Shirine Khoury-Haq
Former Co-op Group CEO and keynote speaker on business transformation, crisis leadership and AI
*Fees are a guide only. Exact cost will be dependent on requirements and are subject to change.
About Shirine Khoury-Haq
As CEO of the Co-op Group, Shirine led a turnaround that reduced net debt, excluding leases, from £920 million to £55 million between 2022 and 2024. Over the same period, underlying operating profit increased by 30% and membership grew from 4.2 million to 7.3 million.
In 2025, Shirine led the Co-op’s response to a major cyberattack. She had to balance containing the threat with keeping essential services running, supporting colleagues and customers, and communicating publicly as the facts emerged. Her open letter to business leaders about the experience was published in the National Cyber Security Centre’s 2025 Annual Review.
Before joining the Co-op, Shirine was Chief Operating Officer of Lloyd’s of London, where she led a modernisation and digitisation programme involving hundreds of organisations across the London insurance market. Her career also includes roles at McDonald’s, Catlin and IBM. She has led change at individual sites and across international businesses, giving her a perspective on how decisions made at board level play out for the people delivering them.
Shirine has served as Audit Chair of FTSE 100 housebuilder Persimmon and co-chaired the UK government’s Net Zero Council under both Conservative and Labour governments. In 2025, she topped INvolve’s Heroes Top 100 Women Executives list.
Shirine’s keynotes draw on the decisions behind these experiences. She explains how to choose what to fix first in a turnaround, what senior leaders need to own during a crisis and how to assess a technology investment against the problem it’s meant to solve.
To book Keynote Speaker Shirine Khoury-Haq, contact The Speakers Agency on +44(0)1332 810481 or email enquiries@thespeakersagency.com.
Turning It Around
Drawing on transformations from individual McDonald’s restaurants to the £11 billion Co-op Group, Shirine explains how to diagnose the causes of underperformance, restore financial and operational discipline and decide which changes to make first. She shares how leaders can give people clear responsibility for delivery and measure progress while protecting long-term growth.
Lead When It Hits
Using the Co-op cyberattack as a case study, Shirine takes audiences through the judgement calls leaders face in a crisis. What do you protect first? When do you defer to specialists? How do you communicate when information is incomplete? She also covers the work that comes after the immediate crisis, when leaders need to support their teams and rebuild confidence.
Making Technology Pay
Shirine draws on her experience modernising the London insurance market to show how leaders can decide where AI and digital investment will make a commercial difference. She starts with the customer problem, then looks at what needs to change in how teams work and how leaders can tell whether the investment is delivering results.
