Speakers

Forbes 30 under 30, Florence and Chloe are the co-founders of Chia Sisters, a Nelson company game-changing the beverage industry. Chloe and Florence make New Zealand's most nutritious juices in the nation's first solar-powered juicery. Chia Sisters stock their superfood juices, bottled in recycled glass, to over 700 cafes, grocers and supermarkets nationwide and export to Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia. Chia Sisters was the first company in the top of the South Island to become Living Wage accredited.

Having spent 20 years in highly stressful management positions all over the globe, Ani was diagnosed with stress induced stage three cancer for the 2nd time in her career.

Ani was a manager who was told to slow down - to "chill out".

Leveraging her neuroscience background, Ani reignited her passion for the human brain and began her own research only to find that 'slowing down' was detrimental to the circuitry within a high performers brain. Ani now travels the globe mentoring and speaking about the merits of their own high performing personalities, teaching business leaders, owners and managers how to change their stress instantly, by using Brain Hacking techniques that physically rewire the brain to promote exponential mental performance.

Shahvez David is General Manager of Internal Audit (IA) with the ANZ Banking Group's New Zealand Division, and oversees the third line of defence for the Bank reporting to the Chairman of the Audit Committee for ANZ Bank New Zealand. His remit covers all entities within the ANZ Banking Group in New Zealand and 10 Pacific Countries where ANZ has Banks and processing operations. Shahvez leads a team of 20 staff based in New Zealand who provide assurance over all aspects of the banks operations covering key material risks. He is a member of the ANZ Group Audit Leadership Team globally where he contributes towards the leadership of the ANZ Global IA function across 35 countries.

Prior to joining ANZ, Shahvez was Head of Audit for the Bank of New Zealand and has held various Senior Assurance and Risk roles in NZ across industries covering, technology, banking and aviation over the last 20 plus years. He is passionate about the role of Internal Audit and the value it brings via being a catalyst for risk and controls improvement in an organisation. When time permits he enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters, running, reading and travelling.

Wendy is a Wellington-based independent consultant. She is a chartered accountant with senior executive and governance experience in the public and private sectors. Wendy's areas of expertise are risk, internal and external audit, finance, organisational change, business improvement and assurance.

She is a director of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, and chairs its Audit and Risk Committee. She is an independent member of the Audit and Risk Committee of the Parliamentary Counsel Office.

Wendy is a former partner at EY, Deputy Chief Executive, Organisational Integrity and Risk and Assurance at the Ministry of Social Development, and Assistant Auditor-General at the Office of the Auditor General.

Passionate about influencing business outcomes, I have been leading the Risk, Internal Audit and Fraud functions since 2013. In that time, our Team have used innovation and close relationships with the Leadership Team and the Spark Board members (who sit on the Audit and Risk Management Committee) to improve the level of assurance these stakeholders have about Spark's principal business risks and the effectiveness of the internal control environment.

Key results we are working toward this year include: 1) Using Agile delivery techniques to improve the productivity and focus; 2) Rolling out best in class risk management and business continuity frameworks; and 3) Expanding our fraud focus to assuring adherence with behavioural policies like the Code of Ethics and other essential policies.

Mahesh is a working Director of HR Plus, a Wellington headquartered specialist HR Delivery consulting practice. His experience across New Zealand and Australia (both public and private sector) encompasses working with executive teams to develop long range organisational development and people management strategies, leading business transformation and outsourcing projects, through to the delivery of operational human resource support across Organisational Development, HR Change Management, and Organisational Design disciplines.

Mahesh has a national reputation as a recruitment strategist and has extensive experience in the review and re-architecture of recruitment models and is regarded as an expert in the benchmarking of recruitment function performance and prioritising recruitment opportunities based on their strategic impact and return on investment.

A woman instrumental in the fight against a culture of sexual harassment within the legal profession Steph was recognised as the 2018 Wellingtonian of the Year.

Steph is a Vice President of the Wellington Branch Council of the New Zealand Law Society and Convenor of the Wellington Women Lawyers' Association. She is a Trustee of Mary Potter Hospice and a Director of the Mary Potter Apartment Company. Steph is Acting Chief Judge on the judging panel for the Electra Business Awards (Kapiti-Horowhenua)

A PhD in biomedical materials engineering Michelle runs New Zealand's only nanomechanical testing laboratory and is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie.
Dickinson has said that she used to be painfully shy and afraid of public speaking. On the advice of a speaking coach, she invented the alter-ego "Nanogirl" as a way to overcome her nerves.
Through co-founding Nanogirl Labs, a social enterprise providing STEM outreach and research which uses kinesthetic based learning to increasing scientific literacy and confidence. Michelle's goal is to help people to have a meaningful relationship with technology no matter what their background.
member of the New Zeeland Order of Merit Michelle was the winner of the Woman of Influence award and Innovation in 2016, was awarded the Sir Peter Blake Leadership in 2015 and awarded the Prime Ministers Science Media Communication Prize and NZ Association of Scientists Science Communications Award in 2014. Michelle's mission is to used science for good, not evil!

Her work and presentations have been featured on 60 minutes with Tim Ferris, and in recent years she has shared the stage with the likes of Steve Wozniak, Rudy Giuliani and Oprah Winfrey. She is a woman who is taken seriously by the best in business.

Catherine offers a refreshing approach to innovation, change management and leading in a new way.

David Corbett is the CEO of Centrality FinTech, a company with a portfolio of high-growth FinTech businesses including Chain Financial and Single Source. Chain Financial builds consortium blockchain solutions for financial products and markets. Single Source builds digital onboarding and identity tools for financial services and professional services clients.

David is passionate about financial markets enabling better outcomes for people, their families and their communities. Blockchain is beginning to drive a period of hyper-innovation in finance and David focuses on helping financial market participants, both traditional and emerging, identify strategic opportunities enabled by blockchain and then implement the full technology stack, including the blockchain layer, required to deliver value to their customers.

Prior to being CEO of Centrality FinTech, and its subsidiary Chain Financial, David was a Financial Services Partner for PwC based in London and New Zealand for more than 9 years. He has nearly two decades of experience leading business units and global client engagements in relation to banking, asset management and other financial services clients.

Mark is passionate about all things decentralised and blockchain. He is the founder of TheDAO.agency (a global team based out of New Zealand providing a range of services in the blockchain and Decentralised Autonomous Organisation or DAO space), and former Executive Director of BlockchainNZ.

He has presented at over 30 conferences on blockchain related topics around the world, and has been a Blockchain trainer at Tech Futures Lab. He was also part of the SingularityU New Zealand local faculty training. In recent years he has been on a mission to educate/inspire business people and put New Zealand at the centre of the blockchain disruption. He has been featured in print, radio and television via The Listener, Radio NZ and TV3 Newshub, and co-authored the report "New Zealand: Unlocking Blockchain's Potential". Mark founded blockchain startup 3months.com, and co-founded Blockchainlabs.nz

James heads up Contact's Automation programme. He is responsible for the delivery and future path for Contact's Automation initiatives as well as the establishment of their RPA Centre of Excellence.

Contact Energy's strategic goals are under-pinned by leveraging automation capability to ensure seamless integrations, straight through processing, and removal of repetitive tasks to improve their customers' experience and free up people to focus on more value added tasks. James has a background in business improvement and operational leadership roles within the utilities sector and is passionate around driving change activities, removing waste, and re-imagining the way we work.

Lisa joined UiPath in 2018 as the New Zealand Leader and Account Director.

Before joining UiPath, Lisa worked at EY New Zealand in the Automation team focussed on growing EY's automation business, training both internal EY teams and clients on RPA. During this time at EY, Lisa worked with New Zealand businesses on implementing Uipath to drive improved business outcomes. Prior to joining EY Lisa worked at Wolters Kluwer as APAC GM of Enterprise Software and the NZ Leader growing the business and helping finance teams improve their compliance processes through using Wolters Kluwer's software.

Lisa is a Chartered Accountant who has worked within finance functions of New Zealand's largest businesses.

Carl Wallworth is Group Manager Internal Audit and Assurance at Vector, New Zealand's largest distributor of electricity and gas. With Vector leading the transformation of the energy sector to create a new energy future, the internal audit function has been challenging and reinventing the way it delivers the assurance mandate to the board and wider executive management team.

Carl brings almost two decades of leading internal audit functions here in New Zealand and wider afield across industries including utilities, manufacturing, transportation and life sciences. He is passionate about delivering sustainable and pragmatic recommendations to improve business processes and operational performance.

Melvin Kishore is an experienced assurance professional with over 10 years of experience specialising in data analytics, accountancy and advisory services across various industries.

Based in Auckland, New Zealand Melvin presently leads the data analytics programme within Vector Limited's internal audit function. Prior to Vector, Melvin held senior roles with PwC and KPMG, consulting for large multinational companies across several international jurisdictions.

More recently he has been responsible for integrating the use of robotic and cognitive automation technologies to Vector's data analytics and continuous assurance programme. He is currently leading the expansion of this automation to all the key risk areas of the business while planning a pilot engagement around machine learning within the assurance function.

Peter was appointed as Secretary for Transport and Chief Executive of the Ministry of Transport in July 2016. He was the Chief Executive of Land Information New Zealand for four years prior to this role and has spent the majority of his career in the Public Service.

Peter has held senior leadership roles in Inland Revenue, the Treasury and the Department of Internal Affairs.