Jeremy Small
Group Company Secretary, AXA UK
An experienced Company Secretary with wide-ranging technical and commercial experience in manufacturing, services and financial services industries, who has extremely good relationships with chairmen, directors and senior executives, and is often used as a sounding board for commercial propositions, strategy and cultural issues. Jeremy led an international team to develop a direct to consumer wealth management product and for several years he has actively sponsored talent and development programmes, providing coaching and mentoring support in the UK, France and Germany.
At AXA UK, he introduced board evaluation and instigated several innovations to improve the culture and smooth running of board meetings. In 2010, through CriticalEye, a business networking organisation, Jeremy published an article on directors and decision-making, and in 2011, he published an article on leadership in M&A. He has also published an article about the role of the Chairman, via Fidelio Partners in 2015. In 2017, he published an article on M&A: The Board’s Role, in Governance + Compliance, the professional journal of ICSA: The Governance Institute of which he is a Fellow. He acts as an informal advisor on a range of corporate governance matters and was a member of the CBI Companies Committee for 10 years. In 2011, he became a member of the ICSA Company Secretaries’ Forum, along with its EU and Professional Development Committees, providing comment and formal responses on various government and EU consultations, as well as helping to update the professional qualifying syllabus for company secretaries.
Jeremy’s experience at AXA, The BOC Group, Forte and Spear’s Games covers the entire range of company secretarial work including board and director succession planning, stock exchange compliance in the UK, US and Japan, contract negotiation, strategy development, corporate administration, company law, share options, insurance, intellectual property, pensions and the establishment of governance and risk frameworks, as well as financial services regulation.