Page 40 - Powerlist 2019 - Digital Edition

Business, Corporates, Financiers & Entrepreneurs

NEW Heather Melville
2019
Director for Strategic Partnerships and
Head of Business Inclusion Initiatives, RBS

Heather Melville is a fierce campaigner for equality. She
established the RBS women’s network and in addition sits
on the board for Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and
leads the CMI women.
Heather was awarded the prestigious Women in Banking
& Finance Award for achievement under “Champion for
Women” and in 2012 was awarded the World of Difference
100 award (TIAW), recognising Heather as one of the top
100 women worldwide who have made a difference to the
economic empowerment of women.
Outside of the financial industry, having completed an
executive coaching programme, Heather is a Career Coach
and Mentor advising young people who are striving to be
tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs.
She represents RBS as a Non-Executive Director for
Enterprise Enfield, a business consultancy funded by the
Government to help small businesses
Heather graduated from IBM business school, and has a
wealth of international experience secured over a 30-plus
NEW Gary Stewart year career in the world of Banking, Finance & International
2019 Sales. In recent years, she has focused on diversity and
Director, Telefonica Open Future & Wayra
UK inclusion with regular contributions to Sky News and
BBC World.
Heather, who will soon leave RBS for a position at PWC,
Gary Stewart is the Director of Telefonica Open Future & was recently recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours
Wayra UK. Seven years ago, Telefonica recognised that list and received an OBE for her services to gender equality.
its future was digital, as companies such as Skype and She was named the winner of WeAreTheCity 2016, Top 5
WhatsApp wiped away billions of dollars from their bottom Rising Star champion for Diversity.
line. Indeed, the world’s top five companies by market
capitalisation are all former start-ups, most of which still
have a founder as its CEO and all of which are threats to
traditional businesses.
Armed with the conviction that Telefonica must either
“disrupt or be disrupted”, its CEO recruited Gary from IE
Business School, where he had been working as an associate
professor of entrepreneurship (teaching in both English and
Spanish) and as executive director of the business school’s
start-up incubator.
As Wayra’s second employee, Gary helped to create
Telefonica’s corporate acceleration model. Since 2011,
Telefonica has invested almost £150million in 450 start-ups
in 16 countries, but Wayra UK accounts for almost 40 per
cent of the global portfolio value. Likewise, though there are
almost 400 incubators and accelerators in the UK, Wayra UK
has been consistently ranked as one of the best – if not the
best – accelerators.
Gary has spearheaded various thought-leadership
campaigns, but particularly noteworthy was his study
on diversity in tech. The research was reported in major
news outlets and found that 70 per cent of the UK’s start-up
ecosystem was dominated by white, upper-middle class men
based mostly in London.
Gary’s response was not only to open up hubs outside of
London to ensure that talent and opportunity are equally
distributed, but also to ensure that, within recent cohorts,
at least 40 per cent of new start-ups had at least one female
founder and 30 per cent had at least one black founder.
Gary also volunteers as a Governor of the University of
East London and as an adviser to the Amos Bursary.

36 Powerlist 2019