Accenture makes three senior appointments in Sydney office

Accenture’s Australian practice has made a number of national leadership appointments, including Ian Pollari, Julie Romanet-Perroux and Carrie Smith, who will all be based out of Sydney.

Global professional services firm Accenture has made three key signings in Australia in recent weeks; former KPMG global fintech practice co-leader Ian Pollari as its incoming head of financial services; Julie Romanet-Perroux, who transfers after over two decades with the firm in Paris to lead the local Energy Transition practice for Accenture’s resources clients; and Carrie Smith as the firm’s new ANZ communications lead.

Ian Pollari officially takes on his new role as Accenture’s ANZ financial services practice lead in July, having spent the past 17 years at KPMG, including the past decade as a partner and sector leader for banking & capital markets.

In addition, Pollari has served as KPMG's global co-leader for fintech since 2014, and spent six years as a founding director of tech accelerator Stone & Chalk. Earlier, he worked as a strategy manager for Telstra.

In his new role, Pollari will be responsible for supporting Australian financial institutions to accelerate the design and transformation of their business models, advising leaders on the future of financial services and technology and how to capitalise on the current revolution. He has previously advised several local and international government and regulatory agencies in relation to fintech, regtech, open banking, and digital developments.

After over twenty years with the tech consulting giant in Paris, Julie Romanet-Perroux has relocated to Australia to take up a managing director role with Accenture in Sydney, where she has been tasked with heading up the firm’s increasingly important energy transition portfolio for resource industry clients, including those operating in the energy, utilities, chemical and natural resources sectors. She first joined Accenture as a trainee in France in 2000.

Romanet-Perroux brings a track record in supporting high-profile industry clients such as Engie, Total, and BP with transformational projects, having also helped to build Accenture’s sustainability practice in France.

Writing on LinkedIn, Romanet-Perroux stated that despite being on another continent in a different timezone and serving new clients, she would still be working in the same industry on a topic close to her heart.

Carrie Smith joins Accenture as its new ANZ regional marketing & communications lead after more than a decade and a half with PwC, where she most recently served as head of marketing and sales enablement – a broad role which covered strategic and digital marketing, client experience, industry programs, and event management among other areas.

Prior to joining PwC in 2006, Smith spent five years as a marketing manager in the London office of KPMG.

In announcing her new role with Accenture in Sydney on LinkedIn, Smith, who holds a social sciences degree in legal studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, said that it had been an amazing start at the firm meeting many of its “talented people across the world who deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity”, while also being buoyed by being back “in an office, in real shoes, with a comfy chair.”