May 27, 2022, HONG KONG: Finsbury Glover Hering and Sard Verbinnen & Co (SVC), which recently combined to create the world’s leading strategic communications firm, have made four senior hires to further grow their Asia business and meet clients’ needs in the region.
The new senior team members underscore the combined firm’s plans to build up their equity advisory capabilities in Asia, confirm the paramount importance of talent recruitment and development across the region, and strengthen advisory capabilities in China, a main growth market.
Kirsten Molyneux has joined as a Partner in Hong Kong. She will consolidate the investor relations and equity advisory capabilities and will lead on complex stakeholder engagement and crisis mandates across Asia. A former corporate broker, Kirsten was most recently Head of Corporate and Consumer Affairs at Jardine Matheson’s, DFI Retail Group.
Sarah Crawshaw has joined as Managing Director in Hong Kong to oversee talent recruitment and development, and the blueprint for the firm’s people strategy across Asia. She will also work as part of the transformation and change advisory practice. Sarah has had a long career focused on specialist executive search and human capital advisory for the communications industry and joins from Teneo.
Xiaoni Chen and Daniel Lyons have joined the Beijing office as Managing Directors, from Brunswick Group and British Airways, respectively.
Alex Geiser, Global CEO, expressed his enthusiasm for the momentum achieved in Asia to date: “Our teams across Asia have grown the business at tremendous speed over the past three years. Following our merger, we are now able to firmly establish ourselves as one of the market leaders in the region. To that end, I am excited to welcome Kirsten, Sarah, Xiaoni and Daniel to our team.”
Ben Richardson, Head of Asia, warmly welcomed the new joiners and spoke of the firm’s strong position in the region: “Being able to provide expertise and strategic counsel across Asia is of critical importance to our clients, whether they are local market champions, or multinational companies. As their needs increase, so does our requirement to have experts on the ground in all of Asia’s main markets. Adding Kirsten, Sarah, Xiaoni and Daniel underlines our commitment to hiring highly experienced professionals, who have best-in-class advisory skills.”
The firm employs more than 90 people across five locations in Asia: Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. The merger between Finsbury Glover Hering and SVC created a leader both in the region and globally, where the combined teams serve clients across a broad range of industries and mandates, supporting on cross-border transactions and financial communications, corporate reputation and leadership strategies, crisis and issues management, transformation and change, as well as government affairs, policy and advocacy.