Gwen Ryder
AIIT, CTA, VAT and Customs Consultant
Gwen has been a VAT and customs duty specialist and lecturer for her entire career. She worked in HM Customs (now HM Revenue and Customs) for 9 years before joining the VAT and Customsteam at Ernst & Young for over 6 years. She subsequently became the VAT and CustomsPartner in a top 20 firm, and then formed her own consultancy practice. From 2006to 2019, much of Gwen’s time was taken up as acting head of VAT, and then head of VATcompliance in a top 10 firm of accountants. Gwen is an Associate of, and former examiner for,the Institute of Indirect Tax, and is a member of the VAT Practitioners Group.
Gwen presents a wide range of courses on most matters of VAT and customs duty as it applies in the UK and internationally.
A Freeman of the City of London, and a Liveryman of The Worshipful Company Of Tax Advisers.
Nigel Davies
Nigel is a Chartered Certified Accountant with over twenty years’ experience in the charity sector. He is a member of the IFR4NPO Practitioner Advisory Group, Healthcare Financial Management Association’s NHS Charity Finance Group, and a trustee of the Association of Church Accountants and Treasurers (ACAT). He has is a member of ACCA’s Charity Trustees Panel and a regular speaker on charity financial reporting issues. He has also written a number of articles on topical accountancy issues including the ACCA Factsheet: ESG reporting for smaller charities (October 2022).
Prior to taking up part-time consultancy in March 2022, Nigel was Assistant Director, Accountancy Services, at the Charity Commission for England and Wales and Joint Chair of the UK-Ireland Charities SORP Committee (2014-2022) and co-author of the Charities Statement of Recommended Practice (FRS 102). He was the principal author of the 2015 ACCA Companion Guide for Not-for-profits to the International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs) which was the first global reporting initiative for non-profit organisations.
Louise Dunford
Louise has been continuously involved in training and consultancy since 1987 and am a qualified barrister. Louise provides advice and assistance to employers through a consultancy company, CompleteHR Ltd, and have also engaged in CPD training for most of the national accountancy training bodies and district societies in the UK for many years. Louise is involved in management training, particularly in employment and HR, for many large multinational and national commercial companies. Louise has also worked as an occasional associate senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, mainly on the MBA, MA Personnel Management and MA Business Law. Louise has published academic papers in refereed journals, chiefly on employment status and corporate manslaughter.
Darren Leiser
Darren Leiser is a Freelance Lecturer and Consultant specialising in Financing, Budgeting and Management seminars, which includes Financial Reporting (under UK GAAP and IFRS), Pension Schemes. Charities, Corporate Finance, Budgeting, Auditing, Finance for Non-Finance Managers, Quantitative Methods, Corporate Governance, Costing and Effective Management Processes.
Darren holds a BSc (Hons) degree in Mathematics and a MSc in Finance. He is a Fellow of The Chartered Association of Certified Accountants (FCCA) and obtained the Auditing Practicing Certificate. He is also a member of the Pensions Research Accountants Group.
Darren has over twenty years of experience in the profession, having worked for several of the largest accountancy practices in the UK along with several smaller ones too.
As an auditor with a top five UK firm Darren was involved with auditing some of the largest pension schemes in the UK that are linked to many national and international companies.
He has taught both throughout the UK and internationally presenting courses in many countries including UAE, Oman, Switzerland, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Greece, and Georgia to name a few. He has taught on the CPD circuit for the major accountancy Institutes including the ICAEW, ACCA and ICAS. He has also presented various in-house courses for organisations such the National Audit Office and European Space Agency.
Alan De Sousa Caires
Alan de Sousa Caires FCCA is a chartered certified accountant and Finance Director with over 30 years' experience across commercial and charity finance. He qualified with ACCA in 1995, is a Six Sigma Black Belt, and has held director-level finance roles at BBC Media Action (a £40m international INGO operating in 25 countries) and The Film and Television Charity, where he spent six years as Director of Finance & Operations. Earlier in his career he spent 14 years with GE across the UK, Italy and Turkey, leading finance and process-improvement programmes that delivered over $4m in savings. He was part of the team that won Charity Times' Best Use of Technology in 2020. He now focuses on helping charity finance teams adopt AI responsibly and practically — as a practitioner, not a theorist.
