Rachel Sexton

Rachel is a Partner and the Head of the Ashurst Risk Advisory practice in the UK. She was formerly a partner at EY LLP and KPMG LLP. She originally trained as a financial statement auditor but has specialised in forensic accounting and financial crime investigations over the past 25 years. She has lived and worked in the UK, US, Switzerland and Germany. During this time, she led a number of high-profile fraud, market abuse, bribery & corruption economic sanctions and tax evasion investigations. She focuses on identifying the weaknesses in the governance and control frameworks which allowed the incident to happen and advises clients on how to strengthen their governance and control frameworks.

Throughout her career, she has mentored and coached many women through the partnership process or on their return to work after a break. She has also sat on partnership promotion panels as well as remuneration panels at her firms to monitor gender equality in the pay and promotion processes.

Rachel earned a BSc (Hons) in Business Administration with Accountancy from California State University Northridge. She is a US-qualified Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a member of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. She has earned post-graduate diplomas in Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crime Prevention from the International Compliance Association. She was named one of the Top 100 Women in Investigations in 2019 by Global Investigations Review.

She is on the boards of two other charities: the Fraud Advisory Panel and JUSTICE. She is also the Treasurer for IWF UK.

Originally from the US, she has lived in Europe since 2002. She splits her time between London and Ludlow in Shropshire. She lives with her husband, Martin, and two cats. She is passionate about wine, gardening, travelling and reading.