Sharon Constançon

Sharon Constançon is an entrepreneur in widely ranging environments of governance, foreign exchange treasury and a Chamber of Commerce.

Sharon holds a MBA, is a Chartered Director, Chartered Secretary (Chartered Governance Professional) and a Chartered Member of CISI with over 40 years working in corporates, banking, not-for profit and her own businesses. She listed her first business on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in the late 1990’s and currently is the Executive Chairman of the South African Chamber of Commerce, CEO of the Genius Group which delivers governance magic and CEO of Valufin where she is the forex treasurer for many global companies.

Sharon started in company secretarial for a mining house now part of the Anglo American group, then turned to forex management for Blue Circle and then Chief Forex Dealer for Societe Generale in Johannesburg before starting Constançon Currencies in 1988 which was the forerunner of a now vibrant forex services market in South Africa.

She retired from the then listed business and turned her hand to governance and since 2010 has run businesses in SA and UK in both forex treasury and governance. She lectures, runs training courses and webinars and speaks at conferences on the wide ranging subject of boardroom dynamics, helping boards to be effective and value adding to their organisation.

Sharon is recognised for the style of board performance reviews she undertakes, having the skill to recognise threads of evidence and understand the correlations of behaviours, actions and communication, to boards not being top performers. Sharon engenders change through helping Directors to understand the consequences of their style, expectations and engagement, so that they can readily address these components, thereby collectively the directors are driving a vastly improved board.

As a forex treasury manager she has worked for 200 odd global companies, enlightening them to understanding the pitfalls in forex processes, engaging effective accounting, dealing the transactions, managing the risks and providing deep management information.

Sharon has a keen insight into use of technology to drive effectiveness and has built two SaaS systems, FRM which is the cornerstone of the forex treasury service and Hawk which delivers various styles of intelligent assessments.

Sharon has a passion for sharing knowledge and upskilling others - she lectures Level 7 on Boardroom Dynamics, delivers training for the Chartered Governance Institute, creates many in-house bespoke training projects on leadership, strategy, risk, board performance, governance, decision making, and is the risk faculty lead for the Corporate Governance Institute.

Sharon has high IQ and EQ, able to think on her feet, deal with complex issues seamlessly and a successful mediator, coach and mentor to senior C-Suite leaders and executives. Sharon is successful and creating in Directors, the desire to deliver their best and to understand the value of governance.

Sharon thrives on variety and diversity; she is on the Court of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Secretaries, serves on the International Committee for CISI, a Trustee for Help2Read, Chairman of the Council of Foreign Chambers of Commerce and gives full time services as Executive Chairman of the South African Chamber of Commerce in the UK.

Andreas Theodorou has a career spanning from relationship management and sales to Enterprise Risk Management through a number of roles such as Information Risk Manager for BNY Mellon, Global Head of Risk for Worldfirst/AliPay and more recently an internal Risk Consultant for his EMEA client base in Diligent.

In his current role, Andreas acts as an adviser of best practises and modern risk and governance to some of the largest companies in the UK&I and across Europe when adopting the Diligent platform.

He is a customer first focused professional bringing the traditional 2nd line of defence functions to adopt an enterprise-wide risk approach and push for the visibility and monitoring of their programs to the company Boards.