Speakers
Keynote speaker
Tim Harford, The Financial Times' Undercover Economist
Tim Harford is a world-renowned behavioural economist, an award-winning Financial Times columnist, and a BBC broadcaster. Described as 'Britain's Malcolm Gladwell', and by The New Statesman as 'perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world' he brings storytelling, humour and intelligence to an oft-maligned discipline.
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With a knack for finding fascinating explanations for everyday numbers, Tim's first two books, The Logic of Life and The Undercover Economist, have been translated into 30 languages and sold well over a million copies. His Radio 4 show More or Less looks at the truth behind dubious statistics and manipulated figures.
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Whilst he's a 'serious' economist with a career spanning Oxford, Shell and the World Bank, Tim's FT columns dwell on the economics of daily life and offer tongue-in-cheek solutions to readers' problems. A regular TED speaker, Tim also looks at why it's so hard yet so important to learn from mistakes, how to deal with uncertainty, how forecasting works and what to do when it doesn't, and what innovation really means in today's world.
Panellists
Lewis joined ECI in 2008 to start up the Commercial Team which is focused on supporting growth at the companies we invest in. Lewis’ current and former investments include XLN, Wireless Logic, Citation, Clarke Energy, Harvard Technology, Avantia, IT Lab, Edenhouse and Imagesound. He previously spent eight years as a strategy consultant at the Monitor Group, based in both London and Hong Kong. Lewis holds an MEng in chemical engineering from Cambridge University.
Jack works on Monetisation at Improbable. He is responsible for the pricing strategy, and works closely with Sales, Marketing, Strategy and Product teams to define and execute the overall go-to-market strategy. Improbable is a British technology company founded in 2012 that focuses on large-scale simulations in the cloud, enabling virtual worlds of unprecedented scale and complexity. Before joining Improbable, Jack was a Management Consultant at Simon-Kucher & Partners for five years.
Rodrigo is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at Cranfield University, and leads the Key Account Management & Strategic Sales Forum and Sales Directors’ Programme. He is also Visiting Professor at Vlerick Business School (Belgium) and Associate Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His main area of interest for teaching, research and consulting is strategic marketing, especially business-to-business markets with a focus on strategic sales and key account management.
Now Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of eve Sleep plc, Felix was previously Vice President at Rocket Internet and Head of Zalando UK. He also launched a fishing startup and the Indian Fashion platform Jabong.
Stefano is the Programme Coordinator at Campus London, Google’s space for entrepreneurs. Stefano helps tech startups grow by designing and executing a 6 month growth stage acceleration program. He started his career in the tech startup scene in 2012 as a product manager and a co-founder. He also worked in the management team of Level39, one of Europe’s largest tech incubators. Stefano holds a MSc in Theoretical Physics and he currently is an endurance mountain runner for Salomon UK.
Kevin is the President of The Professional Pricing Society (PPS), the worldwide professional organization dedicated to pricing training, education, and networking. He is also the Publisher of The Pricing Advisor monthly newsletter and the quarterly Journal of Professional Pricing. Kevin is a frequent speaker at pricing conferences and events in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America where he often discusses trends and demographic changes within the pricing discipline.
Maria works with the boards and management teams of Hg’s portfolio companies across the technology and service sectors on monetisation and pricing topics to accelerate top-line growth. Maria is responsible for developing the pricing IP area within Hg, covering matters from strategic positioning and offer development, to assessing pricing power and identifying tactical improvement opportunities. She has recently worked with Mitratech, Evaluate and Sovos.
Chris Parker has over 20 year’s experience in Revenue Management and Pricing. He started at Brittany Ferries, where he introduced fluid pricing into the UK Ferry industry for the first time. He has worked in the highly competitive short sea market between Dover and France for the last ten years, at Norfolkline and with DFDS Seaway.
Since September 2016, Karen has been the Pricing Manager at Reed Online, the UK's number one job site. Prior to this, Karen spent 11 years at Pearson, the global education company, in a variety of roles ranging from corporate finance to digital strategy to pricing.
John is the GM for EMEA at Zuora, a post he had held for nearly 4 years John has spent over 25 years in the enterprise software industry at major software vendors including Oracle, EMC Corp, and OpenText, but has demonstrated expertise at much smaller firms designing and implementing growth strategies within innovative/early adopter markets. That experience has covered a wide range of business model including open source and SaaS, and a wide range of industries.
John is currently Commercial Finance Director at Addison Lee Group with responsibility for all financial aspects of the UK and Global operations across the Group. John’s responsibilities also cover all pricing activity in the UK and wider global operations, with a focus on building out a global pricing capability following successful acquisitions in the Executive and US markets. During John’s previous role at the AA he was responsible for the UK Breakdown business and Driving School.
Mike has spent the last decade helping companies make better decisions using data. After starting his career in analytical consulting at IBM where he worked with market leading companies, he has since focused on working with disruptive start-ups in London. His past roles and clients include high end home-stay company onefinestay, flower delivery innovators Bloom & Wild, and most recently Deliveroo where he is the Head of Marketing Finance, driving value from marketing spend globally.
Jane Wilkinson is the group’s Chief Marketing Officer. Jane was appointed Chief Marketing Officer in 2016. Before that, Jane had several leadership roles within Euromoney Institutional Investor as a Managing Director for Euromoney Training and HedgeFund Intelligence. CEO and President of Institutional Investor, and the Director of Marketing for the Group. She joined Euromoney in 2000. Before joining Euromoney, she spent ten years at IPC Media.
Simon-Kucher experts
Xi Bing is a Director based in the London office. He specialises in strategy and pricing projects in industrial sub-sectors and B2B data services, with experience in growth strategy formulation, pricing audits and solution development, price model and structure design, as well as organisation design. Xi Bing has 10 years of management consulting experience; prior to joining Simon-Kucher, he worked in strategic planning, growth strategy and large-scale transformation for multinational clients.
Christoph is a Partner and Global Head of the Retail & SME Banking practice. He is located in the Hamburg and Copenhagen office. His focus areas are digitalisation, innovative offering and pricing models in Retail and SME banking, behavioural economics, sales effectiveness, pricing optimisation, and value communication. Christoph studied Business Administration and Economics at the University of Münster and Copenhagen Business School and holds a PhD from the University of St. Gallen.
Mark is a Board Member and Managing Partner of the UK operations of Simon-Kucher in London, having been with the firm since 2006. He is a Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA) and has a BA (Hons) in Management from the University of Nottingham. Mark has fifteen years' experience in the field of pricing and financial management. Mark's areas of specialisation are in the development of pricing and monetisation strategies.
James is a Partner in the UK practice at Simon-Kucher & Partners and has been with the firm since 2009 following 11 years’ experience in industry roles. Prior to joining Simon-Kucher, James was Head of International Pricing at Hertz Europe and before that Senior Pricing Manager in the global division of Ricoh, a leading IT hardware and service provider. His specialisms include B2B contract pricing and sales force / pricing interaction.
Lauren Carter is a Director in the London office of Simon-Kucher & Partners. Since joining Simon-Kucher & Partners, Lauren has worked on a number of both B2B and B2C projects for a range of industry leading companies across the globe. Her project experience includes customer segmentation, growth strategies, price hierarchy optimisation, strategic price development, trade term optimisation and value-selling training.
Peter is an experienced Partner based in the London office. His focus is Technology and Industrial Goods sectors and he joined Simon-Kucher in 2008. He has generated strong profit enhancement results during 17 years in consulting and industry, focusing on commercial strategy, sales, marketing, pricing and product management. Peter has broad experience gained working for corporate clients, private equity-backed companies and venture capital-backed start-ups in the UK and internationally.
Andreas is a Senior Partner and Member of the Board with Simon-Kucher in Bonn. He is the Global Head of the company's Consumer and Retail Practice. In these fields he carried out projects dealing with price and allowance optimisation, the development of marketing and brand strategies as well as the valuation of brands. He especially focuses on the interface between marketing and controlling. He is a lecturer at various universities, and the author of several books and articles.
Dimitris is the Global Head of Leisure, Travel, Transportation at Simon-Kucher & Partners. He holds an MSc in Decision Sciences and a BSc (Hons) in Management Sciences from the London School of Economics. Dimitris has 10 years’ experience in pricing & yield management. His areas of expertise include yield management and dynamic pricing, B2B list price optimisation and value-based discounting and price-sensitive demand forecasting.
Rosalind is a Senior Director with Simon-Kucher & Partners in London. She holds an MSc in Economics and Econometrics from The London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds a BSc (Hons) in Economics from Warwick University. During her time at Simon-Kucher, Rosalind has worked for clients from a range of industries, including tourism & travel, logistics, insurance and B2B services. She specialises in developing forecasting, initial pricing and revenue management approaches.
Alan is a Director with Simon-Kucher & Partners in London. Alan’s principle area of expertise is with Technology, Media & Telecommunications businesses, both B2B and B2C. His focus is on pricing and sales process optimisation, portfolio analysis and design. Alan holds a BSc in Mathematics and Economics from the University of the Pacific, California as well as an M.Phil. Economics from the University of Oxford where he wrote his thesis on price discrimination.
Wolfgang is the Chief Technology Officer at Simon-Kucher, leading our Digital Solutions team. He has more than a decade of experience in pricing consulting. The Digital Solutions team advise clients on pricing, sales, and marketing technologies and provides Data Science services.
David is a Partner at Simon-Kucher in London. Since joining in 2007, David has worked for both the London and San Francisco offices and has conducted projects across the UK, Europe and the USA. David is a published author, regular conference speaker and commentator on pricing and commercial strategy topics. David has a wide range of experience, having worked across various sectors. His core focus areas are Software and B2B Data Services. He also leads the Education practice in the UK.
Georg is the CEO of Simon-Kucher & Partners. He has been leading the company since May 2009. Georg has more than 25 years of consulting experience in the service sector (telecommunications, transportation and logistics, travel and hospitality, B2B services, etc.) and the automotive industry. He is well-known as a personal consultant and coach. His key specialty is pricing transformation. He has conducted many global pricing transformation programs for large multinational companies.