Jonny Combe Keynote Speaker

Jonny Combe is CEO of PaybyPhone UK and Former BMW General Manager for Real Estate, Mobility and Innovation (EMEA). He has a natural entrepreneurial flair, and is a top speaker on business, marketing and innovation.

Since November 2018, he has been CEO of PayByPhone UK, one of the fastest-growing digital payment platforms in the UK, owned by Volkswagen Financial Services AG. Since joining, he has delivered 30% year-on-year growth in a dynamic and constantly evolving industry.

Prior to this, he worked in various roles within BMW. He joined the BMW Group in 2006 as a graduate and progressed onto senior roles including General Manager, Digital and Innovation and General Manager for Real Estate, Mobility and Innovation (EMEA). He led the team that delivered the “BMW Innovation Lab”, an award-winning corporate accelerator, and spearheaded the “The Intrapreneur Lab”, designed to foster innovation within the business, the first of their kind within the Automotive Finance industry.

In 2020, Jonny was recognised as “One of the UK’s top ten business gamechangers”. He has been featured in publications such as HuffPost, The Economist and the Scotsman, and has shared his insights with a number of well-known brands, including Barclays, Disney, Asset Finance International and Baillie Gifford. He is passionate about innovation, challenging organisational culture and finding creative ways to do new and exciting things within the rigid confines of a large corporation. He is an engaging and charismatic speaker who will energise your audiences with his fun yet insightful learnings.

Jonny is comfortable speaking at conferences or smaller, more intimate settings where he willingly engages with participants.

Speaking Topics:

• Innovation and Influencing: Drawing on his experience of launching two award-winning innovation programmes of BMW, Jonny shares how he managed to navigate the “corporate immune” system that exists to kill off new ideas which don’t conform to the status quo, along with the learnings of what made both programmes successful.
• Leadership: Jonny was headhunted to become CEO of PayByPhone UK at 32, taking on a brief to grow a technology business exponentially. Drawing on this experience as a young CEO in the digital world, along with his 14 years at BMW, Jonny shares what he considers to be some of the key ingredients to effective leadership, and exposes some of the “old school” leadership styles that dramatically hold back organisations today.
• Customer: Jonny explains how understanding the customer journey is the key to engaging effectively with your customers, and how to ensure that your organisation’s offering remains competitive in an age when no industry is safe from the threat of digital disruption.