2024 Judges

Sophie Milliken MBE is founder and CEO at Moja Group. Moja work with entrepreneurs and senior executives to amplify their personal profiles and become known authorities in their industries.

In her first business, Sophie led recruitment and employability experts, SRS, to become the leading provider of assessment-centre simulations for universities and trained over 30,000 students at these events. Sophie also worked with employers such as M&S, JP Morgan, Expedia and AXA to design and deliver their graduate recruitment campaigns. Sophie was awarded an MBE for services to Business and to Education in the 2023 New Year honours list.

Sophie has been a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development since 2013 and was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts in 2019. Her first book, From Learner To Earner was published in August 2019, becoming a best seller in October. Sophie’s best-selling second book, The Ambition Accelerator was published in February 2021 and includes advice from Dragons’ Den star Sara Davies MBE and The Apprentice’s Linda Plant. A podcast accompanies The Ambition Accelerator and includes interviews with the women included in the book.

A multi award-winning businesswoman and proud mum, Sophie also enjoys supporting the North East region. Sophie is a supporter of Northern Power Women and co-founder of City Ladies Networking. She is Chair of Smart Works Newcastle and has achieved huge success delivering the aim of doubling the number of unemployed women supported with interview clothing and coaching across the North East and securing Sara Davies MBE as the charity’s ambassador. In June 2021, Sophie became a Founding Ambassador for Every Child Needs a Mentor.

Jo has worked at Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) for over 15 years since originally joining as a graduate.  She has undertaken a number of roles across product management, proposition development and strategy. She’s passionate about creating diverse, high performing teams and translating strategy into action.  

Her current role is MD Customer Propositions and Strategy for the Business and Commercial Bank, leading teams responsible for defining the overall strategy for LBG’s business customers (up to £100m turnover) and developing propositions and programmes to support businesses meet their needs and achieve their goals. 

She puts the customer at the heart of the conversation, leading the Customer Experience team dedicated to understanding how we can improve our products and services as well as pushing forward our Social Sustainability agenda to support under-represented groups and communities in the UK. 

Chris Blackhurst is an award-winning writer, author, commentator and an expert in strategic communications. 

He is a former editor of The Independent newspaper and for ten years was City editor of the Evening Standard. Before that he worked for The Sunday Times, on its business pages and Insight investigative team. He covered Westminster for several years for The Independent. His journalism has appeared in many of the world’s major publications, newspapers and magazines. For 20 years, he conducted the main interviews in Management Today magazine with senior business and political figures. He is an experienced TV and radio broadcaster.

He has written two books: Too Big To Jail - Inside HSBC, the Mexican drug cartels and the greatest banking scandal of the century (Macmilllan) and The World’s Biggest Cash Machine –Manchester United, the Glazers and the struggle for football’s soul (Macmillan)

For four years, he was executive director of CT Group, the international campaigns and public affairs consultancy. He was ranked in the Top Ten for UK ‘Crisis and Reputational’ advice by PR Week. 

Andy McCulloch has worked for Lloyds Bank for 29 years across customer relationship management, credit risk, product development and environmental sustainability.  Andy heads up the Environmental Sustainability team within the Lloyds Bank Business and Commercial Banking division, with team responsibilities including ESG data build, NZBA and Financed Emissions targets, ESG finance products, and sustainability propositions and tools for customers.

Kathryn is an international CPO/CHRO with over 25 years’ experience in financial services and technology.  Partnering with CEO’s, Boards and Executive teams she has a track record in driving organizational transformation, talent strategy, cultural re-engineering and leadership development in both growth and regulated environments.  

Most recently, Kathryn was Chief People officer at SUSE, a Private Equity backed B2B software company. Prior to that she spent nearly a decade as Chief People Officer and then Chief Administrative Officer at CLS, the world’s leading provider of multi-lateral netting and FX settlement services for over 70 of the world’s leading financial institutions. Managing a global team from New York, she oversaw the company's people agenda as well its external and internal communications, PR, workplace services management and administration functions.

Prior to CLS Group, Kathryn held senior HR roles in a range of global financial institutions, including Merrill Lynch, HSBC and Bank of America Corporation where her experience straddled wealth management, banking and global markets sales and trading. 

Kathryn has spent her career in international, complex businesses in both public (NYSE, FTSE, DAX) and private markets and has extensive long-term transatlantic experience with dual US/UK nationality. She is currently based in London, having operated out of New York from 2002 to 2018.

“Empowering entrepreneurs with bespoke tax and strategic advice, I turn complexities into clear, actionable insights, helping both founders and their businesses to thrive and reach their full potential”

Malli provides tax advice to entrepreneurs (across their personal and company matters), other high-net-worth individuals, shareholders, trusts and family offices and is also the lead for the entrepreneurs practice at the firm. Although Malli is a tax specialist at heart, he spends much of his time acting as a sounding board for clients on both tax and non-tax/commercial matters. 

In addition to giving his clients access to the Blick Rothenberg suite of services (through one point of contact) he will look at the wholistic picture to introduce them, as needed, to his third-party network of advisors such as debt advisors, investors, corporate financiers, lawyers, trustees and bankers. 

Before joining Blick Rothenberg as a Partner in March 2024, Malli spent over 15 years in the Big 4 (PwC and EY) within their London private client teams. Prior to that, he had an entirely different career as an orthopaedic surgeon in the NHS.