Rob Phillipson is Managing Director of the International Compliance Association (ICA) and CLYI. Having previously served as ICA's Commercial Development Director, he leads the organisation's work in supporting compliance professionals — and the regulated firms that employ them — as regulation, technology and financial crime risk continue to evolve.

The International Compliance Association is the leading professional body for the global regulatory and financial crime compliance community. With 30,000 members in 155 countries and more than 190,000 professionals trained, ICA works to see compliance recognised as a modern profession, benchmarked against international standards of competence.

Its professional qualifications and courses span anti-money laundering, governance, risk and compliance, financial crime prevention, customer due diligence and sanctions. ICA is part of Wilmington plc.

Robert O’Brien, The Cybersecurity CEO, is a technology founder with 30 years’ experience building, scaling and protecting digital businesses. His work focuses on helping CEOs and boards take ownership of cybersecurity with the same discipline they apply to financial governance.

He has founded six companies, including MetaCompliance, which he grew from a personalised security awareness platform into a leading European cybersecurity software company employing more than 300 people before its sale to French private equity in 2025. Working with senior leadership teams across multiple countries has given him direct experience of the gap between those responsible for running a business and those charged with protecting it.

He is co-founder of Safe Harbour Security, which helps mid-market organisations strengthen their cyber resilience through practical advice and access to senior security expertise. He also hosts The Cybersecurity CEO podcast, exploring the leadership decisions and human behaviours that shape organisational security.

Robert is currently writing Better Safe: A CEO’s Guide to Cybersecurity in the Age of AI, drawing on research with CEOs and CISOs to examine how cybersecurity needs to become a boardroom priority. His central argument is that progress requires CEOs to own cyber risk, implement security as a matter of corporate life or death, and make accountability part of everyday business.

The Cybersecurity CEO is a podcast hosted by Robert O’Brien, exploring the leadership decisions and human behaviours that shape organisational security — and what it takes for CEOs and boards to own cyber risk.

Ellen Gunning has spent more than 30 years in public relations and journalism, and crisis communications is her specialty. Her approach to a crisis is direct: respond quickly, tell the truth, accept responsibility where it is yours, and have trained spokespeople ready before you need them.

In 1992 she founded the Irish Academy of Public Relations, which now has graduates in 55 countries, and she is the author of Public Relations – A Practical Approach, a core text for third-level PR students worldwide. A regular media commentator, her awards include European Parliament Journalist of the Year, a Chambers Ireland CSR Award and Tech Entrepreneur of the Year.

Founded in 2019, Mettacomms is a communications intelligence platform for communications professionals. It combines human curation with artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to search worldwide media coverage, parliamentary proceedings, public opinion, economic analysis and university research, giving teams a verified, global view of any topic in minutes and early warning of the trends worth watching.

Mettacomms won the PR Technology award at the Stevie International Awards and has offices in Dublin and Boston.

Neal Mullen is Chief Information Security Officer and National Director of Operational Resilience at the Health Service Executive, where he leads the national cyber defence and resilience of Ireland's public health service. He brings more than 25 years' experience in cyber security and resilience across the healthcare, construction, technology and retail sectors.

Before joining the HSE, he spent seven years as Group Deputy Director of ICT Operations at St Vincent's University Hospital, and worked with KPMG as a security and resilience specialist, with earlier roles at Bertelsmann, Dunnes Stores and CRH.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) provides Ireland's public health and social care services, in hospitals and in communities across the country. Established in 2005, it is one of the largest organisations in the State — and one of the clearest examples of why operational resilience is a matter of essential services, not just IT.

Chris Hammans is an experienced cybersecurity and cloud leader with over 15 years supporting enterprise organisations across EMEA. As Regional Manager for Northern Europe at FireMon, he helps customers strengthen their security posture, simplify policy management, and navigate the operational challenges of complex, hybrid network environments.

His background spans cybersecurity, compliance and risk management, cloud security, CSPM, observability, and SecOps-related platforms, giving him strong commercial and strategic insight into the challenges faced by large, regulated organisations — including financial services, fintech, insurance, and critical national infrastructure (CNI).

FireMon founded the network security policy management category more than two decades ago, built on a simple premise: policy, not any mix of firewalls or consoles, should govern network security. That premise holds today. Firewalls, cloud security groups, and segmentation platforms execute policy; none of them govern it.

FireMon is the control plane that sits above every vendor and every environment, on-prem, cloud, and hybrid, so enterprises can see, prove, and safely change policy from one place instead of reconciling it console by console. We care about the people running it: audits measured in minutes instead of weeks, and changes made with confidence instead of a midnight page. No fluff. No empty dashboards. Just results that hold up.

Gavin Carpenter is Chief Executive Officer of Phonovation, the Dublin-headquartered secure messaging company that has been building business communications services since 1988. Under his leadership, Phonovation has focused on a problem boards increasingly own: making sure the messages organisations send to customers can be trusted — from protecting bank customers against SIM swap fraud to verifying identity through the mobile device itself.

Gavin has long been a public voice on the risks hiding in everyday customer communications, from SIM swap attacks to fake bank texts and phishing that lure customers into handing over their credentials.

Founded in 1988 and headquartered in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, with offices in London and Newcastle, Phonovation is a specialist in secure Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging. The company designs, builds and manages its own services, handling high volumes of calls and text messages every year for organisations ranging from sole traders to large European multinationals. Phonovation is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant.

Its PhonoSecure suite helps businesses protect their customers from cyber fraud. It includes SIM Swap Protection, in use with most banking organisations, and Mobile ID, which binds a customer's SIM and device to a mobile app for secure two-factor authentication. Mobile ID was named overall winner and Most Disruptive Fintech at the Deloitte Financial Services Innovation Awards in 2022, and Phonovation has also been recognised as a Deloitte Best Managed Company.