Modern CISO Network: Board Book

With an international career in security consulting across EMEA, NA, and APAC, at Accenture, BAE Systems, and other specialist firms, Sebastien built experience across many industry verticals (with a focus on technology and finance), advising Chief Technical Officers (CTOs), Chief Security Officers (CSOs), risk and technical teams alike. A core part of that career was in offensive security with a deep technical skillset, managing penetration testing and red teams tasked with circumventing the security of clients, to identify weaknesses with immediate impacts. Sebastien also delivered numerous risk and compliance projects, supporting initiatives such as ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS compliance, as well as developing entire incident management and business continuity plans.

As a CISO, Sebastien takes a bottom-up approach to securing an organization, by leveraging his attacker expertise to identify the most likely avenues of intrusion, and implementing controls that are both sensible and cutting edge, before rolling those up into appropriate policies and standards. By placing emphasis on automation and security orchestration, Sebastien aims to build lean processes underpinned by technology, and designing an environment that provides a high signal-to-noise ratio for IT/engineering/security teams and incident responders alike. A large part of Sebastien’s role as CISO is to establish a strong culture of security within the organisation. Sebastien takes a pragmatic approach to risk management, adjusting the depth and breadth of controls based on the organization’s size, expertise, and threat profile. His experience in regulatory requirements also allow him to tailor controls to not just meet compliance requirements, but exceed them where appropriate. In his role at Upvest, a SaaS-native cloud-native greenfield FinTech environment, Sebastien was able to bring together his technical and risk skill sets to design a careful balance of highly effective security controls, mitigating the most pressing risks, while enabling the fast-paced agile nature of software development in a modern technology company.