Speakers of the 25 Years - The SCHUMANN Experience

Mandy Berg is 25 years old and was born in Munich. She completed an apprenticeship in finance and has 8 years of professional experience. There she was able to gain profound experience in customer management and leasing. Since October 1, Mandy Berg has been working as Key Account Manager at Allane Mobility Consulting. In this role, she supports customers as a strategic partner in all aspects of fleet management.

The fully qualified lawyer started at R+V in 1997 as a claims adjuster for all credit lines. Alexander Beuther has held management positions as a group leader in WKV operations and was department head for bank-owned insurance/confidential loss. Since 2012, he has managed the del credere/commercial credit insurance department. In 2013, he was appointed department director.

Sean Edwards is Head of Legal at SMBC Bank International plc, part of the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. He is a Special Adviser to the Trade Finance Department of the Bank and in the Trade Innovation Unit. Also Sean is Chairman of the International Trade & Forfaiting Association (ITFA). He helped draft the Uniform Rules for Forfaiting (URF) and the Standard Definitions for Techniques of Supply Chain Finance published by ITFA, ICC, FCI, BAFT and the EBA.

He is a former member of the Executive Committee of the ICC Banking Commission and the ICC Working Group on Digitalisation in Trade Finance. Sean is a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Trade Finance Expert Group. He is a non-executive director of KomGo S.A. Sean has written for all the major trade finance magazines and is on the editorial board of Global Trade Review (GTR). He has presented at many conferences.

With a doctorate in business informatics, he managed the development of business areas as well as marketing and sales for the business unit Industry & Trade.

Since January 2023, Dr. Stefan Gröger has been responsible for the sales management of the business units Industry & Trade, Financial Services and Credit & Surety in his role as Commercial Director and member of the Executive Board at SCHUMANN.

Dr. Werner Grünewald is an experienced managing director (CFO) with a wide range of business literacy. He has many years of management responsibility in a medium-sized family owned company.

Knowledgeable in the implementation of market and financial topics, such as M&A transactions, strategic controlling, risk management and compliance as well as in the sustainable development of transformation and change processes, strategy development and compensation systems.

Experienced, result-oriented, entrepreneurial and international manager with strategic competence, paired with pragmatic implementation know-how.Total turnover/ profit responsibility: EUR 10 bn or EUR 140 m EBT. Beginning April 2020 working as an independent consultant.

Edith Heußer graduated in business administration and started her career in Audit Corporate at KPMG AG. In 2015, she transferred to the MediaMarkt Saturn Retail Group and initially worked as a senior consultant focusing on inventory valuation. Since 2020, she has been head of department in Group Accounting with a focus on accounting in accordance with IFRS and project management.

Jörg Kowalewski, along with Markus Moritz, has overall responsibility for the Ecclesia Credit division in Germany. This includes the companies deas, CFG Finance, Schunck and km credit consulting, more than 60 employees and the strength of the market-leading German specialist broker for the hedging, financing and self-management of supplier credits.

His roots reach into the banking, insurance and management consulting sectors. He was a team leader in Germany at Atradius Kreditversicherung, responsible for the management of international programs. Prior to that, he worked for a multinational management consulting firm. His professional career began in the banking sector. Here he held various management positions in sales as well as in human resources and organizational development.

Lallinger has been Chief Executive "Financial Risks" at Munich Re since 2010, with global responsibility for the Credit Insurance and Credit Reinsurance business of Munich Re, the world's leading reinsurer. Lallinger serves also as Member of the Supervisory Board of a Spanish public company, Member of the Board of Directors of a US Inc. Company and in the Credit Committee of the German Insurance Association.

Between 2008 and 2010, Mr. Lallinger built up and headed the "Global Reinsurance Strategy and Organisation" division, with responsibility for the strategy, mid-term planning, organisational structure and efficiency of the Munich Re Reinsurance Group. Since 2006, he has been “Head of Strategy” for the Munich Re Group, having joined the same department in 2002 as a Strategy Consultant.

Prior to joining Munich Re, Lallinger was Financial Risks Underwriter at GE Frankona Re, having started his insurance career in 1993 as a Trainee at Gerling Credit Insurance, Cologne.

He was born 1965 in Göttingen, Germany, is married, 3 children, and holds a Master of Business Administration from Georg-August-Universität.

Robert Meters is Director of Global Business at SCHUMANN. He studied Business Administration and International Management at the University for Economics and Management in Düsseldorf and Essen. He has been in the credit risk management industry since 1993 and has worked for leading information service providers as well as in the telecommunications industry.

He advises and takes care of customers in the automation of credit risk management for the financial services sector with excellent references in leasing, factoring, banking and trade credit insurance.

Peter Mulroy is Secretary General of FCI, the world’s largest network of receivables finance and factoring companies, with its headquarters in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Prior to joining FCI, Peter was previously Senior Vice President, International Regional Manager and Managing Director with CIT’s Trade Finance unit in the US, a $40+ Billion financial services company and one of FCI’s original founding members. Peter also served on the management committee of CIT, supporting the global growth strategy of the company. Peter came to CIT through the acquisition of the factoring unit of SunTrust Bank, where he developed their international factoring business.

Peter is a past Chairman of FCI, and has served on the FCI Executive Committee for over a decade. Peter also served as Chairman of the Prudential Risk Committee of the EUF.

He has worked and lived previously in Europe and the Middle East. Peter received his Bachelor’s Degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey, studied at the Universität Konstanz in Germany, and his MBA from Thunderbird, School of Global Management in Arizona.

As Secretary General, Mr. Mulroy assists banks, regulators and governments from around the world in educating the role and introducing the concept of factoring, a facilitator of liquidity and mitigator of risk for SMEs and Corporates in both domestic and international trade. He addresses audiences from around the world on the subject of factoring and international trade and is generally regarded as an “ambassador for the receivables finance and factoring industry”.

Tobias Nießner holds a PhD in Business Information Systems from the Georg-August University of Göttingen. He studied mathematics and business information systems with a focus on data science. During his PhD, he worked on risk use cases in accounts receivable management.

He joined SCHUMANN in 2023 as Product Owner to enable the product landscape with AI capabilities

As a member of the executive board, the business information technology specialist is responsible for product- and business development for the business unit of Credit & Surety at SCHUMANN.

After studying law in Freiburg and Grenoble (licence en droit), Bernhard Reckmann initially worked for six years as a lawyer in commercial law. In 2003, he joined the legal department of the Heraeus Group in Hanau, a global precious metals and technology company with over 15,000 employees in more than 100 companies. There he established a compliance system and has been responsible for the implementation and further development of the compliance system at Heraeus as Compliance Officer since 2007.

In 2016, Mr. Reckmann additionally took over the management of the Responsibility Office, which has also been responsible for data protection since 2018. The Responsibility Office is responsible for the global compliance management system, takes care of the implementation of new legal requirements, and ensures that corporate functions such as EHS, Export Control and Customs, Tax, Purchasing, and Sustainability work together effectively and efficiently to address new challenges. In the last two years, Mr. Reckmann has been particularly involved with supply chain due diligence legislation and sustainability issues.

Since 1991, Prof. Dr. Matthias Schumann has held a professorship in Business Administration and Information Systems (Chair of Application Systems and E-Business) at the University of Göttingen. He also heads the joint computing center of the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Social Sciences. He is a shareholder of Prof. Schumann GmbH.

Prof. Schumann's research interests include information systems at financial service providers and systems for credit management, as well as issues related to knowledge and education management. Prof. Schumann has a wide range of experience in consulting companies, extensive lecturing activities and more than 350 publications.

Mr. Sillars has been the Product Owner for Tokio Marine HCC International, a leading specialty insurance group with offices in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. He has been responsible for the vision and product development of the Surety Business in the UK and Continental Europe since 2019. He is a member of the member of the Chartered Insurance Institute and the British Computer Society, with qualifications in Business Architecture and System Development.

Between 2016 and 2019, Mr. Sillars headed up the Trade Credit system development programme, with responsibility for design, build and vendor selection for a new Trade Credit system. Prior to joining Tokio Marine, he led a regional underwriting division for Aviva Insurance UK, focusing on delivery of commercial professional risks Insurance.

Alex started his career in 2008 as a Commercial Insurance Broker before joining Aviva’s Trainee manager programme, working as a Claims Investigator, Underwriter and subsequently Underwriting Manager.

He was born 1986 in Leicester, United Kingdom, and has 2 children.

Stefan Vogel successfully completed his degree in Economy Insurance in 1994 and started his career in sales at EUROFACTOR AG. In 2007, he moved to Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance Ltd. in the position of Sales Director Germany. At ABN AMRO Commercial Finance GmbH he deepened his knowledge as Senior Sales Manager. In 2011 he moved to HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt AG. There he held various responsibilities, most recently as Head of Product Proposition in Global Trade and Receivables Finance. 2022 Stefan Vogel took up his position as Managing Director with shared responsibility for the MidMarket (deas Credit, CFG, Schunck Credit) of CFG Finance, which is part of the Ecclesia Group.

Ecclesia Credit as an umbrella brand unites different credit brokers and consultants with a focus on liquidity, financing and credit management and protection.

After completing a master’s degree in economics, Richard Wulff started his career in 1989 as trade credit insurance underwriting manager and reinsurance director of NCM (a precursor of Atradius) in his native country, the Netherlands. He founded a reinsurance captive for the company in Ireland prior to moving on to Munich Re in Germany.

At Munich Re, he managed the non-European credit, surety and political risk reinsurance department until 2008. He then moved to India to become chief underwriting officer of HDFC-ERGO Insurance Company in India, a general lines insurance business.

Richard subsequently became group general manager, heading up the world-wide credit lines at QBE Insurance in Australia, before moving to Hong Kong in that role.

He returned to Holland in 2017 to found RW Consulting, a consultancy company for trade credit insurance, surety and political risk (re)insurance. In February 2021, Richard joined the International Credit Insurance and Surety Association (ICISA), an association with which Richard has been actively involved throughout his career in trade credit insurance, surety and political risk insurance, where he currently holds the title of executive director.