Ferdie Pieterse Biography

Ferdie was appointed as Experian Africa CEO in March 2020 and comes with extensive pan-African experience as an emerging markets executive in numerous C-Suite roles within the financial services sector. Ferdie’s career in the industry began in auditing before moving into financial management and operations in some of our biggest banks. Ferdie is a qualified Chartered Accountant and Certified Information Systems Auditor who holds an Honours Degree in Accounting from the University of South Africa and Post Graduate Diploma in Advanced Banking (cum laude). As a resident student, he attended the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School where he completed the Leading Across Boundaries Executive Programme.

Peter Ndoro Biography

Peter has three decades of experience as a broadcaster, both in television and radio. He is a familiar face and voice in Africa. His 30-year broadcasting career has seen him work across a number of media organisations including a three years stint as a news anchor/producer at the BBC World Service in London. There he specialised in Pan-African news and current affairs. Other appointments saw him producing and presenting business programmes for CNBC Africa where he was also the Director for Corporate Communications. He also spent some years at SABC Africa presenting their flagship breakfast news programme. Other assignments include work at the business channel Summit TV as a prime-time Business News Anchor and as a Presenter on the Pay TV channel, M-Net. Listeners also heard his voice on Talk Radio 702, Highveld Stereo and SAfm. Peter trained as an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand (Now PWC) and graduated from the University of South Africa with a degree in Accounting. Prior to entering the broadcast arena, he worked in accounting, advertising, marketing and business management. Peter Ndoro is currently a current affairs anchor/producer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).

Annabel Bishop Biography

Annabel Bishop joined Investec in 2001 and is the Chief Economist. She has worked in the macroeconomic, econometric, risk, financial markets, political risk, public finance and regulatory, among other, fields for around 25 years. Annabel is the holder of the Sake/Beeld Economist of the Year award for 2010 and has won numerous monthly Reuters Econometer awards, and various Focus Economics (Economic Forecasts from the World’s Leading Economists) categories for correctly forecasting a range of economic variables. She has authored a wide range of in-house and external articles, published both abroad and in South Africa. She has also guest lectured at Gibbs, the University of Pretoria, Wits, UJ and other academic institutions, and has presented at various national and international conferences.

Valter Adão Biography

Futurist, Valter Adão is recognised as an expert in the fields of disruptive innovation, business re-imagination and emerging technologies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where he does most of his work. Valter is the Chief Executive, and Digital Leader for Cadena Growth Partners, a digital and innovation advisory, and venturing organisation that operates at the intersect of strategic and innovation thinking with emerging digital technologies and rapid commercialisation. He guides organisations beyond potential disruption, towards creating new opportunities for relevance, growth and expansion by contextualising and leveraging the potential and economics of emerging technologies and disruptive trends He is a corporate entrepreneur with extensive experience in venturing and commercialising businesses across a number of industries, and works with the CEOs of leading organisations to, conceive, develop and scale innovative opportunities and IP into high growth, sustainable businesses. He is the former Chief Digital and Innovation officer for Deloitte, managing and founding partner for Monitor Deloitte and managing partner for Deloitte digital in Africa. He was also part of Deloitte’s Global Innovation Executive. He is a faculty member of Singularity University, a Tedx Speaker, and the recipient of the Constellation Transformation 150 award, which recognises the top global executives leading digital business transformation efforts, and a professor of practice at the Johannesburg Business School. Valter co-authored, The Other End of the Telescope. He was recently awarded as the Big 4 professional of the year, by The South African Professional Services Academy, who also recognized him as a top Professional in South Africa’s Digital Industry. Valter holds an MSc and an MBA, he has trained with Roger Martin as a master strategist and is the recipient of numerous academic awards.

Mark Wells Biography

Mark joined Experian in February 2015. Prior to that, he spent 20 years in the Information Technology sector running high performing sales teams. As Chief Customer Officer for Experian Africa, his current role involves leading the customer-facing integrated sales teams that engage with clients across all industries in South Africa. Mark holds a BComm (Hons) degree from the University of  the Witwatersrand, an MBA from the University of Cape Town, and post-graduate executive qualifications from Columbia University in New York and Harvard Business School in Boston.

Jaco van Jaarsveldt Biography

Jaco has spent most of his career in the Credit Industry where he held various C-suite roles in listed, non-listed and private equity-owned entities. He has experience in banking, retail, insurance and consulting across all product verticals both locally and internationally. In a career of more than 25 years, Jaco gained extensive experience working in various industries including banking, retail, and insurance across multiple geographies including Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Throughout his career his passion has been driving organisational value through an absolute focus on the customer and customer experience enhancing strategies, making extensive use of big data and advanced analytics to achieve the desired outcomes. In his current role at Experian as Chief Decision Analytics and Innovation Officer, Jaco gets to hone in on his passion of using big data and advanced analytics to deliver customer experience-enhancing strategies.

Karen Gischen Biography

Karen is a Product Manager at Experian South Africa and is responsible for the Business bureau products with touchpoints into the consumer side of the business. Karen started her career at KreditInform which was one of the biggest commercial bureaus in the country at the time. Experian acquired KreditInform in 2009 and she has fulfilled a multitude of roles ranging from Researcher, Account Manager assistant and Support Manager for the Tier 1 Banks, Unsecured Lending Financial Institutions, Telco’s, and Retailers. Her current role is in Product Manager for Business Information Services.

Richard Adamski Biography

Richard joined the Experian South Africa decision analytics team as an analytical consultant and interim head of analytical consultancy just over a year ago. He has almost 20 years of experience in analytics, modelling and data science; and has managed high-performing analytics, data science and modelling teams for almost 10 years. Richard has built various models/scorecards using a combination of traditional and most recent machine learning algorithms. His Python and machine learning journey started in early 2018 and has taught him various alternative ways of looking at and approaching models.

Francois Grobler Biography

Francois joined Experian in 2022 to head up the Decision Analytics division in Africa. Before Experian, he was at HomeChoice for 6 years as Credit Risk Director, responsible for fraud prevention, data science, credit risk and collections in retail credit and financial services. Prior to HomeChoice, he was a key member in establishing and building the JD Consumer Finance division within JD Group. He was appointed to the JD Consumer Finance board in March 2013 as Chief Risk Officer and Executive Director. He has gained extensive experience over a 25-year period in the local and international banking and retail industries. Francois has a B.Com degree, a B.Com (Hons) in Economics and a B.Com (Hons) in Investment Management from Rand Afrikaans University and also completed the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) Global Executive Development Programme, cum laude, through the University of Pretoria.

Paul Nel Biography

Paul supports the innovation portfolio at Experian Africa, where the objective is to build new business models alongside partners for consumers and businesses in Africa. Paul has a 24-year corporate career ranging from FMCG through to financial service

Vusi January Biography

Vusi January is the Decision Analytics Manager for Experian Africa. His main objective in analytics is to optimize opportunities for the Financial Services industry across the credit lifecycle to improve business strategy, profitability, risk identification and mitigation, innovation, optimization, consumer acquisition, retention and growth across multiple different businesses spanning across banking and retail in South Africa. To attain this objective, Vusi combines his 18 years of end-to-end credit risk experience with Experian Product and Model Suite which is designed for the financial services. His expertise covers a broad spectrum of strategic analytics including late-stage collection strategies, write-off modelling, IFRS9 provision modelling, account management strategies and origination as well as scorecard development – with recent focus on Early Warning Scorecards. He is a passionate and committed leader with an exceptional track record in the identification of key talent while thoroughly enjoying harnessing, growing and developing people to grow to their full potential.

Ans Gerber Biography

A data scientist in the Innovation team of Experian, Ans has experience in Analytics across various disciplines. In her current role, she is part of a dynamic team that continues to push the boundaries of what is deemed ‘typical’ bureau activities, by finding and creating new data sets, building new products and creating value propositions that address industry needs and also help to build an inclusive credit economy for Africa, by empowering consumers.

Anel Ehrke Biography

Anel is an analytical consultant at Experian. She has a MSc in Business Mathematics and Informatics from the North West University. Anel has spent 18 years in the banking industry and has extensive experience in scorecard development and analytics. She has been involved with projects ranging across retail and commercial credit.

Mark Sham Biography

Mark is a passionate entrepreneur, writer and speaker that speaks to audiences around the globe about a variety of topics. He is also the founder and CEO of Suits & Sneakers. Mark believes that the internet has fundamentally changed the world and as a result, we can now learn about almost anything, at any time, in any location, and at virtually no cost. This form of learning is called informal education and Mark is passionate about showing the masses how to use this alternative way of learning to hack the value creation system. Before founding Suits & Sneakers in 2015, Mark was a prolific entrepreneur who founded a host of businesses but ultimately, he realised that he wasn’t cut out for most of them and worked toward building Suits & Sneakers.