Kirk Cheesman is the Group Managing Director of NCI and started in 1990 as an Office Trainee. Throughout Kirk’s time at NCI the company has grown to over 180 employees and 4,000 clients throughout Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia.

Kirk shows strength in identifying and finding appropriate solutions to mitigate trade credit risks. This has been applied to SME’s as well as large multi-national domestic and international companies. He is a cornerstone of NCI’s success, with his enthusiasm to develop new ideas to protect our clients from trade credit risks.

He believes in building a strong culture within NCI, which leads to making close business friendships with clients and partners.

Craig Rowe, as the Executive Manager – Finance, heads up NCI’s Finance Team. With nearly 3 decades in finance and accounting, he has a wealth of experience in both public practice and commerce including international and Big 4 roles.

In addition to his responsibility for NCI’s compliance and reporting requirements, he and his team play an instrumental role in providing value-added support to management and other stakeholders within the group.

Craig enjoys the challenges of working for an innovative, market-leading business that is continually striving to stay ahead of the curve.  Above all else, he enjoys being part of a team and working towards collective goals.

Prudence Chang has been at NCI since 2006. Starting off as a Sales Executive, moving to Senior Sales Executive, Sales Manager, Executive Manager – Business Development and Partners and now Joint Managing Director – Australia. She not only oversees the strategic planning and National Partnerships for the sales teams but also negotiates policies.

She has won numerous awards including 12 NCI achievement awards, Insurance Business Magazine Elite Broker award 7 times and most recently was awarded a top position in Elite Woman in Insurance Broker 2021.

Prudence has the experience to negotiate the most competitive policy, no matter if it is for an SME or a large multinational.

She is energetic and passionate in all walks of her professional life.

Jeff George commenced with NCI in 1991 and is Head of Risk and Group Services. This includes overseeing The Hub service divisions – Claims, Limits, Credit Services and Collections – and Risk and Compliance throughout NCI.

With such knowledge and experience, Jeff is very much the “go-to” person for clients and throughout NCI for technical matters. His strong knowledge of insurer policy wordings and of NCI’s product offerings is invaluable in tailoring solutions to not only protect clients, but to enable them to grow.

His motto is for clients to “survive and thrive” – now and into the future.

Lisa is the General Manager of Operations at NCI, starting her career in 2003. Throughout this time, she has held a variety of different roles, giving her a broad understanding of what it takes to keep the NCI wheels moving.

In addition to overseeing NCI’s operations, Lisa specialises in the management of large projects, data and process analysis and creating efficiencies across all of NCI’s operational aspects.

Her passion for creating opportunities for others to achieve their professional goals and the development of new products and services is paramount in her role.

Most recently, Lisa was responsible for the successful rollout of NCI’s NextGen project which included recreating our client platform, NCILink. Lisa continues to work closely with NCI’s IT team to bring more automation and ease through technical solutions to NCI’s clients.

Zara Mends is the Managing Director of NCI New Zealand. Zara has over 16 years’ experience in the industry and has worked in Australia and New Zealand in Broking and Leadership roles.

She has an in-depth understanding of trade credit risk and experience in tailoring solutions for businesses to ensure they are protected, maximising the cover available and ensuring they are well informed about their debtors and market risks.