Ian Brown is Senior Vice President of Booking.com and Chief Executive Officer of BookingGo, the ground transport business unit of Booking.com.

Within BookingGo, Ian is responsible for developing a full range of transport options to meet the needs of Booking.com customers as they travel in 200+ countries across the world. This includes car hire, rides, shuttle buses, and public transport.

Ian is also responsible for the Rentalcars.com brand - the world’s largest online car hire platform.

Ian joined the business in 2014 from Oliver Wyman Consulting. At Oliver Wyman, Ian was Managing Partner responsible for three of the firm’s practices in Travel & Leisure, Wholesale Distribution, and Commercial Effectiveness. During his 16-year consulting career, Ian worked extensively across Western Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.

Ian holds a MEng degree in Engineering, Economics, and Management from The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. He lives near Manchester with his wife and two boys.

Lorna Davidson is Founder and CEO at redwigwam, the UKs no1 platform for flexible staffing.

Lorna is an entrepreneur with a history of successfully building, managing and exiting businesses.

Redwigwam, is a flexible work booking platform serving both workers and hirers. There are currently more than 108,000 workers registered, a number which is growing daily! The site matches workers to jobs in their area that require the skills they have and workers can book whichever jobs they wish.

As Northern Head of TMT at Barclays, Greg supports a portfolio of fast growing tech companies and a team of regional TMT bankers.

Prior to this Greg has had roles in business development and leadership across UK&I. During 2016 he led the Northern project team responsible for implementing the high growth and entrepreneur proposition at Barclays.

This proposition underpins Barclays support of the local tech ecosystem through Eagle Labs, a bespoke funding model and a team of start-up/scale up bankers in the region. Greg is also a director of Involve Northwest.

Jonathan Fitchew was a student of Economics at UCL, and went on to achieve early success as a telecoms entrepreneur in the 80’s and 90’s. He is the Founder and CEO of Pareto Law, a global market leading sales development and recruitment business.

After two decades of success, Pareto’s growth trajectory continues, with offices throughout the UK and New York, and a constantly expanding portfolio of services, now including Apprenticeships.

Richard has been in charge of Leeds based Sky Betting & Gaming for eleven years and with the company for sixteen.

He holds a Masters degree in Engineering, Economics and Management from Oxford and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He lives in Harrogate with his wife and two children but remains an Arsenal fan.

Amy Fox has extensive experience of digital delivery and transformation in both the public and private sectors. Amy has delivered large digital transformation programmes in the e-commerce and translation industries for companies such as Net-a-Porter and Habitat.

Most recently Amy was Delivery Director for the Government Digital Service where she was responsible for the delivery of government’s digital products including GOV.UK and Verify. In this role she was also Head of Agile Delivery across government.

Amy is currently the Head of Digital Projects and Delivery for BBC News and Weather (Public and World Service) where she is responsible for the end to end delivery of all BBC News’s digital output and is also consulting on the digital transformation of the newsroom.

An Economics graduate, Paul was an investment banker before co-founding his first games company, BattleMail in 1999.

After the sale of BattleMail, Paul went on to found Rockpool Games and Ironstone Partners, both of which were sold to Eidos/Square Enix in 2007 with Paul heading up Eidos Play, Eidos’ Casual division until February 2009. Paul Co-founded Playdemic in 2010.

Experienced Head Of Architecture, Board Member & Non Exec Director.

Skilled in Digital Strategy, Strategy Mapping, and Enterprise Architecture.

Strong business development professional with extensive retail history & a Bachelor's degree focused in Financial Services from The Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Richard is former CEO of GBG plc. Under his leadership GBG gained first mover advantage and became a global leader in disruptive Identity Intelligence making online business easier, safer and compliant for household name businesses globally. During his tenure GBG increased its market capitalisation 100 fold from £5 million to over £500 million and acquired 10 businesses across Europe, the USA and Asia.

Richard is a passionate supporter and backer of North West technology businesses and took a stake in and became Chair of Vypr in September 2017. Richard also Chairs Manchester based Zuto and, is an active Angel Investor in the region and works closely with Tech Manchester

Will is a founding director of OBI Property, and specialises in advising fast growing tech occupiers on their real estate strategies across the UK and Europe.

Will was recently named Dealmaker of the Year by North West Business Insider and has delivered successful business relocations for the likes of AO.com, The Hut Group, NCC Group, Zuto, Rentalcars.com, UKFast and LADBible

Edie Lush, a British-American Journalist, is an Author, Executive Editor of Hub Culture, aCommunication Trainer and MC.

She is co-host for the CBS distributed Global Goals podcast,which is part of the ‘We Are All Human Foundation’, an organization devoted to promoting radical inclusion and diversity and fights racism and discrimination.

David Moss, CTO and co-founder of Blue Prism, is a thought leader and founding technologist in the Robotic Process Automation software sector.

David has over 20 years’ experience in the enterprise software space and a proven track record of delivering transformational technology products to global blue chip organisations.

Paul is a partner in our Corporate team based in the Leeds office and heads our Private Equity team in the UK. Paul trained with the firm, qualifying in 2005 and being appointed as a partner in 2013.

Paul’s particular expertise covers all types of corporate work, in particularly private equity and mainstream mergers and acquisitions (both locally and internationally).

On the corporate side, Paul’s clients range from owner managers to PLCs and on the private equity side, Paul covers all aspects of such transactions ranging from advising management teams and/or the shareholders to advising the private equity house and/or the company.

Stephen is an Investment Director at ECI Partners, the UK’s leading growth-focused private equity firm.

ECI partners with UK growth companies within the business & financial services, consumer, and TMT sectors. For more than 40 years ECI has invested across the northern technology sector, gaining a wealth of experience in supporting high growth businesses, including NCC Group, LateRooms, Ascribe, Citation, Imagesound and Oaktree.

They typically invest £25m to £100m of equity in deals valued up to £200m. ECI believes in teamwork and collaboration, supporting ambitious management teams combining their knowledge and vision with our experience.

Aidan has recently retired as Global Managing Director of Industry X.0 – Accenture’s global practice devoted to the 4th Industrial Revolution and technologies such as IIoT, Applied Intelligence and Robotics. He grew this business to multi-billion $ scale over 5 years, including acquisition and integration of over a dozen specialist companies.

In the earlier parts of his 31-year career, he was a founding leader of Accenture Digital, Global Managing Director of Mobility Services and a Partner in Andersen Consulting’s Communications, Media and High Technology division. He lives in Cheshire and continues to travel the world as a Board advisor and consultant in digital transformation, product/platform software and artificial intelligence.

Simon Wilkinson is the Chairman and CEO of Mobica.

He joined the board in March 2017, he was the founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Myriad Group, one of the largest global independent providers of mobile handset and software services with 900 staff and offices in 15 countries and listed on the Zurich stock exchange.

Prior to this, he served as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Magic4 Ltd, a mobile messaging software market leader (sold to Openwave). Simon was recognised as the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the year for the North in 2002.