All posts in Speakers

Seb is CEO of Qdos Contractor with an expertise in matters relating to the Contractor and Freelancer industry specifically with regard to IR35 Status issue. Seb is a sought after commentator on all matters relating to the IR35 legislation and presents extensively on the subject around the country.

Seb also co-founded the influential Contractor news and information website Contractor Weekly which has over 75,000 registered Contractors.

Mark has spent over 25 years working in tax and specialises in Personal and Capital Gains Tax. After beginning his career as a Revenue Officer at HMRC, Mark worked for a number of years as a Tax Senior at an in-house tax department for a UK stockbroker, dealing primarily with high net worth individuals.

He joined Thomson Reuters in 2006, working on support and as a Business Analyst before becoming Product Owner for Digita’s Personal Tax product. He now holds the position of Product Manager for Tax. He and the team are currently working closely with HMRC over the upcoming move to Making Tax Digital.

Having been diagnosed with dyslexia (aged 8) and, as a result, being told “nothing good will ever come of you” by his headmaster, Simon set about proving him wrong. Having never been academically gifted, Simon stumbled into the accountancy profession in 2002 and found he had a knack for it.

3 years after becoming one of the youngest people in the UK to hold both an accounting and tax qualification Simon bought an accountancy practice called GreenStones, at the age of 27.

In the first three years of owning the practice, Simon and his team doubled the number of team members, tripled the turnover and quadrupled the profits of the business. He did all that whilst running the London Marathon (raising over £10K for the Arthritis Research Campaign), qualifying as a hypnotherapist and cycling 963 miles from Lands End to John O’Groats.

Having extracted himself from the day-to-day running of GreenStones, Simon now spends his time Inspiring, Challenging and Supporting accountants and their teams to be the best they want to be.

Roddy writes frequently for the national and trade press and has a weekly column in Financial Adviser (Financial Times’ Professional Magazine of the Year). He also writes a monthly column for Personal Finance Magazine. His TV appearances include Working Lunch, C4’s Dosh, Fair’s Fair (HTV), BBC News 24, Sky News, Channel 5 News Early and Sky Business News. He co-hosted C5’s Serious Money, a consumer series featuring, amongst other things, pensions, property, using the internet and dealing with your bank manager. It achieved the highest request rate for its factsheets from viewers hungry for accessible information. Roddy is also a regular for Sky Active and many radio shows including Today, Money Box Live, The Financial World Tonight, Moneycheck and Wake Up To Money.

Simon heads up Qtac’s Sales and Marketing operation and is responsible for communicating the challenges and opportunities that Auto-Enrolment pose to all Qtac customers. Simons work at Qtac has ranged from technical support to management of Qtac’s successful payroll outsourcing operation.

Frank Woods is the general manager of Bankstream, a service that combines bank-authorised data feeds with practice-based software to help automate the bookkeeping process for accountants and their clients.

Frank has spent many years providing IT solutions to accounting practices across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. Frank specialises in working with Banks and Financial Institutions to set up the authorised data feeds that enable Bankstream to provide client transaction data directly to accountants.