HR Executive with extensive experience running complex global organisations with additional professional skills in retail, marketing and sales.

Specialties: Leadership Development, Talent Management, large scale global reorganisations/strategic business turn around, building and shaping of agile organisation structures, offshoring and outsourcing and leading running/delivering results with truly global diverse teams.

Over the course of his career Gerard has gained a true breath of business and professional experience. Assignments in Marketing, Sales and Commercial roles have been followed by a career in Human Resources, in which Gerard has built a strong track record in multiple areas of the business. More recently, he has been on the executive teams of the two largest businesses in Shell – Upstream and Downstream and in august 2020 he moved back to his home country the Netherlands to take on the position of CHRO of ABNAMRO Bank. From the beginning of 2023 Gerard has shifted his focus on NED roles linked to the energy transition/HR.

Gerard’s passion lies in working within global businesses to navigate the full range of external trends and disruptors and transform them into business opportunities. For Gerard the global energy transition creates an exciting leadership challenge in which he is ‘front and centre’. Finding ways as a business to deploy a range of lower carbon products and quickly develop new, innovative solutions for customers, supported by different business models and ways of working is the sort of complex, business-critical challenge from which he gains personal and professional satisfaction and motivation.

Early 2018 Gerard has been elected to the Board of Sustainable Energy for All, a Vienna based global NGO allowing him to further extend and broaden his expertise in the provision of sustainable energy solutions.

Early 2021 Gerard had been elected to the Board of Alliander NV, a Netherlands based energy network company (as of mid 2023 chair Remco/Nomco).
With over 7700 professionals Alliander provides secure and increasingly sustainable, electricity and gas solutions with 5.7 million customer connects. With an annual investment of 1,2 billion euro Alliander is paving its way to a more sustainable energy future.

Gerard holds a master’s degree in Law from Leiden University.