Training team

Grant Vernon

Senior Trainer

Grant is qualified accountant who is now a full-time facilitator and trainer. He has delivered training to some of the biggest names in the Industry including Vodafone, MTN, Etisalat, Zain, and Vodacom, as well as other blue chip clients such as Arcelor Mittal, ABSA, Nedbank and Standard Bank, General Motors SA, NPC Cimpor and the South African Revenue Services. He has been delivering training for over ten years on both a public and company-specific basis, with excellent feedback received from delegates worldwide. He is also a guest presenter at four South African Universities and Business Schools.

Rody Vonk

Senior Trainer

Rody Vonk has been working as an innovation consultant and trainer for over fifteen years. He started his working life as a creative concept developer in advertising agencies. Over the years he moved over to developing marketing and communication concepts and strategies for various companies and projects around the world. Nowadays Rody uses his creative background in developing disruptive ideas and strategies for organizations that get stuck in their daily routine or projects. The learnings from these assignments he uses as examples and as a source of inspiration in his trainings, workshops and presentations on serious creativity and innovation.

Simon Torrance

Senior Advisor

Simon is a senior independent advisor to boards and leadership teams around the world, specialising in business model transformation and platform strategy. His new course is based on extensive recent analysis of the financial performance of hundreds of listed companies, ongoing research into global best practice in business model transformation, as well as his hands-on experience of working with clients, large and small, across multiple sectors and geographies. Simon will stimulate your thinking and provide you with a clear framework to engage your colleagues in re-thinking the way you create and capture value in the digital world.

Elvin Turner

Consultant & Professor

Elvin Turner is an award-winning consultant, associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and innovation coach for global technology company Cisco. His clients include some of the world’s leading organisations in the financial, technology, music, pharmaceutical and publishing industries. He has coached hundreds of corporate innovation programmes around the world – helping leaders and managers overcome the many barriers that they face when trying to turn new ideas into action. His experience extends from working with new and disruptive technology start-ups, through to seasoned leadership teams inside conservative, global institutions.

Ed Day

Data Scientist & University Lecturer

Ed Day is an expert in AI and Machine Learning with over thirty years’ technical consulting experience. Since 2006, he has been a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he also managed Big Data computing projects combining Machine Learning, Hadoop and Spark technologies. Ed has implemented AI and Big Data projects that analyse Twitter data and forensically analyse mobile phones. He has worked in a range of industries across both the public and private sectors, from financial institutions including American Express, to the Arizona Department of Corrections.

Petros Geroulanos

Managing Director of Epigon

Petros is a FinTech consultant with over 25 years of professional experience in trading, product development and sales. As former head of VEGA Structured Finance GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany, he introduced default-free ABS to medium-sized corporates using data analytics. His professional experience commenced with Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Discount PLC in Zurich and London – where he was engaged in trading, selling and structuring FX, Equity Exotic and Fixed Income Derivative Products as well as their underlying cash instruments. Petros is a visiting lecturer at SKEMA Business School in Paris, ranked 6th world-wide by the Financial Times in 2018 for its M.Sc. Programme running the successful FinTech programme. There, Petros is supervising students in their FinTech research. He has also been a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School in London and EMLV in Paris.

Chrysanthi Ainali

Clinical Bioinformatics Consultant at DiGNOSIS

Dr Chrysanthi Ainali is a bioinformatician and consultant with an expertise in the integration of AI technologies and techniques. She has a PhD in Machine Learning and Translational Medicine from King’s College London, where she focused on the development, validation, and application of Machine Learning algorithms to the integration of genomic data for biomarker identification, disease subtype identification, and patient stratification. In 2017, Chrysanthi founded DiGNOSIS to provide professional consultancy and data science services for pharmaceutical companies, and to pioneer the application of AI to clinical trials. Prior to founding DiGNOSIS, Chrysanthi worked for Thermo Fisher Scientific, where she drove the bioinformatics component of designing and developing clinical genetic tests, as well as the customer rollout of bespoke bioinformatics workflows.