Michael is passionate about providing effective risk, resilience and recovery solutions for organisations and has been involved in the Resilience & Business Continuity Industry for 20 years. Michael has had the privilege to speak about Resilience and Business Continuity Management (BCM) at various conferences in Africa and received the Personality of the Year award from the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) in 2018. Further to that, Michael was honoured to receive the Resilience and BCM Contributor for Africa award in 2020 and an Honorary Fellowship of the BCI in the same year. Michael is a Fellow member of the Institute of Directors of South Africa, a member of the Institute of Risk Management South Africa (IRMSA) and Chairman of the African Committee of IRMSA. Michael’s current focus is to help organisations in integrating strategy, risk and resilience for them to remain effective and sustainable in times of great uncertainty and accelerating change.

Pete is a Fellow of the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) (www.thebci.org), the founding chairman of the African Chapter of the BCI, a Director of the Global BCI Board, an approved BCI and ISO 22301 Instructor, the founding BCI Forum Chairman for Mauritius and surrounding Islands as well as the founding member of the East African BCI Forum. He was awarded the Business Continuity Consultant of the year in August 2014 and shortlisted for the Global BCI Awards that same year. 

Pete has successfully completed projects over the last 22 years in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Mauritius, Botswana, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, UAE, United Kingdom, Angola, Madagascar, Benin and the United States of America.

In addition to being the official company Compliance Officer for the Continuity practice of Dimension Data, he has been advising several Global companies on COVID-19 resilience, Crisis Management and Risk & Resilience Implementation Programs.

Pete has worked with BIRGER. for over 3 years and has established the Resiliency core services. As from February 2022, he is the Executive - Resiliency Services.

Mr Casteres has a master’s degree in applied mathematics, actuarial science and finance, and Executive MBA from HEC Paris. He was audit senior manager in the financial management and actuarial audit department at Aviva Europe, conducting internal audit reviews in actuarial processes. During this time, he was also involved in the implementation of Solvency II EU Directive within the Aviva Group. In 2012 he joined MUA as head of internal audit, was subsequently appointed CEO in 2015 and Group CEO three years later. Through three successive strategic plans, he secured MUA’s reputation as the largest Mauritian insurer by market capitalisation and its transformation into a truly regional insurance group with an expansion into four East African countries. The group’s latest strategic plan integrates corporate social responsibility principles with the aim of transforming MUA into a more responsible and sustainable insurer.