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Vandecruze

Grace Vandecruze

Founder and Managing Director,
Grace Global Capital, LLC

Grace Vandecruze’s career has been dedicated to the relentless mission of advising her clients in effectively executing growth strategy and managing change. Her purpose is to assist organizations, teams and leaders in realizing their highest potential by charting a range of possible futures, rather than one predetermined outcome. She is the Founder and Managing Director at Grace Global Capital LLC (www.graceglobalcapital.com) a consulting firm providing M&A financial advisory, restructuring, and valuation to insurance executives, boards and financial regulators since 2006. Throughout her career, Grace has delivered advisory expertise on over $5 billion of insurance transactions.

As Managing Director at Swiss Re, Grace was responsible for the firm's regulatory advisory practice in the insurance and financial services industries. Grace has extensive expertise in mergers and acquisitions and capital raisings, and most notably she provided expert testimony on the valuation of Conseco during the largest bankruptcy in the insurance industry. Prior to joining Swiss Re, she was a Vice President at a private equity firm specializing in the insurance industry and an Associate in the Financial Institutions Group at Merrill Lynch. Working with EY and Grant Thornton earlier in her career, she was an auditor with CPA credentials serving clients in the financial services industry.

She earned an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and a BBA in Accounting from Pace University in 1985. Before attending The Wharton School, she was an auditor for six years in the financial services industry at Ernst & Young and Grant Thornton. She is a Certified Public Accountant. Grace is also board member of SBLI USA and M Financial Group.

Grace has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Annapurna, the Himalayan in Bhutan and Everest Base Camp. She is also a licensed sailor. Grace has been featured in two books: "Be Happy at Work, 100 Women Who Love their Jobs and Why" by Joanne Gordon and "Doing it Ourselves: Success Stories of African American Women in Business" by Donna Ballard. Grace is frequently quoted in the financial press, including The American Banker, Insurance Journal, SNL Financial and AM Best TV and Journal. She is a regular keynote speaker on the M&A landscape at the Mid-West Zone Conference of National Association of Insurance Commissioners, M Financial Annual Marketing Meeting and The Baker Tilly Insurance Conference.

As an experienced mountaineer and entrepreneur, Grace sees the two worlds of business and adventure to be inextricably linked and interconnected. As the landscape of insurance is rapidly changing, mountains provide high-altitude laboratories and metaphors for leadership, team dynamics, collaboration and strategy management. Her stories of taking chances, thriving in uncertainty, and achieving results are dynamic, inspiring and transformational. She encourages her clients to transition from a traditional model of change and risk to moving beyond the status quo and embracing unchartered territory in order to maximize outcome.