Russia, China, and the United States actually intersect, beyond headline framings Specific reference points for how to test the assumptions in any internal Russia or geopolitics brief

Why organisations work with Ning Zhu A specific thesis on China, not a country briefing. China’s Guaranteed Bubble argues that implicit state support is the load-bearing feature of Chinese growth, and the source of its systemic risk. Audiences leave with a frame they can actually use. One of the few China-economy voices with peer-reviewed standing in the Journal of Finance and Review of Financial Studies, which means his macro reading is built on disciplined empirical work, not commentary. Operating experience inside Lehman Brothers and Nomura in Hong Kong, so the talk is calibrated to how capital allocators and quantitative desks actually think, not to a classroom audience. Behavioural finance fluency that translates into how Chinese retail investors, regulators and state-owned enterprises behave under pressure. This is rare combined with macro authority on the same market. Faculty Fellow status at Yale’s International Center for Finance and senior faculty roles at SAIF and Tsinghua, which gives him standing across Chinese policy circles and Western financial institutions in equal measure. Biography highlights Deputy Dean and Professor of Finance, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Faculty Fellow, Yale University International Center for Finance. Author of China’s Guaranteed Bubble (McGraw-Hill), The Investors’ Enemy and The Investors’ Friend. Sun Yefang Financial Innovation Book Award, 2018. Named among Elsevier’s “China’s Most Cited Scholars,” 2022. Former Senior Executive at Lehman Brothers and Nomura Securities, Hong Kong, leading quantitative and portfolio advisory teams. Former tenured Professor of Finance at the University of California (Davis) and Chair Professor at Tsinghua University. Biography China’s economy does not behave like a textbook market. Implicit state guarantees underpin large parts of its credit system, shaping how banks lend, how households save, and how risk migrates into shadow channels. China’s Guaranteed Bubble, published by McGraw-Hill, sets out that argument in detail and is the work that defines Ning Zhu’s public profile. Zhu sits at the intersection of academic finance and operating practice. He is Deputy Dean and Professor of Finance at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and a Faculty Fellow at the Yale International Center for Finance. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science, with a particular focus on behavioural finance and Chinese capital markets. Before returning to academia full-time, he was a Senior Executive at Lehman Brothers and then Nomura in Hong Kong, where he led quantitative strategy and portfolio advisory teams. That period gives his China commentary a useful directness: he has sat on the desk that has to act on the analysis, not only write it. He has also held tenured and chair appointments at the University of California, Davis and Tsinghua University. His work has been recognised with the Sun Yefang Financial Innovation Book Award, considered one of the highest honours in Chinese economics, and inclusion on Elsevier’s list of China’s most cited scholars. For boards and investors, the value is the combination: a researcher whose behavioural finance training shows him how investors and regulators actually behave, applied to the Chinese system he has studied and worked in for two decades. Key speaking topics China’s macroeconomy and financial system Implicit state guarantees and systemic risk Behavioural finance Shadow banking and credit risk in China Global financial order and capital flows Chinese investor and household behaviour Fiscal sustainability and financial reform Ideal for Boards, CFOs and CIOs with material China exposure assessing systemic risk Investment committees, asset managers and family offices allocating to or away from Chinese assets Banking and financial services leadership teams shaping China strategy Policy and regulatory audiences working on cross-border capital and financial reform Audience outcomes A working model for how implicit state guarantees shape Chinese credit, equity and property markets A clearer view of where systemic risk actually sits inside China’s shadow banking and SOE structures A behavioural finance lens applied to Chinese retail investors and institutional decision-makers A more disciplined reading of Chinese policy signals and what they imply for capital allocation Specific questions a board or investment committee should be asking about its China exposure

Why organisations work with Nora AlMatrooshi She graduated from NASA’s 2021 astronaut candidate programme alongside ten American candidates chosen from more than 12,000 applicants, as the only non-NASA astronaut in her class and the first Arab woman in the programme’s history. That credential is not replicable. Her career connects two sectors that rarely share a vantage point: hydrocarbon infrastructure (projects for ADNOC and Saudi Aramco) and advanced space operations. Audiences in GCC energy, government, and technology sectors get a perspective that spans the full range of UAE industrial ambition. The UAE Astronaut Programme went from concept to operational in under a decade. AlMatrooshi went through the entire process, from open national selection through two years at Johnson Space Center, and can describe what selection rigour and institutional commitment actually produced. Selected from 4,305 applicants through a multi-phase evaluation built to international standards, she speaks from direct experience of what elite technical preparation demands of individuals and the organisations that develop them. Biography highlights First Arab woman to complete NASA’s astronaut candidate programme; graduated March 2024 at Johnson Space Center Selected from 4,305 applicants, UAE Astronaut Programme second batch (2021) Mechanical engineering graduate, UAE University; member, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Former piping engineer, National Petroleum Construction Company – projects for ADNOC and Saudi Aramco; later Technical Specialist at ADNOC First place in the UAE, 2011 International Mathematical Olympiad Gulf Business 100 Most Powerful Arabs, 2022, 2024, and 2025; Arabian Business 100 Most Inspiring Leaders 2024 (ranked sixth) Biography The UAE had no domestic astronauts in 2009. Ten years later, Hazzaa AlMansoori spent eight days aboard the International Space Station. In 2024, Nora AlMatrooshi became the first Arab woman to complete NASA’s full astronaut candidate programme, graduating alongside ten candidates selected from more than 12,000 American applicants. AlMatrooshi was chosen from 4,305 applicants in 2021. Over two years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, her training spanned ISS operations, spacewalk preparation at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, robotics, T-38 jet proficiency, and Russian language. Survival training at Fort Novosel, Alabama was also required. In March 2024, she received her astronaut pin and qualified for future space mission assignments. Before the astronaut programme, she worked as a piping engineer at the National Petroleum Construction Company on projects for ADNOC and Saudi Aramco, and later as a Technical Specialist at ADNOC. She served as Vice President of NPCC’s Youth Council for three consecutive terms. Her academic record includes placing first in the UAE in the 2011 International Mathematical Olympiad. Gulf Business has included her in its 100 Most Powerful Arabs in 2022, 2024, and 2025. Arabian Business ranked her sixth in its 100 Most Inspiring Leaders in 2024. Her stated ambition is to land on the Moon aboard an Emirati spacecraft. Key speaking topics Human spaceflight preparation and operations National space programmes and strategic capability-building Engineering excellence in high-stakes environments STEM talent development and technical career pathways International collaboration in advanced science and technology Selection and readiness in elite technical environments Ideal for STEM, engineering, and advanced technology conferences Government and public sector leadership events focused on national innovation programmes Energy sector organisations, particularly those with ADNOC and Saudi Aramco connections or GCC operating context Youth, education, and talent development forums where firsthand accounts of competitive entry carry weight Audience outcomes A specific account of what elite technical selection actually looks like, from open national application to NASA programme graduation Understanding of how the UAE built operational space capability from scratch in under a decade Insight into the standards, preparation, and team discipline required in environments where errors are not recoverable A reference point for what STEM pipeline development produces at its most rigorous Perspective on the relationship between national ambition, institutional investment, and individual readiness

Why organisations work with Nouriel Roubini His 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, which outlined the specific structural conditions (overleveraged housing markets, fragile credit instruments, unsustainable household debt) that caused the 2008 financial crisis before they were widely recognised, gives his risk scenarios a credibility that peer analysis rarely carries. The MegaThreats framework, the argument that ten overlapping structural forces, including sovereign debt, geopolitical rivalry, AI-driven labour displacement, and climate stress, reinforce one another, equips leadership teams to analyse compound risk rather than managing individual threats in isolation. As both an academic and an active strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and Atlas Capital Team, he connects macro-risk analysis to live capital allocation decisions, not retrospective commentary. His public-sector career spans the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, giving him a direct, lived understanding of how policymakers reason under pressure, and where their responses typically fall short. His forecasting runs in both directions. The economist who warned the IMF in 2006 has since argued, against consensus, that a technology-led productivity surge will sustain US growth towards 4% by the end of the decade, a case made in the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Boards get a weighed reading of upside and downside scenarios. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Economics and International Business, NYU Stern School of Business; previously on faculty at Yale University Author of MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How to Survive Them (Little, Brown, 2022) and Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010) 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund accurately identified the structural vulnerabilities that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis Ranked #4 on Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” (2009); named among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World (2009); multiple further appearances on Foreign Policy’s annual list Senior Economist for International Affairs, White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998–1999); Senior Adviser to the Undersecretary for International Affairs and Director of the Office of Policy Development and Review, U.S. Treasury Department (1999–2000) Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates; Senior Economic Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital; Chief Economist and Portfolio Manager, Atlas Capital Team Monthly columnist for Project Syndicate; profiled by the Financial Times, New York Times Magazine, and Bloomberg; PhD in Economics, Harvard University; BA, Bocconi University Biography Nouriel Roubini’s most consequential professional moment came at a 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, where he outlined the structural conditions (overleveraged housing markets, fragile credit instruments, unsustainable household debt) that would produce the 2008 global financial crisis. The IMF’s own economists were, by contemporaneous accounts, sceptical. Within two years, the scenario had materialised almost exactly as described. That track record is the foundation of his authority. Roubini is a Professor Emeritus at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, with a career spanning the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, and advisory roles at the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve. His academic foundation rests on a PhD in Economics from Harvard and more than 70 published papers on sovereign debt, financial crises, and international capital flows. His 2022 book, MegaThreats (Little, Brown), advances a named framework for compound systemic risk. The thesis is precise: ten structural forces, sovereign debt at historic highs, geopolitical fragmentation, demographic pressure, AI-driven labour displacement, and climate stress among them, are not independent variables but mutually reinforcing ones. For organisations still using single-factor risk frameworks, the argument is a direct challenge to how they model exposure. Alongside his academic and research work, Roubini serves as Senior Economic Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and as Chief Economist and Portfolio Manager at Atlas Capital Team, roles that keep his analysis connected to live capital allocation decisions. The crisis-prediction reputation understates the range of his judgment: he has recently argued in the Financial Times that a technology-led productivity boom will sustain US exceptionalism despite tariffs and fiscal strain. He is a monthly contributor to Project Syndicate and has been ranked #4 on Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” Key speaking topics Global macroeconomic outlook and downside risk scenarios Sovereign debt, fiscal dominance, and currency risk Geopolitical fragmentation and its economic consequences US-China strategic rivalry and the restructuring of global trade Financial crises: structural causes, policy responses, and systemic aftermath Inflation, monetary policy, and central bank independence AI, automation, and structural shifts in labour markets Compound systemic risk: the MegaThreats framework Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams stress-testing strategy against macro-economic disruption CFOs, CROs, and treasury functions making capital allocation and risk management decisions in volatile conditions Investment and financial services leadership, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, requiring rigorous macro-risk briefings Government, public policy, and multilateral forums addressing fiscal strategy, monetary policy, and geopolitical-economic interdependence Audience outcomes A structured understanding of how macro forces, debt, geopolitics, monetary policy, interact and compound rather than operating in isolation Specific frameworks, drawn from the MegaThreats thesis, for anticipating systemic stress before it becomes visible in headline economic indicators Clarity on the geopolitical dynamics, particularly US-China rivalry, fiscal dominance risk, and the conditions for de-dollarisation, most likely to affect long-range strategic planning A more calibrated reading of central bank and government policy responses, and the structural conditions under which those responses typically fail or arrive too late Practical language and conceptual tools for articulating compound systemic risk to boards, investors, and regulators, beyond standard scenario planning conventions

Why organisations work with Oliver Peyton He pioneered the model of high-quality restaurant and café concessions inside cultural institutions, with sites at the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Wallace Collection and Kew Gardens, and can describe the operating logic from the inside. He has presided over both the building and the public administration of Peyton & Byrne, and discusses commercial failure and reinvention as someone who has lived it. He has applied a single operating philosophy, hospitality as a service discipline, across nightclubs, restaurants, bakeries, drinks brands and the funeral sector with Exit Here. Fifteen years as a judge on the BBC’s Great British Menu has given him sustained scrutiny of how performance operations function under pressure, and a vocabulary that translates for audiences outside hospitality. He has consulted for Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard, organisations large enough to expose any thin theory of consumer-facing operations. Biography highlights Founder of Peyton & Byrne, with restaurants and cafés inside the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Wallace Collection, Kew Gardens, the British Library and the Wellcome Collection. Judge on BBC Two’s Great British Menu from 2006 to 2021. Honorary OBE for services to catering, presented in 2012. Founder of Exit Here, a contemporary funeral business in Chiswick and Crouch End, opened in 2019. Founder of Unknown Pleasures, a premium canned cocktail brand launched in 2021. Author of two cookbooks; columnist for GQ Magazine; consulting client list includes Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard. Biography Hospitality is a public discipline. Every cover is a transaction watched in real time, and a single bad year can take a brand that took fifteen years to build. Few operators have spent longer testing what that requires than Oliver Peyton. He opened nightclubs in Brighton and London in the early 1980s. He moved into restaurants with the Atlantic Bar & Grill in 1994, then launched a string of London venues including Coast, Mash and Isola. In 2005, he founded Peyton & Byrne, which placed restaurant and café concessions inside major London cultural institutions, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Wallace Collection and Kew Gardens. The trajectory has not been linear. In October 2016, Peyton & Byrne entered administration after losing contracts, including Kew Gardens and the British Library. It was acquired by Sodexo, where Peyton stayed on as creative director. In 2019, he founded Exit Here, a contemporary funeral business in Chiswick, now also operating in Crouch End. It applies the hospitality model to a sector he describes as largely unchanged since the Victorian era. In 2021, he launched the premium canned cocktail brand Unknown Pleasures. Alongside the operating career, Peyton spent fifteen years as a judge on BBC Two’s Great British Menu, from 2006 to 2021. He has also presented and contributed to programmes on restaurant turnaround. He was awarded an honorary OBE for services to catering in 2012 and has consulted for Sodexo, British Airways, Virgin and Pernod Ricard. His career makes a practical point. Consumer-facing operations are a portable discipline. Operators who have lived through public failure and started again carry an authority that strategists rarely match. Key speaking topics Hospitality and consumer-facing operations Restaurant and catering entrepreneurship Brand building inside cultural and visitor attraction venues Commercial reinvention after public failure Operating discipline in service businesses Cross-sector application of hospitality models Ideal for Hospitality, retail and consumer-facing operators looking at growth or repositioning CEOs and founders of brands operating inside host environments such as museums, galleries, transport hubs and public venues Boards weighing turnaround, recovery or reinvention strategy after operational failure Senior leaders in catering, foodservice and customer-facing service industries Audience outcomes An operator’s account of how restaurants and consumer venues actually generate margin, and where it leaks Specific case material on building brands inside the National Gallery, Royal Academy, Kew Gardens and similar host venues A direct read on how Peyton & Byrne entered administration, what was lost, and what came next A view of how hospitality discipline transfers into adjacent sectors, drawn from the funeral business, Exit Here and drinks brand Unknown Pleasures

Why organisations work with Olivier Sibony He co-authored Noise with Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein, which means a board hears the original behavioural science argument from one of the people who built it, not a secondhand interpretation. Twenty-five years at McKinsey, including running the Global Corporate Strategy Practice, gives him a working vocabulary for the actual decisions executive committees argue about: portfolio bets, M&A, market entry, capital allocation. His framework converts cognitive bias from an interesting concept into a procurement question: what does your decision architecture look like, and which specific traps does it fail to catch. He is one of a small group who can sit in a HEC Paris and Saïd Business School classroom and a CEO’s strategy offsite in the same week, and translate without losing either audience. Biography highlights Co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, winner of the 2019 Manpower Foundation Grand Prize for best management book Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company for 25 years, leading the firm’s Corporate Strategy Practice globally Co-author with Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo of “Before You Make That Big Decision,” selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions Knight in the French Legion of Honour and recipient of the Vernimmen Teaching Award at HEC Paris Biography Most strategic mistakes do not come from missing information. They come from the way executives process the information they already have. Behavioural strategy is the discipline of catching those errors before they reach the board paper, and Olivier Sibony has spent two decades building the case for treating it as a serious management practice rather than a curiosity. His credentials sit on both sides of the divide that usually separates academics from operators. He spent 25 years at McKinsey & Company, eventually as Senior Partner running the firm’s Global Corporate Strategy Practice and a European leader of the Consumer sector. In 2015 he moved full time into teaching, joining HEC Paris as a Professor of Strategy and taking up an Associate Fellowship at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. The intellectual work shows up most clearly in the books. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, co-authored with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and reframed an entire category of judgment error that bias literature had ignored. You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! won the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize and turned the academic case into 40 specific techniques executives can use. Earlier, his Harvard Business Review article with Kahneman and Dan Lovallo, “Before You Make That Big Decision,” was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions. What makes him useful in a room full of operators is the McKinsey vocabulary underneath the behavioural science. He talks about decision architecture the way other people talk about org design: as something you build deliberately, audit regularly, and rebuild when it stops catching the errors it was meant to catch. Key speaking topics Behavioural strategy and decision quality Cognitive bias in executive judgment Noise and inconsistency in organisational decisions Decision architecture in senior teams Strategic choice under uncertainty Algorithms, AI, and the limits of human intuition Diversity and personnel decision-making Ideal for CEOs, executive committees, and boards reviewing how major capital allocation and strategy decisions get made Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development teams running M&A, portfolio, and market-entry processes CHROs and senior HR leaders responsible for hiring, performance review, and promotion systems where noise quietly distorts outcomes Investment committees and risk leadership teams whose decisions repeat under uncertainty Audience outcomes A clearer view of where their own decision processes are most exposed to bias and noise A vocabulary to challenge confident recommendations without attacking the people making them Specific techniques for building dissent, structured disagreement, and pre-mortems into existing governance A framework for deciding when to trust judgment, when to trust data, and when to trust an algorithm A sharper sense of which decisions deserve the heaviest process and which do not

Why organisations work with Oswald Rodrigo Pereira He has summited five eight-thousand-metre peaks without supplementary oxygen or Sherpa support, a credential held by a small population of climbers worldwide and one that gives his risk material a basis no simulation can replicate. He has been on the active end of two high-altitude rescues, including the 2023 evacuation of 84-year-old Carlos Soria from Dhaulagiri, and uses both as worked examples of crisis decision-making rather than as anecdote. His twelve years as a television journalist before mountaineering give him a working method for information triage under deadline, which he applies directly to how leadership teams handle incomplete data. He directs and shoots his own documentary work in the death zone, including The Silent Escape, which gives his sessions visual evidence at a level most speakers in the resilience category cannot match. Biography highlights Five eight-thousand-metre summits without supplementary oxygen: Broad Peak, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Kangchenjunga Ten Himalayan and Karakoram expeditions in seven years, including two winter K2 attempts Director of The Silent Escape, awarded Best Mountain Film at the Krakow Mountain Festival 2023 and screened in more than twenty countries Co-led the 2023 high-altitude rescue of climber Carlos Soria on Dhaulagiri Twelve-year prior career as a television journalist in Poland covering politics, economics and sport Law studies at the University of Warsaw and the University of Lisbon Biography The death zone above eight thousand metres is the highest-stakes operating environment a person can voluntarily enter. Judgement degrades, oxygen falls below half of sea-level value, and the consequences of a slow decision are irreversible. Oswald Rodrigo Pereira has worked in that environment for seven years, on ten expeditions, and has summited five of its peaks without supplementary oxygen. His route to the mountain ran through journalism. Twelve years in Polish television covering politics, economics and sport gave him a working discipline around information under deadline. The pivot came on a winter K2 expedition, where he went as a correspondent and stayed as a climber. He now films what he climbs. The documentary The Silent Escape premiered in Seoul in October 2023, won Best Mountain Film at the Krakow Mountain Festival, and has since screened in over twenty countries. Two rescues anchor his crisis material. The 2023 evacuation of 84-year-old Carlos Soria from Dhaulagiri, reported in detail by Explorersweb, required him and climbing partner Bartek Ziemski to return to altitude with stretcher and oxygen after their own summit and ski descent. The decisions in that sequence, who moves, in what order, with what margin, are the substance of his risk and decision-making sessions, not the dressing. What he offers leadership audiences is not motivation. It is a working description of how a small team triages information, allocates physical and cognitive reserve, and decides what to abandon when conditions change faster than the plan. The translation to boardroom risk is left to the audience, deliberately, and that is the strongest test of whether the material lands. Key speaking topics Risk management in extreme conditions Decision-making under sustained pressure Crisis response and rescue operations Resilience and recovery Information triage from journalism to crisis leadership High-altitude filmmaking and storytelling Personal transformation and physical reinvention Ideal for Executive teams and boards running risk, safety, or crisis-response remits Operations and field leaders in industries with consequential physical risk (energy, construction, logistics, defence) Leadership offsites focused on decision-making under pressure Conferences in insurance, security, or resilience adjacent sectors Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how a small team makes consequential decisions when information is partial and time is short Two worked examples of high-altitude crisis response, used to surface the structure of good and bad calls under load A framing of risk that separates the avoidable from the inherent, and treats the inherent as something to be managed rather than removed Footage and first-person material from inside the death zone that gives the abstract content concrete weight