6 SIGMA GROUP - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Business Associate Partner in
Alvaro worked for over 10 years with Citibank NA, domiciled in Latin America and involved responsibilities in Credit, Credit Administration, and Training. He recently established his consulting business with particular focus on credit and operational training, and consulting in credit policies and procedures. His professional memberships include the State Bar of California, and Member of the Board of Directors of Citibank, Costa Rica.
His work involved several institutions across Latin America, and was involved as instructor in Citibank courses in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and Florida.
Diagnostic review of analysis and approval procedures for a bank in Costa Rica;
Development of financial analysis material for Citibank self-instruction booklet, through Citibank Emerging Markets Training Unit;
Bassam Hayek is the Managing Director of 6 Sigma Training & Development, a DIFC registered company specializing in management consultancy and training to financial institutions in Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East & Africa. Since his departure from Citigroup, Bassam has worked closely through 6 Sigma Group in delivering state-of-the-art training programs to bankers throughout the region.
6 Sigma Training & Development works through numerous business associate partners in promoting and delivering quality training programs in English, Arabic and French. Bassam has been actively coordinating and managing the training portfolio of a large Middle Eastern Bank for the last three years in areas of Corporate Banking, Treasury and Investment Banking. He has helped the bank in developing comprehensive programs for their Management Associates Programs.
Additionally, Bassam is actively involved in providing consultancy work to banks in the areas of Operations and Operation risk through a team of experts and advisors from International Financial Institutions.
Bassam left Citigroup after a 28-year career that spanned a variety of countries. In his last assignment at Citigroup, he worked with the Europe, Middle East and Africa regional training center responsible for the Treasury and Financial Markets curriculum and managed the group's customer training portfolio.
Over the years he was involved with a variety of training functions within Citigroup in Athens, Istanbul and London. Training assignments were done in between other assignments in Operations in Bahrain, Financial Control in New York, Marketing, Systems Management and Implementation in Greece, Kenya and Morocco, and the Middle Office Operations of the Global Derivatives desk in New York.
Bassam holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics with a specialization in computer science from the American University in Cairo.
Job Titles:
- Financial Markets Specialist
Daniel Stone is a financial markets specialist whose topical areas encompass financial markets products, e-commerce, treasury advisory, banking regulation, investment, and risk management. His US-based banking career spanned the 1980s and 90s, with roles in currency and interest rate derivatives sales, structuring, and dealing. He began his banking career in credit analysis and lending, and moved later into interest rate derivatives sales, and FX options dealing for international banks. He worked for banks in Chicago, New York, London, and Paris. His focus involved advisory and dealing for interbank and corporate treasury clients, and the creation and marketing of wealth management investment products.
In 1997, Daniel moved into training and consulting, working independently for 5 years from Spain, later moving to Singapore. He developed and delivered custom and open courses, and in Singapore, he headed the global curriculum for Standard Chartered's Wholesale Banking division. His Consulting career helped Asia-based international and regional banks in the areas of treasury management, risk, wealth management & operations.
Clients included Standard Chartered, WestLB, Deutsche Bank, Volbroker (now part of ICAP), Fenics (now GFI, Cap Gemini, Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, UBS, Crédit Suisse, Société Générale, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Merrill Lynch, Standard Chartered, RBS, Bank of Tokyo, DBS, OCBC, Bank Indonesia, CIMB, and ICICI). He teaches finance in the financial engineering MSc program at National University of Singapore and for the MBA program at Singapore Management University. He holds the Financial Risk Manager's certificate with GARP, and the IBF's FMRP certificate.
Job Titles:
- Founder of the John Maxwell Team Romania
Daniela Niculescu is a proven professional in banking, with 20+ year expertise in commercial and SME areas.
She is known for her expertise in management and creating businesses from scratch, developing successful growth strategies, through outstanding sales, and delivery of complex projects.
Daniela held various positions with local and international banks in Romania since 1993. She was the first Romanian employee of Citibank Romania in 1995, where she held various roles in Customer Relationship Management.
She has an extensive SME expertise with management position at BRD SocieteGenerale, Banca Trasilvania and Alpha Bank, and she was part of the team launched the very first SME dedicated product in Romania. In her various positions, Daniela was responsible for setting up the SME business strategy, responsible for its growth and performance.
Her recent work in Romania, was the credit analyses and credit administrations functions centralization, while he was the SME Director at Alpha Bank.
Daniela is also known asa founder of the John Maxwell Team Romania and a certified Trainer, Speaker and Coach. She is well-known for developing and conducting workshops on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Public speaking and How to make a successful presentation, Personal Youth and young professionals Development. She developed one of the very first Youth and Student Personal Growth program for high schools and university students, which is run in different high schools.
Daniela holds a Bachelor of Science in Computers and Robots, various Diploma in Economics, along with a Master of Human Resources.She has also been a presenter at a number of conferences and universities.
Job Titles:
- Managing Partner of Inter
Haluk Ulusoy is the Managing Partner of InterConsult, an associated company to 6 Sigma Financial Consultancy.
Louis Adande is a banker with over 20 years of experience in structuring financing transactions and managing businesses in West Africa. Louis is a Senior Associate of 6 Sigma Training and Development and the Managing Director of Saoti Finance France.
Louis began his corporate banking career in 1983 with Citigroup in Gabon, West Africa. He held a series of roles in Customer Relationship Management, Risk Management and Business Leadership at country and regional levels. He worked in most of the countries making up the West Africa area including postings in Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon and Nigeria. Louis gained an extensive exposure to the Financial Institutions businesses through his management roles on both country and regional manager.
In his various positions Louis was responsible for structuring and negotiating large, often innovative financing transactions for local as well as foreign industrial and financial institution clients. He had also the responsibility of managing businesses for growth and performance.
Louis has been delivering training programs in the areas of Credit and Relationship Management with 6 Sigma Training and Development since he left Citibank and has had very successful deliveries in Beirut, Manama, Jeddah, Dakar, Douala, Lagos and Abidjan.
Louis Adande holds a Bachelor Degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (IEP), an MBA from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) in Paris, France and a Master Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University, in Washington.
Peter Woods has 40 years banking experience, spread over 50 countries, of which 28 years have been in Risk Management. He started off his career with Lloyds Plc in the UK, working mostly in Retail and SME financing, Workouts and Leasing. In 1987 he joined Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) in the Credit Risk Area, dealing with Credit Policy and as a transaction Approver. With SCB Peter has lived and worked in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Dubai and spent time in both Retail, SME and Wholesale Banking.
During various assignments in the risk area, including as the CRO of a $100bn assets size bank, Peter has had exposure across the risk spectrum dealing with many projects and issues from Acquisitions to Zimbabwe. The range of markets he served were very broad in terms of clients, geographies and products; including Basel, Portfolio Management, Acquisitions and due diligence. Peter's exposure has afforded him very practical world class skills in all areas of Risk Management, in both conventional as Islamic financing.
Since leaving SCB he has worked as a consultant in the Middle East with assignments covering Portfolio Review, Strategy, Account Planning, Capital Efficiency, Risk Based Pricing, and Basel Models, amongst others. As part of his most recent assignment Peter updated his client's risk policies, practices and underwriting standards.
Peter provides an ingrained knowledge of risk practice and theory combined with exceptionally deep hands-on experience across all areas of risk and account management.
Ramzi Watfa is the founder of 6 Sigma Group and Managing Director of 6 Sigma Financial Consultancy. Ramzi established 6 Sigma Group in 2003, and has been a veteran of the banking industry since 1983.
Ramzi started his career in the City of London with the Royal Bank of Canada; later moved to its regional office in the UAE. During the stint in London, Ramzi was instrumental in developing the bank's risk platform across the whole of Europe, Middle East and Africa.
He later joined its UK National team, and was later posted to Dubai in the bank's regional center for Middle East and Africa; handling a variety of businesses across the spectrum of banking products and services.
Job Titles:
- Senior Consultant With 6 Sigma Management Consultancy
Samira Khalil, a senior consultant with 6 Sigma Management Consultancy, is the Managing Director of Teta, LLC in the USA, which specializes in providing consultancy and training to Financial Institutions. She has over 29 years of international corporate banking and training experience working for the world's largest banking groups (Citigroup, BankAmerica and General Electric Capital).
Job Titles:
- Senior Consultant at InterConsult Limited, Istanbul
Serpil Yildirim is a Senior Consultant at InterConsult Limited, Istanbul, an Associate Company of 6 Sigma Financial Consultancy.
Serpil started her career at InterConsult in 1997 as Management Trainee and was appointed as Partner in 2002. She benefits from wide experiences in management and financial consultancy including:
The establishment of two investment banks,
Structuring project finance deals for multinational and large local companies,
Managing the acquisition of two bank projects,
Development of an InterBank Foreign Exchange Market project for the Central Bank of Ghana,
Re-structuring Investment Banking Department for National Bank of Uzbekistan,
Re-organization of a mid-size Turkish Bank's Treasury, Internal Control, Financial Control and Corporate Banking departments.
Executing bank and company due diligences for several clients,
Performing Strategy Consultancy for an Islamic Bank in Turkey and a large commercial bank in Bahrain,
Additionally, she was Project Leader in the following projects;