Larysa Melnychuk

Larysa Melnychuk is a passionate Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) professional and influencer who has held senior FP&A roles at leading organisations before setting up the International FP&A Board in 2013. The Board is a global and well-recognised professional think-tank that aims to bring together the knowledge and experience of senior FP&A professionals and aid the development of best practice in the profession.

In the last three years, she successfully expanded the Board into 27 chapters in 16 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and North America.

Larysa is also the founder and CEO at the FP&A Trends Group (fpa-trends.com), the leading online resource for FP&A professionals. She chairs the Global AI FP&A Committee and runs a number of high-profile initiatives in the area of modern financial analytics.

Larysa holds a Master of Science degree in physics of materials and is a qualified chartered management accountant (CIMA), chartered global management accountant (CGMA) and is a holder of an FP&A certification. She is also a member of the exam content writing team for the Association of Finance Professionals (AFP) FP&A certification.

Larysa is also a passionate conference speaker and writes articles on various FP&A-related subjects.

Laurent Claes

Laurent Claes is the Global Controlling Director at Cartier, part of the Richemont group, which owns several of the world's leading Maisons in the field of luxury goods, with particular strengths in jewellery and luxury watches.

Laurent, 43, is responsible for the consolidated FP&A Reporting and Analysis, ICS and Accounting of the company, as well as competitive analysis and benchmarking, both internal and external.

He previously held the role of Richemont Group FP&A manager, partnering with strongly independent Maisons to identify opportunities to capture profitable growth. In this capacity, Laurent also coordinated the Forecast and Budget cycles. Prior to that, he was Finance Manager International for Carefusion, a medical device company which he joined after being on the management team for an ultimately doomed start-up and spent his formative FP&A years at Levi Strauss in Brussels and GE Capital in London.

Laurent received his Master’s degree from Antwerp University and has studied in the US (Middlebury College) and Japan (Jochi Daigaku).

He is married with two children and lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

James Halley

James Halley is European CFO at Nidec. He is a finance leader, who brings more than 20 years of experience & leadership across various industries after having started in a Big Four as a Chartered Accountant. James has worked in the areas of Accounting & Controlling, Project Management, M&A Deal Execution, Post-Merger Integration, M&A Due Diligence, Auditing and Assurance & Compliance.

Anthony Caffon

Anthony is a Director at Michael Page Geneva, part of Page Group, a leading specialized recruitment firm. For the last 12+ years, Anthony specialized in recruiting finance professionals in Western Switzerland across various sectors such as consumer goods, luxury, energy, manufacturing, lifesciences and not for profit. Clients include privately owned SMEs, start-ups and blue-chip multinational companies. Anthony has built a strong expertise in the market with a wide network in the region. He is a regular speaker in finance-related events in Geneva.

Denis Ranke

Denis Ranke serves as VP of Finance at the Diethelm Keller Group in Switzerland. He brings 15+ years of experience in Technology and Corporate Finance, with the majority of that time spent at ebay International in Germany and the EU Headquarters in Zurich as CFO for emerging markets and businesses. He is used to apply the essentials of FP&A either as Business Operator or project based in the areas of M&A and Business Transformation.

In his current role at Diethelm Keller Group he is leading Controlling, Risk Management, Internal Control Systems and Commercial Management. This entails the scope of classic portfolio management as well as operational interim assignments in portfolio companies. In the current year, the focus has been set on COVID-19 crisis management. Especially the travel businesses in the portfolio have been impacted significantly by the crises which required scenario planning along many dimensions.

Patrick Jung

Since 2019 Patrick Jung works for Horváth & Partners as a senior manager advising CFOs and CIOs on data and analytics to support their digital transformation journeys. Currently he is managing a data science center for a client on an ad interim basis.

Before joining Horváth & Partners, Patrick had worked more than 20 years for ABB Ltd. His earlier career was spent in internal audit, finance, controlling and general management. In 2006 he became CFO of a Chinese joint venture and division CFO in China and the North Asia region. He then served as global business unit CFO and years later joined the finance IT organization to run business intelligence and reporting programs on group level. In 2014 he took over the responsibility for all group finance systems where he started developing data and analytics capabilities. In 2017 he founded a data science lab as part of the CIO organization.

Patrick holds a Master of Science in Business and Economics and an Executive MBA in Digital Transformation. Data management, governance and building advanced analytics capabilities as well as corresponding change are his main areas of focus.