Speakers

Founder and CEO of Answear.com, since 2011. Answear.com is a leading fashion ecommerce, currently operating in Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. Simultaneously, he’s holding the position of President of the Board Management at ‘Brandbq’ Co. Ltd. – owner of the fashion brand Medicine.

His story with fashion has its beginnings in 1992 when he cofounded “Artman”, launching two fashion brands during the next years: HOUSE and MOHITO. As the President of the Board Management at “Artman”, he was responsible for areas related to strategic management, marketing, brand and product creation, locating production in the countries of South East Asia. Together with his business partners, he led the company to IPO in 2004 and finally sold the company to ‘LPP’ S.A.

Additional information:

• Graduated from Master of Environmental Engineering and Land Reclamation Faculty at Agricultural University in Cracow.

• Graduated from development program management skills Management 2008, Harvard Business School.

• Stock market investor,
• Member of Investment Committee in GD&K Group
• Interested in: e-commerce, strategic marketing, branding.
• Hobby; sport, travel, politics.

Jakub Czerwiński is the VP CEE of the global payment provider Adyen. Having strong background in Fintech and Hospitality industries and over 10 years of experience in commercial roles, Jakub helps merchants find the best way to expand their business worldwide, connect online and offline payments in one unified system and optimize merchant’s operational effectiveness. His domains are Unified Commerce, platforms and marketplaces.

Since 2008 President of Polish Organization of Commerce and Distribution which associate the biggest international retail and wholesale companies in Poland. 2000 till 2017 Director of the METRO AG Representative Office in Poland representing METRO AG companies Makro C&C, Real and Media Saturn Holding towards state authorities, NGO’s and industry associations. Vice President of Employer’s Confederation Lewiatan. Vice President of the European trade association EuroCommerce in Brussels.
Since 2012 Chairman of the Central Eastern Europe Council, representing modern distribution channel of the CEE region towards EU institutions.

He is responsible for identification and selection of strategic trends and core innovations for development of Żabka Group, including changing values that are of importance for people and have impact on their contemporary and future life choices.
Started career in the strategy department of an international advertising group. Then in Stratosfera strategic consulting company he created and co-managed a team responsible for innovative marketing strategies and culture analyses.
For 5 years under Deloitte Consulting practice he led an expert team using proprietary foresight analyses and market research to set future development directions for leading consumer brands. In recent year he also created strategies for introduction of new fintech to European markets.

Dr. Krzysztof Korus is an attorney at law, doctor of laws and economist, lecturer on public business law at the Foreign Legal Systems School Coordination Centre at the Jagiellonian University (Ośrodek Koordynacyjny Szkół Praw Obcych przy Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim), works with the Polish-German Centre for Banking Law at the Jagiellonian University (Polsko – Niemieckiego Centrum Prawa Bankowego Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego), is an associate member of the European Payments Consulting Association in Frankfurt, a member of the programming board at the monthly publication “Banking Law Monitor” (Monitor Prawa Bankowego), and a member of the working group of the Financial Market Development Council at the Polish Ministry of Finance, dealing with implementation of Directive 2007/64/EC. He has worked for renowned law firms in an of counsel capacity. Legal expert of the Polish Organization of non-bank Payment Institutions (PONIP). His specialist practice focus is commercial law. He has authored several dozen publications and legal analyses on legal issues relating to electronic payment instruments, and is invited to speak at numerous conferences and seminars relating to this issue.

Michał joined Lidl Polska in 2011 and he was named CFO in 2019. Prior to joining Lidl Michał worked in the assurance department at PwC office in Warsaw. Michał is a certified chartered accountant.

Michał Pieprzny – CEO Poland. Expert in customer value building in B2C and B2B markets. He has an extensive experience in designing and improving business cooperation models, as well as in developing and implementing sales stimulation programs, optimizing product portfolio and company operational effectiveness.
Prior to joining PAYBACK, Michał worked at McKinsey & Company, supporting company boards of multiple companies in Central and Eastern Europe. He also worked for Avon Cosmetics where he was co-responsible for the company’s strategy on 23 markets in Central and Eastern Europe.

Rafal Reif manages Accenture’s advisory department for companies from the retail sector in Poland. He specializes in improving processes and implementing solutions for fashion industry companies, executing projects related to mergers and acquisitions, digital transformation and supply chain strategy. He also advises trade companies from the food, cosmetics and construction industries. He conducts analyses of changes occurring on the consumer market. He is the co-author of the report on the purchasing habits of Generation Z, published in April 2019. He has been working at Accenture for 12 years, previously associated with Daimler, where he held a managerial position in the financial services department.

Head of Development and Development Director at Panattoni in Poland since 2015. Accountable for new business in the region of Central Poland, Warsaw and Gdańsk. Earlier in his career, on the position of Project Manager (Panattoni Europe 2006-2011), Michał supervised the development of 7 buildings in the Lodz and upper Silesia region at volume 220,000 sqm. At Hines (2011-2015) he was the Project Director responsible for office project (Neptun Gdańsk), acquisition of logistic portfolio (300,000 sqm), and asset manager for logistic portfolio. During his career he was responsible for: strategic business development, identification and acquisition of commercial developments, negotiation of contract terms, leasing & project management.

I am Akshay Saraf currently working for the Landmark group in Dubai and interested in a senior role in the
Analytics domain. Over the years I have managed, set-up analytics teams with hands-on experience with provenfundamentals in advance analytics using machine-learning algorithms.
My experience in the analytics domain spans across Banking, Retail, Telecom and Technology working across
multiple geographies like North America, Middle East, South East Asia and India.
I have worked for organizations like Visa, Citi, Central Bank of Malaysia, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank,
Landmark Retail, AT&T, Microsoft etc.
A few projects to highlight
• “Next Best Offer” – A model to enable customer-centric strategy for EMEA and North America CITI
Cards/Retail business. The objective was to predict next best product of an existing customer likely to take
up based on his behavior on existing relationships.
• “Lifestage Segmentation” – Built a segmentation logic for the Landmark group to segment customers as
per their lifestage for targeted marketing campaigns.
• “Proactive Retention Campaigns” – A model built for Maybank and the goal was to build an engine that
would help identify the most revenue generating customers that are likely to churn.
• “PIN and PAY project Malaysian Government” – Managed the analytics for more than 20+ banks in
Malaysia that were undergoing recarding credit/debit cards to facilitate PIN at POS from signature at POS.
Specific analytics projects around card activation.
Areas of Expertise
• Setting up teams, growing existing engagements, managing senior stakeholders.
• Data Sciences, Advanced Modeling and Optimization.
• Customer Value Management analytics– Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Attrition and Conversion for
Banks, retail companies like Landmark.
• Pricing, inventory, space, NPS analytics
• Campaign strategy and management.
Technical know-how
• Machine learning Supervised (Logistic regression/Decision Trees/Random Forest/GBM/SVM/Ensemble
techniques) and Unsupervised (Clustering) techniques.
• Proficient in statistical programming languages like SAS, R and other analytics tools like SPSS modeler,
Microstrategy, IBM text mining, Nice speech mining etc.
• Worked on Visualization tools like Tableau and QlikView.
Please reach out to me should you find my profile to be a fit for your organization

Michał has 19 years of banking experience. Over that time he was responsible for (i.a.) development & relationship management with strategic corporate clients, business teams’ management, development & implementation of the sectorial strategies (Food&Agri and TSL). He gained his experience in Rabobank Group, where he worked in Poland (Rabobank Polska and BGZ) and as well as in the Netherlands (bank’s HQs and Corporate Network). In the process of BNPP and Rabobank/BGZ merger was responsible for integration of the strategic and multinational corporate clients, and subsequently Michał became head of Large Corporates Department. He worked also in Corporate Division of Santander Bank, where was responsible for development of TSL sector strategy. Currently is responsible for Food&Agri sector strategy and growth for BNPP Group’s bank in CEE & Turkey. Michał graduated from Krakow University of Economics.

Earlier a longtime news journalist at Puls Biznesu and – starting from September 2019 – the editor in chief of the monthly trade press “Handel” , which is accompanied by the portal HandelExtra.pl and podcasts: Posłuchaj, co w Handlu.
With PhD economics (in the field of management) she is interested in intellectual capital and using it to build the company’s competitive advantage; records podcasts, writes and makes inspirational speeches and trains tap dance.

Manager with an extensive, international experience gained while working for the global consulting companies. I managed and delivered projects on three continents and lived in eight different countries. After ten years of corporate life, spent mainly in the energy sector, the time has come for a radical change – nowadays, as a General Manager Poland in viafintech, I keep discovering the multitude of great business models and ideas in the fintech space. Together with my 70 colleagues we are busy “digitalizing cash” and building the largest, bank-independent cash infrastructure network in Europe.

Tomasz Trzósło has over 23 years of experience in the CEE real estate markets. Before joining EPP, he was the Managing Director of JLL for Poland and Central Europe, where he managed the company’s operations in Poland, and oversaw JLL business in the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. He was also a member of legal & compliance board of Tetris design and build business for EMEA. Before managing JLL, he ran the capital markets teams of JLL for both Poland and Central and Eastern Europe, and as such was involved in numerous transactions across the CEE, including portfolio and property disposals and acquisitions, fund raising and debt deals, or structured equity transactions. He has a strong track record in working with all branches of the real estate market, including retail, office, industrial, hotel and residential sectors. While managing JLL in Poland, he identified, managed and completed two M&A transactions – acquisition and integration into the firm of the design and build business (Tétris) and residential consultancy business (REAS).
Tomasz holds a master’s degree in Financial Accountancy and Economics from the Cracow University of Economics and has qualifications in valuation, investment appraisal, property finance and portfolio management from London’s Investment Property Forum.

Sales Manager with over 12 years of experience in Insurance, CFM, Marketing SaaS and Logistic Industries​. Joined InPost in 2016 as Business Development Director​ and till today challenge with roles of Global Commercial Director and Interim Managing Director of UK Market.
Currently ​Global Accounts & SME Market Sales Director​ responsible for Polish “long tail” market and Strategic International Partners.

Wojtek is a globally experienced CFO, recently took over the role of General Manager Finance for Polish subsidiary of Media Markt Saturn Group. Before for last 18 months led entire finance operations of Polish subsidiary of Dr Max, the biggest pharmacy chain in Central Europe and Poland.
Vast majority of Wojtek’s career was spent in retail sector, namely with Tesco PLC Group. He has grown within the organization from junior Business Analyst role to regional CFO one he had been performing for 3.5 years between 2015-2018.
He joined the organization in 1999 within its Polish subsidiary and having spent 7 years doing various roles within Finance, he moved internationally to start managing from finance perspective Tesco overseas operations with main focus on its Asian subsidiaries.
After return back to Central Europe region in 2009 he took over CFO role for Czech Republic leading and supporting the business strategy review in the times of retail industry decline and economic crisis. Having performed that role successfully he has been appointed to take over finance leadership over the entire CE region in May 2015, focusing on Finance Transformation programme as well as business strategy development within new, regional model of business management.
Wojtek graduated from University of Economics in Cracow (faculty: Finance and Banking, obtained Master’s Degree in Corporate Finance Management in 1999). He qualified within CIMA in 2008 and became a Fellow in May 2016. Elected for the first time to the Regional Board in 2018 where he was leading one of successful members engagement initiatives in Poland – CIMA Mentoring Programme. Became Co-Opted member of CIMA Council from November 2019, he is also a member of Global Members Engagement Committee.

Miłosz Wójcik, CEO at Center.ai and Board Member at Appchance
An entrepreneur operating in the Digital industry for over ten years.
Co-founder of Appchance – a Software House specializing in designing and producing dedicated technological solutions for the retail / e-commerce industry and co-founder and CEO of Center.ai – a local marketing tool, operating in the SaaS model, used by retail chains to increase foot traffic in stores.
He actively supports tech startups as an advisor and mentor in international acceleration programs organized by Techstars and Huge Thing in cooperation with companies such as METRO Group, Procter & Gamble, Alior Bank, Santander Bank and Google.

Marek Złakowski graduated from Economic Academy in Poznań in 1997 and completed International Management Programme Insead in 2008.
All his professional life has been associated with Jeronimo Martins, where he gather experience in audit, financial controlling, store operations and implementation of IT system.
Last 5 years he was engaged in development of customer analytics in relation to Moja Biedronka loyalty program.
Currently he is in charge of customer support and satisfaction area, loyalty program and analytics of customer behavior patterns, customer research and insights, e-commerce and digitalization.

At Visa, Katarzyna manages a team responsible for relations with acquirers and retailers, and acceptance growth in the region of Central Eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary).

She has more than a dozen years of professional experience in such sectors as banking, cashless payments and loyalty programs, and also in the FMCG industry. During her career, she has held a number of directorial positions with companies including Raiffeisen Polbank (formerly Polbank), POLCARD, and Premium Club. Most recently she was the President of the Management Board of Paymax S.A., a company providing a solution which enables card acceptance via payment application installed on a phone / tablet and mPOS Paymax card reader.