Benedetto Conversano – Keynote Speaker

Biography

Benedetto Conversano is the Senior Vice President of Avon, joining the company in 2018 and bringing his experience and wealth of knowledge on digital, e-commerce and IT strategies to advance the brand digitally.

Prior to this role, Conversano was the Group Chief Information Officer of Jerónimo Martins, the Portuguese based international retailer with annual sales of over 16 billion euros and more than 100000 employees. Between 2010 and 2015, Conversano was Chief Enterprise Architect for IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant, where he was responsible for IT Strategy implementation. He joined IKEA in 2010 when the word “e-commerce” was a tabu, and he built – under the sponsorship of CEO Mikael Ohlsson – the transformation adventure to make IKEA bloom in the e-commerce business.

Before 2010, Conversano spent 15 years at the consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, where he learnt – with the coaching of CIO Filippo Passerini – how to build an IT organisation which transforms the business and becomes a contributor to market leadership. He built one of the first “big-data” systems which enabled P&G back in 2002 to report accurate financial information to Wall-Street faster than ever.

In 2015, Benedetto Conversano became the Group Chief Information Officer at Jeronimo Martins where he led another digital transformation. His new retail customer digital app hit the record number of downloads in Portugal within one month from the launch.

Benedetto joined Avon in 2018, bringing decades of proven experience developing and implementing successful digital, e-commerce and IT strategies across some of the world’s best known previously mentioned global organisations such as IKEA, Proctor & Gamble and Jerónimo Martins.

Conversano has a strong passion for driving change through people, process innovation and technology: he is motivated by challenging working environments and by stretching business goals which require organisations to go beyond the accepted level of performance. Organisational development is Conversano’s main focus area to deliver business results: his passion is to develop leaders and lately he is focusing on conflict management.

As an unconventional speaker, Benedetto Conversano will inspire his audience and encourage them to push all boundaries, whether it be professional or personal boundaries. He speaks with elegance, good intentions and with the profound belief that all of us, as human beings, have a mission greater than we believe we can achieve. Conversano believes that we all have potential and that most of all, each of us has the duty to contribute to make this planet a better place to live and to leave to our future generations. Conversano ensures he engages the audience in a creative debate which emanates a constructive and liberating energy in the room. He is vibrant, provoking and inspiring.