About
At NewForesight, Arjan leads the TransMission and Finance domains and holds a broader mandate as Deputy Director. He helps the organisation and its clients scale what works.
With over 26 years of experience across international financial institutions, corporates, start-ups, and public bodies, he brings the ability to hold financial rigour and systemic ambition together and turn that tension into forward movement. He has sat inside the systems that now need to change, which means he understands both the pressure leaders are under and the levers that actually move things.
Most organisations working on sustainability transitions aren’t short on ambition. They’re short on traction. Strategies stall between intent and execution. Capital sits on the sidelines. Teams are busy but progress is slow. The gap isn’t about ideas – it’s about decision-making, alignment, and the courage to make real trade-offs.
That gap is exactly where Arjan works.
He is a strategic thinker who combines imagination with discipline. He brings deep expertise in governance, value creation models, behavioural and cultural change, and leadership development. He names the underlying dilemmas and patterns and builds the conditions for better decisions – not just better plans. Whether he is supporting a financial institution to redirect capital toward sustainable transitions, helping a sector partnership get unstuck, or building the internal conditions for teams to perform, his focus is on clarity, courage, and momentum.
Arjan is an endurance athlete and a trained chemical engineer – two things that say a lot about how he works. He approaches every challenge with a systems mindset, always asking what the rate-limiting step really is. And he believes that the right team, moving together with focus, resilience, and a little lightness, can cover remarkable ground.
What clients experience working with Arjan
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He focuses on surfacing the real problem – not just the one in the brief. He reads between the lines of a strategy challenge to find the structural or behavioural issue underneath.
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He brings financial credibility to sustainability conversations, and sustainability depth to financial ones. This builds trust with boards, investors, and sector stakeholders alike.
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He moves organisations from analysis to action. He is not a report writer. He designs decision processes, builds alignment, and creates the routines that keep momentum alive after the engagement ends.
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He builds capabilities, not dependencies. His goal is always to make the people and organisations he works with stronger – not to make himself indispensable.
Career highlights
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26+ years across consulting, leadership, and entrepreneurship in finance, energy, food, and sustainability – in the Netherlands, the UK, and internationally.
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16 years at PwC, including as Director in the Business Resilience team in London, working with banks and capital market firms on reconstructing governance and operating model.
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Involved in the administration and controlled wind-down of Lehman Brothers – one of the defining governance and risk events of the 2008 financial crisis.
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Led the consulting division at Impact Institute, helping organisations measure and manage the value they create for society, and contributing to the development of open-source impact measurement standards.
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Served as interim Chief Risk Officer at SWIFT, the global financial messaging network.
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Director of Business Transformation at AXVECO, strengthening governance, innovation, and entrepreneurial culture in the context of emerging technologies.
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Member of the Advisory Board of the Erasmus Platform for Sustainable Value Creation.
