About PredictX

Keesup started as an aspiring jazz musician in New York, barely eeking out a living waiting tables at Sweet Basil Jazz Club in Greenwich Village. Realising that he needed a “day gig”, much like Chance Gardner he somehow found himself on the trading floor of Wall Street trading derivatives. When he found out that multi-billion dollar portfolios were managed on spreadsheets, he moved to Palo Alto to found Renaissance Software Inc, the first distributed system for managing financial derivatives. He recorded his first CD, “Strange Attractor” in 1992. Since then, Keesup’s career straddled finance and software. He has run his own hedge fund, acted as head of trading for major investment banks in the City and Wall Street as well as successfully growing startup software companies in Silicon Valley and London. Keesup’s particular passion is empowering business executives with the tools and technologies to make smarter and faster decisions based on data and analytics as well as discovering new jazz musicians.

After spending 22 years in the City of London in various senior roles including Head of Interest Rate Derivatives, Funding and Trading various European interest rate portfolios, Ayesha rose to Treasurer of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, responsible for financial strategy and operations including long-term funding, asset-liability management and investment and trading of €11 Billion. She has been awarded Asian Women of Achievement Business Woman of the Year as well as being polled one of Euromoney’s Top 50 Women in Finance.

After joining the company in 2009, Andrew has played a central role in setting up and developing the company’s Retail, Insurance and Integrated Health & Social Care solutions. Andy is responsible for the day-to-day running of these three business lines and leading on product development. He has played a key role in driving through a number of technical enhancements across the business to help keep PredictX at the forefront of new technology, whilst maintaining the highest levels of customer satisfaction. He has recently taken on a larger role within the company as the Vice President of Solutions Engineering. Outside of work, Andy is a keen cyclist and enjoys five-a-side football.

Kevin joined PredictX as a programmer in 1991 and has been responsible for the technical direction of the company since the mid ‘90s from Pricetrak to PredictX. Kevin is in charge of infrastructure at PredictX and is actively migrating the company to an in-house cloud-based solution using Devops for management. During his time at PredictX he has promoted the early use of new technologies to keep development at cutting edge. These include the early use of Windows, using the commercial internet in the mid ‘90s for report delivery and the early adoption of Linux as a server operating system. Outside of work, Kevin enjoys reading and camping.

Simon has played a pivotal role in the development of Predict.X Procurement, Travel and Talent since 2008. Simon is responsible for guiding both new and existing product strategies from initial concept through to prototype, launch and post-launch development. In addition, Simon has overall responsibility for the smooth and successful operation of the Analytics solution line. Simon is passionate about building products customers love and is usually deployed at the frontier between the technical and commercial worlds. Simon can often be found immersed in international politics, business, and technology.

Maria Chevalier is a 30 year travel industry executive. She has held senior leadership roles in all aspects of the travel ecosystem - buyer, distribution & supplier. Before joining PredictX as Executive Vice President of Customer Success, she worked as Executive Director of Business Travel Sales for Hilton Worldwide where she managed over $7B sales organization as well as GVP of Corporate Incubation for Travelport, VP of Hotel Relations/Consulting for BCD Travel and COO of The Travel Desk. She has served as a business travel buyer as the Global Director of Travel & Meeting Services for Johnson & Johnson and HP - both programmes with an annual T&E spend of over $1 billion.

She has won multiple industry awards including the BTN’s Business Travel Manager of the Year and Best Practitioner as well as ACTE’s Driving Innovation.

Maria has always been ahead of her time in her adoption of BI strategies using data and analytics tools to improve travel programmes through implementing new strategies to improve customer experience and safety as well as drive critical savings and business controls.

Her passion and expertise in data and the travel industry along with her in-depth understanding of today's business travel buyer programmes and challenges allows her to help our customers use our solution to drive travel programme innovation and improvements.

When not helping our customers, Maria can be found gardening, making jewellery or on long hikes with her dog Katie.