Members' Advisory Board

Anna Sandgren - Head of Business Development

Ben & Jerry's

Anna Sandgren is the Head of Business Development including E-commerce/DTC and country expansion at Ben & Jerry’s in Europe, owned by Unilever. With 20 years of experience in a mix of tech/finance start-ups (Orc Software), private equity (Kopy Goldfields/Cancale), global retail (Unilever) and car companies (Volvo), Anna's passion and knowledge lies primarily within sales, marketing, driving purpose with impact and growing business fast within a disruptive or challenging context.

With purpose at the heart, Anna was co-founder of a network called Hera - for Engineering Women at LTH - 20 years ago in Sweden, which still is delivering value to next generations engineering women. She has been one of the co-founder of Ice Academy – an entrepreneurial refugee program jointly driven by Ben & Jerry’s and NGO Tern. Working across Europe, Anna has been one of the leaders behind the Unbreakable rainbow in Poland, where purpose and impact were driven by an offline experience combined with digital disruption to drive awareness of LGBT rights in Poland with the ambition to drive systematically change.

Mark Cliffe - Chief Economist

ING Group

Mark Cliffe is the Chief Economist of ING Group, an international financial services group with 37 million customers. Based in London and Amsterdam, he leads a team of economists, strategists and analysts in 16 offices around the world. Mark and his team are dedicated to helping businesses and consumers make better decisions by providing fresh insights about the outlook. In a disruptive and uncertain world, marked by dramatic changes in technology, politics and society, this increasingly involves an open source and multi-disciplinary approach to analysis. Mark travels extensively and has worked for a variety of financial services firms including HSBC and Nomura Research Institute.

Ann Roberts - Group HR Director

Badoo

Ann is the Group HR Director for the world's largest dating apps maker Badoo. With previous gigs in Goldman Sachs, Rolls-Royce, Future Cities Catapult and Lebara, she is interested in all things at the intersection of modern HR practice, emerging technologies and business results.

Paul Clark - Chief Technology Officer

Tandem Bank

Paul has worked in digital since the web first exploded back in the late nineties, delivering the online presence for brands such as Adidas, Budweiser, Guinness and Peugeot. Since then he’s worked at a number of UK broadcasters building video on demand (VoD) platforms, starting with Channel 4, then the BBC and finally as Digital CTO at ITV. As VoD matured and commoditised, Paul looked around for the next big challenge and recognised that financial services was next to be disrupted by digital, so he joined HSBC as their Global Head of Engineering for Digital. Unsatisfied with the pace of change at HSBC, Paul left and joined Tandem, a digital only challenger bank. He’s currently the CTO there.

Nick Lisher - Country Manager

Nextdoor

Nick Lisher is the UK Country Manager for Nextdoor, the free and private social network for neighbourhoods.

Nick spent six years in the early 2000s producing websites for MTV, before joining the launch team at successful UK dating site mysinglefriend.com, where he was Strategy Director for four years. Nick then joined mydeco.com as Marketing Director, before becoming Chief Marketing Officer for Massive Media, which was sold to IAC in December 2012. Most recently, Nick served as Chief Marketing Officer for Depop, a fast-growing social shopping app based in the UK.

With a wealth of experience managing online communities, Nick brings a passion for building authentic communities to his critical role leading the UK expansion for Nextdoor.

Major General Tom Copinger-Symes CBE - Director Military Digitisation

Ministry of Defence

Major General Tom Copinger-Symes joined the Royal Green Jackets (now The Rifles) in 1988 and has served on operations in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2014 he formed and took command of 1st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade, before becoming the British Army’s Head of Operations. In late 2017 he led the “Information Manoeuvre” project; commissioned by the Army Board to consider how digitisation is changing the way the Army should fight in the 21st Century. From December 2017 to July 2019 he commanded Force Troops Command (now retitled 6th (UK) Division), where he was responsible for the Army’s specialist formations – including its Intelligence, Information Activities & Outreach, and Signals Brigades – and charged with taking Information Manoeuvre from concept to reality. In August 2019 he was appointed to the new post of Director Military Digitisation at Joint Forces Command, responsible for accelerating UK Defence's Digital Transformation and helping develop the MOD’s concept of Information Advantage.

Phil Scully - Chief Information Officer

Costa

Phil Scully is the CIO for Costa, responsible for corporate and customer systems globally. Phil joined Costa from parent company Whitbread where he was Group CTO for 3 years with responsibility for Technology, Architecture, Data and Information Security functions. Phil has 30 years’ experience in the IT industry working in technology and delivery leadership roles on large, complex transformation agendas for BAA, Centrica, M&S and Whitbread.

James Moore - General Manager

Trainline

James is General Manager of the UK Consumer Business at Trainline. Prior to that, James had leadership roles at the top table of fast growth tech companies - Amazon, eBay, EA Games, Betfair and Sky. James is passionate about building innovative customer propositions at the intersection of marketing, data and digital product and putting together great teams and processes to run them.

Darren Armitage - Enterprise Architecture Director

BMI Group

Experienced enterprise architect and innovator. Wide industry experience from banking to beer and now construction. Focussed on the intersection of architecture and innovation, to fix real world issues and support strategic ambition of the business.

Oliver Lewis - Co-Founder

Near Future Society

Oliver Lewis is the co-founder of the Near Future Society, a senior visiting fellow at the University of Southern California and a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. Previously he built a public sector business for billion-dollar British startup Improbable. He is one of the few technologists who has been deployed to Afghanistan and led efforts to reform how the UK government prepares for emerging technology. He is also the co-founder of Rebellion Defense, based in Washington DC and London, building products for the mission of national defence.

Baron Frankal - Sector Development

Oman Aviation Group

Baron is an experienced strategist. Trained as a corporate finance lawyer at CMS Cameron McKenna, he has worked in central banking (at the ECB), government and for MAG, owner of Stansted and Manchester Airports where he led on corporate strategy, building a wide-ranging portfolio including lounges, car parks, property, the US and a state-of-the-art digital distribution division he helped establish. Baron is now working on strategy for OAG, the bringing together of Oman’s airline, airports and other key tourism assets for sector development, which is all rather exciting if a little hot out in marvellous Muscat.