Speakers
Steve Butler, Chief Executive at Punter Southall Aspire
Steve Butler is CEO at Punter Southall Aspire, a national retirement savings business. Steve takes an active leadership role as a diversity and inclusion champion in the investment and savings industry and within Punter Southall Aspire. By blending academic research, writing books on diversity issues, publishing articles and blogs, and delivering podcasts and lectures to university students on diversity and inclusion subjects, Steve is leading best practice. He has created new diversity programmes and networks in Punter Southall Aspire which are enabling a more inclusive culture and helping attract and recruit more diverse talent. To help drive change, Steve is involved in several initiatives including The Diversity Project, a cross-company initiative championing inclusion within the Savings and Investment profession.
Lisa Edgar, Chief Customer Officer – Saga
Lisa is Saga’s Chief Customer Officer and Chief Executive of its own wholly owned insight agency, the Big Window. Lisa joined the Saga Executive Leadership Team in February 2022 to drive its vision of knowing our customers, and what it means to get older, better than anyone else. Prior to Saga, Lisa owned and led insight agencies for over 20 years and is a multi-award-winning and published speaker on ageing consumers together with how they behave and respond. During that time, Lisa worked with leading UK and global players, including Aviva, Zurich, Bupa, Hargreaves Lansdown, BBC and many others, helping them to develop leading-edge insight into their strategies and tactics. Over the last 10 years, Lisa focused her attention on the ageing population and , in particular, the ageing and decision-making for consumers, employees and employers. She is now regarded as a leader in the field of what it means to age as a consumer and employee, what needs are spawned by this, and how to best satisfy those needs with products and services.
Michaela Gibson, Head of DEI Transformation & Programme Management – Phoenix Group
Michaela is Head of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Transformation and Programme Management and joined Phoenix in September last year.
She has over 20 years’ experience in the UK insurance industry working in the Lloyd’s Specialty Market across a variety of roles in IT, Operations, Business Change and DEI. Shas a degree in History & Politics from the University of Sheffield and a Masters in Global Politics & International Political Economy from Birkbeck University.
She is proudly neurodivergent and a parent to neurodivergent children and an advocate for greater disability and neurodivergent inclusion in the workplace and further afield.
Michaela is also the founder of the Insurance Families Network – the cross UK Insurance Industry working families network, and 50overFifty – the 2023 photography exhibition and initiative celebrating the contribution of women over 50 to the UK Insurance Industry, as well as a steering committee member of Link – the cross UK Insurance Industry LGBTQ+ network.
David Whitson-Black, Group Head of Talent Development at Azets
David is Group Head of Talent Development at Azets, an international business and one of the UK's top 10 accountancy firms. Azets promise is to work hard to improve the lives of their Colleagues, Clients and Communities in a sustainable way and to achieve this for their 90,000 clients across our 160 offices worldwide, requires hiring, nurturing and developing the best talent in the marketplace. Starting his career in people development nearly 20 years ago David now leads Azets Talent development team across the UK & Europe and is also the Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the Azets Group.
David has strong experience in people development and has managed learning and development teams in the financial and professional service sectors. He is passionate about developing the best talent no matter where they are on their journey from early careers right through to senior management. His expertise ranges from leadership development to succession planning, talent strategy, coaching and mentoring, career pathing and performance management.
Kim Chaplain, Specialist Advisor - Work, Centre for Ageing Better
Kim has over 30 year of experience in the employment and skills sector spanning both operational and policy roles. She specialises in community engagement and regeneration and has extensive experience of fostering partnerships between local authorities and employment services in both the third and public sector.
In particular, she has worked with local partnerships to develop solutions tackling long term worklessness. In her early career, Kim spent time working for The Prince’s Trust as the Northern Director of the Volunteers Programme in some of the most economically deprived areas of the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. She has worked at a national level on a number of central governments training schemes including as the Director of the Job Transition Service at Jobcentre Plus, tackling the impact of significant redundancies.
Patrick Thomson, Head of Research, Analysis and Policy from Phoenix Insights
Patrick has more than 15 years’ experience of policy, research, and delivery across the private, public and charitable sectors. He previously led the Centre for Ageing Better’s programme on age-inclusive employment, in government he helped develop the evidence base as part of DWP’s ageing society strategy, and has been an expert witness to the Women and Equalities Select Committee. He is currently leading Phoenix Insights research and policy work looking at topics such as the state pension age, lifelong learning, careers and Mid-life MOTs, and retirement saving.
Lucy Standing, CIC Co-Founder, Brave Starts
Lucy is a co-founder of Brave Starts CIC – a non profit who see being over 50 as an asset. They’re building the blueprint for how people can figure out how to make this the best and most fulfilling time of their careers. Lucy is a Chartered Psychologist, Associate Fellow with the British Psychological Society and Certified Principle Psychologist with the Association for Business Psychology (ABP) for which she was Vice Chair for nearly 10 years. Prior to her nonprofit career, she worked in the strategy consulting and investment banking sectors.
Liz Sebag-Montefiore, Director and Co-founder of 10Eighty
Liz has over 15 years of experience in the HR consulting world as a sales director and coach. She is passionate about coaching as a means to motivate individual performance and is committed to coaching people to have successful and fulfilling careers. Her aim is to help people deal with the various challenges they face in their working life and to develop strategies to effectively deal with them.
Gillian Nissim, Founder, WM People
A former Senior Communications Executive, Gillian has worked at a number of different organisations with very different cultures and attitudes towards family friendly working policies. After the birth of her second child she decided to set up her own company to cater for the businesses who did appreciate the vast experience and high calibre of professionals who had become parents, and wanted to find challenging and interesting jobs that offered more flexibility than traditional office-based, Monday – Friday, 9:00 – 5:00 jobs.
