Paul is the founder of Laughlin Consultancy, a business that enables companies to maximize the value of their customer insight. This includes growing their bottom line, improving customer retention and evidencing to regulators they treat customers fairly. Services that are achieving this value-add include training & consultancy. He also provides executive coaching, to ensure leaders can sustain such performance themselves. The most popular training course this year, “Consultancy Skills for Customer Insight Analysts” has received rave reviews from analysts, leaders & marketers. Former Head of Customer Insights for both Lloyds Banking Group Insurance and Scottish Widows, Paul has over 13 years’ experience of creating & improving customer insight teams. Plus 25 years’ experience of deriving value from data. His teams added over £10m incremental profit per annum, through improvements to customer acquisition & experience.

Dr. Nicolaus Henke is a leader in the field of analytics and is bringing this new science of management to clients while leading McKinsey's innovations in this critical area of client service. He leads McKinsey Analytics globally and also serves as Chairman of QuantumBlack, an advanced analytics firm operating at the intersection of strategy, technology and design to improve performance. (QuantumBlack was acquired by McKinsey in 2015.) McKinsey Analytics has growing data analytics capabilities in every industry group, functional group, and geography and helps clients achieve dramatic impact through analytics, often through large sustained transformations.

Nico's passion for analytics and its potential to radically change the field of management science stems from his own client work. He serves leading companies and healthcare systems on improving performance through data enabled transformation and has seen firsthand the impact that can be achieved through the capture and analysis of big data. In addition to his McKinsey leadership role and continued client work, Nico publishes and speaks extensively on the topic of advanced analytics. His recent focus is how to help CEOs of large companies to transform their strategies and organizations, enabled by data and analytics. He is currently co-leading a joint research effort with the McKinsey Global Institute on the future of decision making, which will look at the potential opportunities and challenges that private and public sector organizations will face as the field of analytics advances. Nicolaus serves on the Board of McKinsey, on the Board of Innovations in Healthcare (founded by Duke, WEF and McKinsey), and on the Dean's Advisory Council of Harvard's Kennedy School. He holds a Masters and a doctorate in business from the University of Münster, and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School. At Harvard, he was a John J. McCloy scholar.

As the Head of Research, Analytics at Spotify, Will leads an interdisciplinary team of 15 researchers addressing high-variance questions that range across all parts of the company and include topics such as financial forecasting, user churn prediction, audience segmentation and content valuation. Will and his team draw on techniques from a wide range of scientific, mathematical and computational disciplines including machine learning, network/complexity science, statistics, algebra, topology, economics, and psychology.

Dr. Susan Wegner is responsible for the innovation field “Smart Data Analytics & Communications” of Telekom Innovation Laboratories. The focus areas within this field are strategically derived from the key drivers of future telecommunication business: Future Communication, Big Data and User Driven Innovation. Susan has studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is married and has over 10 years’ experience in designing and managing innovation development within the Deutsche Telekom group.

Kevin works to develop and execute commercial strategies across the digital consumer landscape, bringing to bear extensive analysis, research, & data. He is currently leading a marketing analytics and business intelligence transformation programme across Coca Cola Enterprises, and previously has worked with McKinsey & Co. and Trinity Mirror in developing plans and initiatives based on consumer-driven insights. Kevin has a MBA from Kellogg School of Management and BS from Princeton University

Andy is the Head of Data Science at Direct Line Group, which he joined from Royal Mail in July this year. At Royal Mail, he held several leading roles in data, analytics and business intelligence over three years, including building and heading up a new data science and advanced analytics capability, as well as implementing a new business intelligence capability for Royal Mail’s Parcels business. Andy oversaw the development and delivery of a number of business analytics projects, including Single Customer View, customer churn model, revenue assurance analytics, fraud detection and various data visualisation initiatives.

Prior to Royal Mail, Andy worked at Accenture for six years in various business, technology and data consulting roles. Andy will be driving the development and delivery of more data agility at DLG, collaborating with various parts of the business to use data in creative ways to support or improve business processes and decision making, enable data talent and expertise across the business.

Eloy is the VP of Data Science at News Corp, a worldwide network of leading companies in the worlds of diversified media, news, education, and information services, such as The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, New York Post, The Times, The Sun, The Australian, HarperCollins, Move, Storyful and Unruly Prior to this, Eloy led Pricing, Data Science and Data Analytics for HarperCollins Publishers, the second largest consumer book publisher in the world, with operations in 18 countries, nearly 200 years of history and more than 65 unique imprints. Since joining HarperCollins in 2011, Eloy pioneered the creation and development of the pricing function, first in the UK, and then its extension to international scale for the global company. He worked with his teams and each division around the world to drive data-driven decision-making, with particular focus on Pricing. Besides his global role, he was Board Level Director of HarperCollins UK. Previous to HarperCollins, Eloy worked in a number of countries, languages and industries, including publishing scientific papers on spacecraft orbits for the European Space Agency and managing global pricing initiatives at American Express.

Mike is the Director for Data and Insights at Microsoft Skype, and manages one of the worlds very large consumer data sets, extracting leanings to help Skype compete at scale. To do this he has built an end to end data team which comprises data science, business analysis, data architecture and data quality. Prior to working at Skype, Mike has run management consulting teams specialising in data analytics in a broad set of industries for the previous 15 years. The focus of this effort has been on the intersection of data and business impact. Mike manages one of the world’s largest consumer data sets, extracting leanings to help Skype compete at scale. To do this he has built an end to end data team which comprises data science, business analysis, data architecture and data quality. Prior to working at Skype, Mike has run management consulting teams specialising in data analytics in a broad set of industries for the previous 15 years. The focus of this effort has been on the intersection of data and business impact

Kristjan is responsible for the management of the whole company, but mainly focusing on innovation, compliance and IT development. Her team is made of around 75 people in 3 different locations. Peachy.co.uk has been a leading innovator in the UK consumer credit space ever since it was launched in 2011. His recent achievements include Integrating Big Data analytics and Social Data profiling throughout the whole customer life cycle from marketing to debt collection. He believes that the way they have succeeded in utilising big data is unique and he can see limitless opportunities going further. Kristjan have been a speaker on several conferences before and received nothing but positive feedback.

Peter Sergio is the Chief Technology Specialist in the area of Big Data, Machine Learning and Data Science in Nordea. His task in Nordea spans from working on concrete projects and defining and developing the new Common Information Platform (CIP) in Nordea.

He has hands on experience with various technologies from the Hadoop EcoSystem, such as Apache Spark, Apache HBase, HDFS, etc. but also machine learning modelling and data science has been a part of Peter’s daily work. One of the key project that Peter is working on is in the area of Risk and Compliance, and other projects involving recommendation engines and face detection, among others.

Tommaso has over 10 years’ experience managing BI implementations in large global organizations as a instrumental BI and Analytics professional in mainly the retail and pharmaceutical industries, by simplifying and embedding BI into business processes in companies like Danone. As an evangelist of simplification and bi-modal bi, he is convinced that the real value of analytics can be achieved only with the business working side by side with IT. In the last few years his main focus has been around operationalization of BI, real-time analytics, data visualization, predictive analytics and big data. Tommaso is currently a Global Business Intelligence and Analytics Marketing and Sustainability Portfolio Manager for Unilever in London.

Roberto is an Aeronautical Engineer who had to repurpose himself as IT professional, before responding to the call of Data Management a bit more than 2 years ago. Career wise, Roberto has been working for Nissan, Ford and for the last 16 years he has been part of General Electric Capital big family. As Chief Data Officer for their International Division he has been overlooking the implementation of Data Governance and Quality framework, spanning from supporting risk model validation to enabling divestitures and leading their more recent Basel III data initiatives, with a hint of BCBS239. He hates the “Big Data” thing, but he loves the fact that Data Management is still broadly pioneering with very wide horizons to explore and land to conquer.

Charlie began working with consumer data at Forrester Research in Boston just in time to witness the dotcom crash of 2001, before switching to lead agency measurement and analytics with multiple global clients including General Motors, American Express, AT&T, BT, Fidelity and Comcast. After receiving his MBA in 2012 at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Charlie joined BT’s MBA Leadership Programme as an internal consultant before most recently moving to TripAdvisor in 2013 in his current role of Director of Customer Insights. Now based out of London, Charlie today works to help TripAdvisor and its clients make the most of all available forms of travel research, using TripAdvisor’s own data to help the world’s largest travel companies stay current with global traveller trends

Armando Vieira is a Physicist turned into a data scientist. He started working on machine learning after his PhD in Physics in 1997. From the beginning he was an aficionado of Artificial Neural Networks, and recently he is focused on Deep Neural Networks, especially for unsupervised and semi-supervised learning problems. He has more than 50 publications and worked as a Data Scientist consultant on several companies and startups. Presently is a lead data scientist at Bupa in London

Geoffrey Zbinden is Senior Vice President Business Intelligence & Customer Base Management within Orange Group. His department is in charge of Data Management, Customer Analytics and Customer Engagement for Orange affiliates in Europe, Africa and Middle-East. Geoffrey’s focus is on leveraging Data to increase customer loyalty, digital usage adoption and revenue stream. Before his current position, he was Vice President Finance for Orange France and more recently Director of Machine-to-Machine within Orange Group. In 2010 he published a book titled “The Internet of Things, an answer to the Global Warming”, prefaced by the former French Ministry of Ecology.

Jim Anning is Head of Data and Analytics at British Gas Connected Home. His team of Data Scientists and Engineers manage all aspects of data from Connected Homes’ products including Hive Active Heating and MyEnergy, analysing it to help improve services and developing machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to give customers the best experience from connected products

Norma has been working in the field of enterprise data and information management for over 16 years and is currently Head of Global Data Services at British American Tobacco. Since joining BAT in 2008, Norma has held several senior IT director roles, working on large enterprise business transformation programmes.

Norma lead one of the most critical workstreams on Programme TaO, which is the largest and fastest SAP implementation in the world. As Global Data Lead, Programme TaO, Norma had principle accountability for defining and executing the global data strategy and the scope of her role directly affected over 150 people and extended to operational leadership of a team of over 600 people, based all over the world.

Norma is passionate about data and understands its commercial value. She believes that we are still tackling some of the fundamental data and information challenges that we were tackling many years ago! Today, however, we have even more data – and the dynamics of digital, the explosion of social media, the growth of globalisation and the economic drivers to sharpen ones competitive advantage has increased the pressure to deliver…and deliver big and fast!

Detlef is the head of data science research in BT's Research and Innovation Division located at Adastral Park, Ipswich, UK. He is leading a group of international scientists working on Intelligent Data Analysis and Autonomic Systems. His interest is making data analytic techniques more widely available by automating analytics and embedding them into systems and processes. His research focusses on developing new ways of analysing data to achieve better insights and how to conduct analytics professionally and responsibly. Detlef is a Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University and a Private Docent at the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany. He has also published over 120 papers, holds 6 patents and 30 active patent applications.

Rhys started as a junior programmer many moons ago and came through the ranks from senior, to tech-lead, to architect and then into running various dev, data and analytics teams. He has worked with organisations of all shapes and sizes from BP, Hanson, Babcock to GoCompare! Rhys is incredibly passionate about building high-performance teams and the phrase he is guilty of using the most is "It's about the people, process and technology". Technology is often the easy bit!

Vanessa Galvany is on a mission to help companies grow profitable businesses by delivering best in class insights and data analytics capabilities, while acting as a change agent to transform the role of marketing within the organization. As an experienced marketing and business intelligence professional, Vanessa has held a variety of business intelligence and marketing roles at Dell Technologies prior to becoming the “Director of Market and Business intelligence” at Royal Philips. Specialties: Business Intelligence and Information Systems, CRM, Strategic Consulting/Analytics, Program Management, Executive Engagement, Change Management and People Management. Vanessa is originally from Barcelona, Spain and holds a BSc in Business Administration and an Executive MBA from the IESE Business School

Francesco is a data scientist at Johnson&Johnson. His team is formed by 12 data scientists between Europe and USA. He provides data analytics solutions to several teams within the Company, from sales forecasting to Real World Evidence, from algorithm design to early stage development and deployment into production environments. He will be speaking about data analytics in Pharma and pitch an approach he has been working on in his personal time.

Matthew is a lead data scientist within Shop Direct. He is responsible for providing leadership and direction to a team of over 15 data scientists, including internal and outsource resource. Responsibilities include integrating advanced analytics into the various functions within Shop Direct, delivery of key strategic data led and enabled initiatives, and an internal academy designed to increase analytical capabilities across the wider Shop Direct analytical community. 

Recent successes include: 

- delivery of internally produce algorithms and solutions to increase website conversion and customer ease via personalisation of journeys, including the personalisation of website navigation, galley sort orders and the homepage. 

- providing a suite of analytical solutions to the sales and marketing teams to revolutionise customer management including: strategic customer segmentation, campaign incremenality modelling, customer value models, and marketing effectiveness measurement frameworks 

- the launch of an internal academy to upskill analytics across Shop Direct 

The above achievements have been key in securing a range of industry awards for Shop Direct, including: 

-Retail Week Customer Experience Personalisation Initiative of the Year 2015 for Personalisation Acceleration 

-Retail Week Technology Initiative of the Year 2016 for Personalised Sort Orders 

-Drapers Digital Awards, Best Digital Team 2016 for the eCommerce and Insight teams. He will be speaking on how actionable insights can help marketing and sales functions increase return on investment and deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. 

Shop Direct has been on an incredible transformational journey from traditional catalogue retailer to leading digital retailer over that last 10 years and he has very much been a part of this. Their approach to Sales and Marketing has changed significantly over this period and the importance that analytics has played in this cannot be underplayed.

Harvinder leads a team of analysts and Data Scientists to deliver data-driven customer insight, marketing optimisation and predictive analytics for Moneysupermarket from one of the largest customer databases in the UK with records for 23 million unique individuals. Harvinder was previously Insight Director for Tesco Clubcard at Dunnhumby and Senior Manager for Customer Strategy and Insights at Lloyds Banking Group. He is passionately interested in Data Science, Machine Learning, Big Data technologies and how they can be used to improve Customer Experience.

As head of the Data Science at Capital One UK, Dan leads an 18-strong cross-functional team that is changing the way we do business. He uses the latest distributed computing technologies and operate across many billions of customer transactions. The models and data products that his team builds, unlocks big opportunities for the business and help UK consumers save money and reduce friction in their financial lives. He and his team have recently implemented a new open source analytic environment for model building/deployment as well as a sandpit for testing new analytic approaches. The last 6 months have seen the launch of major new credit risk models, leveraging the latest machine learning approaches to optimise our decisions. He has also made recent strides in understanding and mining customer contact data to better meet their needs and help them succeed. Dan have over 15 years of experience in analytics within the Finance industry. He has looked to build and lead highly-skilled, engaged teams focused on using data to solve real business problems.

Head of Technical Analysis at West Ham United, Rory oversees all of their analysis around player recruitment and opposition analysis. With a background in professional gambling and using statistical modelling to gain a financial edge he now implements similar models and processes in the professional game.

Andrés Manso is a serial entrepreneur that founded startups like HogarDigital & Atraczion. He worked on several Big Data projects when he was getting his M.S in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley. Shortly after, he found Incubio, The Big Data Academy where he co-founded more than 20 companies. Andrés strongly believes that Incubio is the perfect environment for entrepreneurs to enhance technical knowledge, sharp problem solving skills, and learn the art of execution. Incubio allow coporations to scout for next generation technologies or innovations by creating corporate incubation programmes.

Xavier Ruiz is Computer Science engineer for Polytechnic University of Catalonia. His experience is based on cloud environments and distributed computing. His interest for the startup world started on the startup incubator Incubio, The Big Data Academy as Technical Leader for more than 2 years. He is currently the founder and CEO of SmartMonkey where they develop Big Data technologies in the optimization field based on their algorithms and distributed computing platform.

A PhD in Computational Linguistics, Lauren is the Lead Scientist of the Natural Language Processing research and development team of the Tekstum engine. She provides strategic linguistic direction regarding the growth and scalability of their language-dependent tools, as well as head the initiative to define and integrate new state-of-the-art features in an effort to constantly grow the capabilities of our innovative sentiment analysis engine.

Spanning a 20 year career around data management and business insights at Fortune 100 companies, Raj currently leads a global team of Customer Insights advocates backed by innovative Data Science and intelligent generating platforms at ITC Infotech, to help Customer Centric Organizations better engage with their customers Globally.

Mark Patrick Roeling (Dutch) studied psychology (BSc), behavior genetics (MSc) and genetic epidemiology (MSc) and worked as a junior researcher in the Erasmus MC Rotterdam and the Centre for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research in Amsterdam. He worked as data scientist for Capgemini, where he focused on detecting fraud in the banking sector and the Dutch tax authority. So far, his work has been strongly statistical and at Oxford he aims to use his background to test the applicability of methods and models from (genetic) epidemiology to improve the detection of anomalies in big data in a cyber context. In his first year, he has studied the vulnerability of state estimation algorithms to false data injection in an aerospace setting, and the possibility to detect fraudulent credit application by systematically comparing residuals from regression analyses to detect dishonest clients.

Jeremy King is the CEO & Founder of Attest, a technology startup based in London. Attest is the complete platform for high-quality, high-volume evidence, insights, data & intelligence. The power of Attest is in delivering confident insights quickly, engaging respondents in new ways, with powerful analytical tools, and flexible technology that can deliver almost anything you can imagine.

Before starting Attest, Jeremy guided many large companies on strategy, operations, governance, decision-making and organisation during his 9 years with McKinsey & Company, where he worked across U.K., U.S., Australia and over 20 other countries. Jeremy holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and was originally a scientist, focusing on genetics and ecology. Jeremy has been involved in several startups in the U.S. and U.K., is an Advisory Board member at Founders4Schools and is an NED at REAch2 (the U.K.'s largest primary schools education Trust).

Markus is driving Advanced Analytics on network and service data in Vodafone Germany to improve customer experience and operational performance. He leads a team of data scientists for predictive/big data analytics as well as a BI developer team to productize analytical results into KPIs, reports and dashboards. By developing a real time correlation software, the data science team is able to proactively find network and service deteriorations and automate the corrective maintenance process, delivering every year multi-million OPEX savings. Employing the typical data science methods to correlate network and customer data, they also continuously provide levers to improve customer service experience.

Before his role at Vodafone, Markus held various positions in Product Management, Sales and Management Consulting at various companies in the communications sector. He holds a diploma and a PhD in physics from LMU Munich.

Olmo is a Data Scientist, entrepreneur and change maker. He was one of the first joiners of ZXVentures (AB-Inbev) as Head of Data & BI for all European operations. ZXVentures is a disruptive growth organisation part of AB-Inbev set to disrupt the beer industry and wider beverage & experiences industry.

Olmo's responsibilities include leading and developing the data roadmap: from asking the right questions and designing the data architecture, to in-house development of innovative data products and democratising data across the entire organisation. Olmo's past achievements include inventing an unsupervised multidimensional clustering algorithm; he was the first Data Scientist at TripAdvisor CPC; and he developed a process to optimise AdWords bidding. He collaborated with various not-for-profit organisations and worked as a strategy consultant. Studied finance and marketing at ICADE, CBS and McGill University and worked for three years in China.

Olmo loves developing data models that are able to explain reality and bring value to users, and creating collaborative environments to help talent grow within the organisation. He taught himself how to code in Python, regularly joins Python & Data conferences and you will likely find him coding early in the morning while sipping a coffee and listening to music.