“Talk to the Board, for me, is absolutely spot on! Coming here and engaging with the board to validate what resonates with them is very special and powerful. We have silos of silos in companies. But criminals don’t have silos. They don’t have borders or boundaries. So, to win the fight, we must come together and build coalitions of capability and bridge across the boundaries we live in so we can stop the enemy and kick them out of our networks and our organisations. This event is fantastic. It’s a great forum. Board members and IT people speak different languages. We must learn to communicate effectively to help make rational decisions within a context that matters. So, this event, this forum, is exactly what I’m looking for.”
Michael Beaupre, Head of Cyber Security, Hays
“The great thing about Pulse is that you get different perspectives outside of our core market. So it’s perfect for me to come here and get that completely different perspective and speak to people at the level that Pulse Conferences attract. Talk to the Board is interesting because the business dimension is the most important thing about cybersecurity. Speaking to the board brings me that business dimension to cybersecurity. As a sponsor, we get so much value out of these events, not just from potential clients but for people to partner with, and we get different perspectives on what the market is and what other people are prioritising.”
Dr Paul Kennedy, Chief Engineer – Cyber and CEMA, QinetiQ
“It’s so rare to have that opportunity to hear it directly from the CISOs and the board. So what more could you ask for if you’re up and reporting to boards and you need to communicate with them effectively? It’s a unique opportunity. What is important for them? For anyone thinking of coming to a Pulse Conferences event, just do it. Block out that time, make the commitment and realise that it’s an investment not only in your company and what your company needs from you but also in your professional development.”
Katherine Leivesley, Head of Legal, Offer and Sourcing, Kingfisher PLC
“I wanted to be part of Talk to the Board because I’ve always been so fascinated by technology, particularly cyber attacks and the cyber risk. I’ve learnt about how lonely and vulnerable the CISO/CSO feels. I’ve been a CEO a few times and always felt the CEO took the can for everything. I was hearing that from some of the attendees, and as boards, we need to think about how we can be more of a support for the CISOs so that they don’t feel so under threat. If your world is looking at cyber risk and you’re a CISO or security leader, I would come to this event and get involved because you are sharing and gaining simultaneously.”
Dame Inga Beale, Former CEO, Lloyd’s of London
“Having a plan prioritising, getting the basics right, not trying to do everything or running off in different directions demands some follow through, both by boards and CISOs. Great to have board and CISO side of the equation together. It shows the maturity of the board-CISO relationship that we’re having much better conversations about this now than we were 10 years ago.”
Robert Hannigan, Former Director, GCHQ
“It was a really interesting panel, Talk to the Board, and great to meet people from across the cybersecurity profession, to hear their concerns and to help them to understand all the different issues that Boards need to deal with and where cybersecurity may rank on their list of priorities.”
Lorraine Heggessey, Former Controller, BBC One
“A rich discussion with very interesting themes emerging for myself. Both the audience and panel found the event very interesting and informative.”
Jeremy Schwartz, Former CEO, The Body Shop, Pandora and Conival plc; Chairman, Sustainability and Inclusion Practice, Kantar
“It’s great to hear from board executives and have CISOs sit alongside them, asking questions. It’s a sort of reversal of the status quo.”
Jonathan Luff, Co-Founder, CyLon Ventures
“Talk to the Board provides a wonderful opportunity for CISOs to hear first-hand how and where they might tailor their Board interaction more strategically to achieve greater impact at this level. By doing so, board members could be better served as CISOs educate and update them about evolving organizational cyber security risk exposures and vulnerabilities. More intriguing, perhaps, was that CISO’s were urged to also see risks as potential opportunities that, with careful due diligence, might be thoughtfully exploited.”
Graham Joscelyne, Former Auditor General, World Bank; Chair, Audit and Ethics Committee, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Advisory Committee for Internal Oversight, United Nations (UNRWA)
“… how to build trust with Board members, what priorities a Board cares most about and how to sustain the conversation as a rolling programme. Such diverse Board representation from Audit, Tech, Sustainability, Risk, Marketing, People and Change meant the participants could fully engage in debate across a range of challenging topics”
Deborah Exell, Former Board Member, Head of Human Capital & Business Transformation, Getronics
“Talk to the Board. It’s been so fruitful and fantastic. We particularly found the 1-2-1 speed meetings useful. We covered a lot of ground in a short time. We’ve met some great new contacts, and I’d definitely come again!”
Holly Steele, Senior Vice President EMEA & UK Marketing, BlueVoyant
“Great to be back at a Pulse event! We love this event, Talk to the Board. It’s just so good to be able to network and interact with people and to have relaxed conversations, especially timing-wise towards the end of the year. People have gone through pressures and challenges and the good things that have happened. We can all collaborate and talk to each other. Interesting panel topics that fundamentally pinpoint where we’re heading in 2025 and beyond!”
James Alliband, Head of Marketing, Risk Ledger
“The key take-away of Talk to the Board is the calibre of the individuals who attend. I’ve done these events over many years and I’m incredibly impressed with the team. They pulled this off brilliantly! I’ve had conversations with people who have budget, make decisions and who want to know about cybersecurity technologies that Mastercard cyber intelligence has.”
EMEA Strategic Alliances Director, Mastercard
“Pulse has exceeded expectations again in terms of the event they put on Talk to the Board. The content and 1-2-1 meetings are the important factor for us, and on the social side where we get to socialise with CISOs!”
Matt Middleton-Leal, Managing Director, EMEA, Qualys
Director of Cyber Risk Insights, London-based global bank; Author, Communicating Cyber Risk and Cyber and the City
Ashley Sweetman is Director of Cyber Risk Insights for a London-based global bank. He is the author of Communicating Cyber Risk and Cyber and the City and is a Visiting Research Associate with the Emerging Threats Group at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.
Associate Professor in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity, University of Portsmouth; Co-Director, Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime
His research focuses on political cybercrime and regulation, cybersecurity education, online fraud and the role of AI in cybercrime and cybersecurity threats. He is theme lead for cybercrime, online harms and AI for the University of Portsmouth Policing Academic Centre of Excellence, Director of the award-winning Cybercrime Awareness Clinic, and co-chairs the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Ethics Committee.
Former Group CISO, Credit Suisse
Steve Hill is an independent strategic adviser, helping Boards to navigate geopolitics, national security and cybersecurity challenges. He served as Group CISO at Credit Suisse and deputy Group CISO at UBS until August 2024, and previously spent over thirty years in national security roles for the British Government, including as Deputy Director in the National Security Secretariat of the UK Cabinet Office. He is a senior visiting research fellow at King’s College London and sits on advisory boards including Dell Technologies, Venari and Twine.
President, Defence and Security Forum
Fractional CISO, The Cyber Navigators
Alan was formerly Group CISO at Babcock International, UK CSO at CSC and T-Systems, an Associate Partner at IBM Security, and served in the Royal Air Force for 21 years.
Business Information Security Officer, ICE Exchanges & CCPs -Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)
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Director of Information Security, Liberty International Insurance
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CEO, Cyberwolf
Daan Gheysens is the CEO of Cyberwolf, a global cybersecurity firm with offices in the United States and Belgium. Cyberwolf delivers all-in digital protection for wealthy families and corporate VIPs, delivered in a private and convenient experience.
Before Cyberwolf, Daan served as Head of Sales & Marketing at Robovision, where he built and scaled the go-to-market for AI-powered solutions in medical imaging and industrial automation. He began his career at Accenture, advising Fortune 500 companies on AI strategy and helping them establish their first AI teams and programs.
CIO, Pickering Group
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Partner, Punter Southall
Group CISO, OCS Group Holdings
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Director, NormCyber
Lee brings decades of experience in building new-customer-acquisition sales teams, targeting large UK and global enterprises with managed services. He also has proven expertise executing acquisition strategies for fast-scaling businesses. Prior to joining Norm, Lee served as Managing Director of Nasstar for six years, where he oversaw the company’s managed services and cloud key accounts business, managing half of the company’s revenue. He also spent six years at Intamac Systems, where he was promoted to CEO.
Head of Security Business Engagement, Marks and Spencer
AI Security and Governance Leader, AI DIONIC
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Former Global CISO, Dentons
Toks is responsible for the global delivery of information security at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. He has over 20 years’ experience working in security, technology and privacy, across a number of industries.
Toks is an experienced and strategic business risk leader. He has a particular passion for strategy and team building and development. His core skillset, developed over the years includes security operations and architecture, risk management and risk driven investment, data protection, compliance and audits, and enterprise culture, awareness and training.
Toks has contributed to the business and technology community through information sharing, groups, speaking engagements and multi-industry networking. As strong supporter of education and schools, he has provided advice in areas of security, data protection, user awareness and cloud transformation.
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Founder, Be Less Beige Ltd
Tom Berry is a specialist communications consultant and board advisor. He is European Chair of the global PR agency MikeWorldWide and has worked in technology, corporate and crisis communications for 25 years. Tom is also an Independent Council Member for King’s College London, a Trustee for Onvero (The Employers’ Network for Equality and Inclusion) and was a Non-Executive Director for Mental Health First Aid England. As one of the early Advisory Board Members for ClubCISO, Tom has been deeply involved in working with CISOs and security companies to promote the profession. Before working in communications Tom was a journalist for a decade, winning Business Journalist of the Year and Magazine Journalist of the Year awards from the Periodical Publishers’ Association and The Work Foundation.
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Co-Founder, Cytix
Thomas Ballin is co-founder of Cytix, a Manchester company that understands the tickets, pull requests and releases moving through a business to identify which changes have introduced risk, and provides the decision layer to validate them. He has spent the past 12+ years across penetration testing, security consulting, and product engineering, giving him a broad view of how organisations build software and where that leaves them exposed.
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Chief Education & Development Officer, Association of Corporate Investigators
Simon has over 30 years significant investigative, security and compliance related experience, formed from an extensive corporate and law enforcement background. He is recognised for having conducted complex Bribery, Corruption, Fraud and Misconduct investigations worldwide, in regulated and non-regulated arenas. He is internationally recognised for his public speaking credentials and his vast experience, having successfully led, directed and managed investigation, ethics, compliance and integrity teams within Europe, the USA, Africa and the Middle East. He has also been instrumental in delivering investigative services to the key emerging markets of South America, India and China.
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Head of IT & IT Security, Gumtree.com
Head of Information Security Risk, Informa
Vasilis Razos is Head of Information Security Risk at Informa, a FTSE-100 international B2B events, digital services and academic publishing company. Vasilis has 14 years of cybersecurity experience, with a focus on risk management. Before Informa, he worked in global companies in a variety of industries, including financial services and telecoms. Vasilis holds the CISSP and CISSP-ISSMP certifications and is a member of the FAIR Institute for cyber and operational risk management. https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasilis-razos-79308a23/
Reliance Cyber is your specialist cybersecurity operations partner, focused solely on identifying, preventing and responding to breaches. We combine deep engineering and powerful automation with a constant human-in-the-loop approach for all our services. Our best-in-class technology reduces your threat exposure, while our experts work to detect and resolve breaches faster. As your trusted partner in an increasingly complex landscape, we defend your business continuity. We turn your security into a competitive advantage, enabling you to focus on your goals with confidence.
NormCyber makes cyber resilience measurable, giving CIOs and CISOs a continuous view of where they are exposed, how effectively they are protected and whether resilience is improving over time. At the heart of our approach is the Cyber Resilience Score: a dynamic, CAF-aligned measure that brings together signals from across your security environment to quantify resilience, expose the gaps that matter and demonstrate progress in a language the wider business can understand. Delivered through our UK-based, CREST-accredited 24/7 SOC, our analysts turn that intelligence into prioritised action, continuously reducing risk, strengthening resilience and helping prevent cyber incidents from becoming business disruption. We believe cyber resilience isn’t something you claim. It’s something you prove.
Origin is the endpoint AI observability platform for agentic monitoring and security. It finds the agents in your environment and reconstructs each session from activity captured on the endpoint. The result is a trace that lets security teams monitor agents as they work and investigate any session to see what the agent was asked to do, everything it touched, and what changed.
Cytix is the security decision layer for a world where software development never stops. It reads the context behind every ticket, pull request and release, and helps security, engineering and risk teams decide which software changes carry real risk, what response is proportionate, and what evidence to keep. Cytix already powers KPMG and NCC Group’s continuous testing programme, turning software change into security decisions the business can stand behind.
Intel 471 equips enterprises and government agencies with intelligence-driven security offerings powered by real-time insights into cyber adversaries, threat patterns, and potential attacks relevant to their operations. By integrating human-sourced intelligence with advanced automation and curation, the company’s platform enhances security measures and enables teams to bolster their security posture by prioritising controls and detections based on real-time cyber threats. Organisations are empowered to neutralise and mitigate digital risks across dozens of use cases across its solution portfolios: Cyber Threat Exposure, Cyber Threat Intelligence and Cyber Threat Hunting.
SecurityScorecard is the global leader in threat-informed third-party risk management (TPRM), securing the world’s supply chains. The company delivers a modern, threat-informed approach to TPRM that enables organisations to drive out risk at the source. Through continuous visibility, AI-accelerated intelligence and predictive insights, the platform transforms third-party risk into a competitive advantage, empowering organisations to proactively reduce risk before incidents occur and respond with confidence when they do. Trusted by over 3,300 organisations, including 70% of the Fortune 100.
Cyber Rescue helps CISOs demonstrate to the board that cyber risk is decreasing across their organisations, subsidiaries and supply chains. We help organisations worldwide make informed decisions about where to invest in cybersecurity, combining industry-leading technology with expert guidance and executive support. As SecurityScorecard’s Premier Partner, Cyber Rescue provides its VIP Executive Service to hundreds of customers, helping them understand, manage and communicate their cyber risk with confidence.
Most leaders are well protected at work. But attackers stopped coming in through the company a long time ago. They come in through your personal life: your phone, your home network, your travel data, your public profile, your family’s accounts. That is the gap Cyberwolf closes. We protect the digital lives of executives, board members, high-net-worth individuals and their families, with enterprise-grade security carried by a team of experts who know you.
ThreatLocker is a Zero Trust cybersecurity platform protecting endpoints, networks and cloud workloads. Its Application Control, Ringfencing, Elevation Control, Storage Control and Network Control tools enforce least privilege to help prevent ransomware, data exfiltration and unauthorised access, with central management across on-premises and cloud environments.
Founded in 1989, the Information Security Forum (ISF) is an independent organisation driven by its Members, ranging from Fortune 500 and Forbes 2000 listed corporations to public-sector bodies and government departments. Its business-driven solutions provide organisations with the guidance, tools and methodologies needed to tackle wide-ranging governance, risk and compliance challenges.
7th Talk to the Board 2025
6th Talk to the Board 2024https://vimeo.com/1044384154
More videos and photos from every Pulse event are in The Vault.