ANDREA BONIME-BLANC

Dr. Bonime-Blanc is CEO and founder of GEC Risk Advisory LLC, the global governance, risk, integrity, reputation and crisis advisory firm (www.GECRisk.com) serving executives, boards, investors and advisors in diverse sectors, growth stages and industries worldwide. Client assignments range from strategic to tactical, including enterprise and specific risk assessments, crisis planning, integrity program development, codes of conduct, and customized education from the boardroom to the shop floor. “Global Risk, Reputation and Resilience” Workshops for Boards and Executives of for-profit, non-profit and international governmental agencies are a custom specialty of GEC Risk.

Dr. Bonime-Blanc wrote The Reputation Risk Handbook: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Hyper-Transparency (Do Sustainability, October 2014 - http://bit.ly/1284TMR), is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Lead Cyber-Risk Governance Researcher for The Conference Board. She is an Ethisphere 2014 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics and a 2014 Top 100 Thought Leader in Trustworthy Business. She recently joined the Advisory Board of Spain’s leading think tank, Corporate Excellence: Centre for Reputation Leadership (http://www.corporateexcellence.org).

Dr. Bonime-Blanc spent two decades as a senior executive in a wide diversity of global industries in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 250, leading governance, legal, ethics, compliance, risk, crisis management, internal audit, external affairs, and corporate responsibility functions. She was founding global chief ethics and compliance officer for Bertelsmann, the global media company, where she established and launched the ethics and compliance program for 100,000 employees in 600 businesses in 60 countries. She was head of global corporate responsibility & risk management for Verint Systems (NASDAQ:VRNT), a “big data” technology company where she supervised five global functions. Dr. Bonime-Blanc was general counsel, head of compliance, crisis management, external relations, strategic communications and environment, health & safety for the global division of PSEG (NYSE:PEG), the leading U.S. energy and utility company. She began her career as an international project finance lawyer at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

Dr. Bonime-Blanc has deep governance experience. She has been chairman of the board of directors of two non-profit boards, one of which she was also chair of the audit committee. She is chair emeritus of the Ethics & Compliance Officer Association (now ECI) and a director member of the National Association of Corporate Directors. She actively counsels boards and has acted as corporate secretary and general counsel to several boards over the past 25 years.

Dr. Bonime-Blanc is an extensively published author and editor of books and articles. She writes The GlobalEthicist column for Ethical Corporation Magazine (http://bit.ly/YHoGL7) and co-authored and co-edited The Ethics and Compliance Handbook for the ECOA Foundation. She has written “The Fight Against Corruption Goes Global” for Foreign Affairs, “Business and the Way of Democracy” for the New York Times and opinion pieces for El Pais and Expansion in Spain and El Cronista in Argentina. She serves as adjunct faculty at NYU and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest lecturer at private, pubic and academic venues worldwide including Yale, Columbia, ESADE, Georgetown, Baruch, Universidad Austral IAE, and the Korea Management Association.

Over the years, Dr. Bonime-Blanc has leveraged her European background and fluency in Spanish to work throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. She holds a Joint J.D. in Law and PhD in Political Science from Columbia University where she wrote her published doctoral thesis, Spain’s Transition to Democracy: The Politics of Constitution-Making (http://amzn.to/Z9bEXv) used for university democracy courses around the word. She is an exhibited artist and photographer and lives with her family in New York City. She tweets @GlobalEthicist.