In 2021, we launched our May Mentoring Month where we asked members of our HSOG Community to sign up to HSOG Connect to offer mentorship for our young alumni. It gives us great pleasure to see our FPs working together in the wider world. Thank you to Professor Gordon Hewitt (Class of 1963) and Tim Grant (Class of 1993) for taking time out of their busy schedules to update us on their work with SIX Digital Exchange (SDX).

We were delighted to hear from Professor Gordon Hewitt CBE, one of the world’s leading Business School Professors. Gordon has been appointed as Global Strategic Adviser to help SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) in Switzerland create the world’s first integrated and regulated digital asset system. Fellow FP and current Head of SDX, Tim Grant, studied at Old Anniesland from 1991 to 1993. 

The two had the chance to collaborate on SDX’s ‘Thought Transformation Series’. This was a set of papers providing an “intellectual backbone” for the important developments that SDX are attempting to deliver. However, this is not the first time the two have worked together. Professor Hewitt previously acted as a mentor to Tim during his high-flying career running the worldwide technology innovation group for UBS. More recently, he mentored Tim in a major start up in the area of Distributed Ledger Technology (blockchain). Following Tim and his team joining the SIX Group to run SDX from Zurich, Tim asked Professor Hewitt to take on the part-time advisory role. 

Professor Gordon Hewitt is a Professor of Management, and for many years was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Business and Corporate Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He is also an Honorary Professor at Glasgow University, and has been lead Strategy Professor on top executive programmes for the University of Oxford. With more than 25 years’ experience working at CEO and Board level with major companies, Gordon has delivered business strategy and top leadership programmes for leading global companies. These include Pfizer, Shell, IBM, Sony and Time Warner. Additionally, Gordon received a CBE for services to international business in the Queen’s 2007 New Year Honours List. He has also been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Tim Grant was appointed Head of Business at SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) in early 2020. He has more than 20 years of management expertise across institutional capital markets and enterprise blockchain businesses from his time serving senior positions in financial services. Additionally, he is Founder and CEO of DrumG Technologies, a builder/operator of blockchain technology applications and networks with a focus on institutional capital markets and post-trade infrastructure. Previously, he was CEO of the R3 Lab and Research Centre, which brought global financial institutions, technology companies, regulators and central banks together to evaluate and accelerate distributed ledger technologies towards production. Tim received a first class honours degree in Materials Science and Metallurgy from the University of Cambridge in 1997, following his time at The High School of Glasgow.