Lode Beckers
Lode Beckers is an international financier and banker, who after a 28-year corporate banking career with Citibank in 7 countries, became a Board Member and Audit Committee member of several banks, industrial companies, and charitable associations. In 1996, Lode Beckers founded LOBO N.V., an advisory and equity investment firm focusing on EU related strategic and organisational matters.
Over the past fifteen years, trade and industry federations, governments, and leading corporations have called on Lode's expertise in assessing the impact of the European Single Market area on business with European trade partners and in commenting the origins and consequences of the global financial crisis. While acting as a presenter and company director, Lode Beckers continued to be a board member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium and of the Board of Trustees of the Chicago-based SITE Foundation. He also held teaching assignments at the Universities of Leuven, Paris X (Nanterre), and St. Petersburg (Russia). Lode obtained magna cum laude degrees in Law and Political Sciences from the University of Leuven. He is an alumni of Wharton's International Forum and holds an Advanced Management Program certification from INSEAD (Fr.). He was a member of the Global Council of Thunderbird: the American School of International Management (Glendale, Ariz), and still is an International Council member for the AMA (American Management Association). Previous directorship responsibilities were assumed with Aquafin N.V., a government-owned water treatment company, and LRM (Limburgse Reconversie Maatschappij), a regional development company. He also served two terms on the board of directors of the Dutch private bank "van Lanschot Bankiers" België, and of Fortis Bank until the latter's acquisition by BNP Paribas. He currently is an independent Board Member of Citibank Belgium. In his banking career Lode Beckers became known as a senior-level risk management expert and as a corporate banking expert for the construction & engineering industry (1978-1986) and the agribusiness & food industry (1990-1996). Relationship banking and staff assignments in New York, Paris, and London were alternated with general management responsibility for Citibank's operations in Belgium (1987-1996), Luxemburg, and the Netherlands (1984-1987). Lode was born in 1940 in Boorsem (Belgium), is married to Monique Marmillion since 1970, and lives in Belgium and France. He is active in the non-profit sector as a Board Member of the Belgian Mountaineering Federations CMBEL and KBF, of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), and of Special Olympics Belgium.
What he presents:
The financial crisis (origins and consequences)
Personal and professional success: what are the key determinants?
Comparison between managerial challenges and mountaineering challenges
Possible directions in the further construction of the European Single Market