Alvarez & Marsal

Ann Cairns is a Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal in London and Head of the Financial Industry Advisory Group in Europe. She brings more than 20 years of experience working in senior management positions across Europe and the U.S., running and improving global retail and investment banking operations.  

Ms. Cairns is currently leading the team responsible for Lehman Brothers Holdings International across Europe, reporting to Bryan Marsal (current CEO of Lehman). Since September 2008, her team has been disposing of banks, equity investments and trading assets for the several hundred legal vehicles across the region, as well as running some business lines as ongoing concerns until the markets improve. 

Ms. Cairns also has a team based in Ireland, working with the Government as loan valuers for the Asset Management Agency NAMA. In addition, a team in Iceland working with Kaupthing Bank on their derivatives portfolio. Her practice also have a number of engagements in key financial markets across Europe and into the Middle East.  

Prior to joining A&M, Ms. Cairns was with ABN-AMRO in London, where she was CEO of Transaction Banking, reporting to the Group Board and serving on the bank's Executive Committee. In this role, she managed a business with over €5 billion in revenues across 50 countries, covering the retail, financial, commercial and institutional segments. She joined the Wholesale Payments business in 2002 and turned an operation which had been loss-making since 1996 into one generating €1 billion profit by 2007.
 
Prior to ABN-AMRO, Ms. Cairns was with Citigroup for 15 years in a variety of senior operational roles. Based in the U.S. as COO of Citi's e-Business, she had responsibility for the U.S., Europe and Japan businesses, with revenues totaling over $1 billion. In this role, she generated $400 million additional annual revenue in two years from a series of innovations and managed the roll-out of the world's leading Web-based banking platform in 83 countries and 26 languages. Prior to this, she was Division Leader in Operations and Technology, where she headed a team of 5,000, and built the bank's low cost client services groups in Dublin and Malaysia. She was also Head of the European Transaction Business where she streamlined a division of 1,000 and grew revenues by 40 per cent over two years in a difficult market. In her first role at Citi, she ran the Compliance, Control, Service and Processing area for the European FX dealing rooms, working closely with Treasury on many initiatives.
 
Ms. Cairns earned a first class degree in mathematics from Sheffield University and a master's degree in statistics from Newcastle University. She was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and attended the senior Harvard Risk Management Seminar. She is a U.K. national.