Ms. Suzanne Heywood has been Managing Director of Direct Investments at Exor N.V. since September 13, 2016.
Prior to that, Ms. Heywood worked at McKinsey & Company which she joined as an associate in 1997. She then became a Partner and later a director (senior partner) of McKinsey. She led McKinsey’s global service line on operating model change for several years and also worked extensively on strategic issues with clients.
She has published multiple articles on these topics and has also acted as a visiting lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her McKinsey clients were global companies primarily in the industrial, financial, media and consumer sectors. She has been a Director of CNH Industrial N.V. since April 15, 2016.
She started her career in the UK Government as a Civil Servant in the UK Treasury. At the Treasury she worked as Private Secretary to the Financial Secretary (who is responsible for all direct taxation issues) as well as leading thinking on the Government’s privatization policy and supporting the UK in its European negotiations at ECOFIN (the meeting of European Finance Ministers) in Brussels. Ms. Heywood is also a Board Member of The Economist (where she is an Audit Committee member) and of the Royal Opera House (where she chairs the Finance and Operations Committee), the Royal Academy of Music (where she is an Audit Committee member) and the Royal Academy of Arts. She grew up sailing around the world for ten years on a yacht with her family recreating Captain James Cook’s third voyage around the world. Prior to that she studied science at Oxford University (BA) and then at Cambridge University (PhD).