George Briford is Associate Research Director for IDC Financial Insights. His major experience spans over designing pragmatic operating models and leading transformation and change management initiatives as project and program manager for universal banks in Europe, Eurasia, and East Asia.

Briford has experience in working for major management consulting firms as well as various roles in banks. His main domain is retail and small business banking with a focus on strategy development, sales and distribution operating models, customer relationship management strategy, and business architecture including digital enablement of its key components.

Several engagements were related to optimizing customer experience through improved journeys and developing omnichannel capabilities adopting a human-touch first and technology-enablement later approach.

He has also experience with controlling and budgeting. This includes developing performance measurement operating models, such as balanced scorecards with aligned objectives and KPIs.

Briford is a keen advocate of design thinking blending agile methods with a waterfall approach to implementation. He is an experienced business architect familiar with the major frameworks.

He has an MBA from the IESE Business school, and a BSc in economics and business studies from Lund University.

Marc is a senior security practitioner with almost 30 years of experience crossing multiple industry sectors, from financial services to publishing. With a strong technical background, Marc has spent the past 15 years leading security improvement programmes for the likes of Pearson, T-Systems and Visa Europe.