Alister Esam
Founder and CEO, eShare
Alister is an actuary and CEO of eShare, a business he founded in 2004. In 2004, many pension funds were in crisis after years of snoozing board members had allowed them to be run down for corporate profit. Pensioners were campaigning naked outside parliament for their lost pensions. Board members of pensions funds needed to improve governance to say the least.
Alister set up eShare and developed BoardPacks to provide them with the technology to do this. This started by establishing a governance forum of some of the best run pension funds so he could identify what board members needed to govern better. Today pension fund boards are better run than ever in no small part due to the BoardPacks product the majority of large funds use.
It turns out that poor governance is not exclusive to pension fund boards and over the years BoardPacks has been developed to meet the governance needs of charities, housing associations, universities, many of the UK’s hospitals and companies in over 25 countries.
As eShare expanded into the corporate sector, Alister was astonished at how multi entity corporates had digitised the board but had failed to take advantage of this to improve subsidiary governance. He lead eShare to develop EntitySquared, a solution to enable multi entity corporates to monitor compliance and board performance of their entity structure and deliver a subsidiary governance solution.
eShare is now the largest UK owned board governance software provider.