Speaker

Marie Gallagher, CPA

Marie Gallagher is Senior Vice President and Controller of PepsiCo, Inc., the Fortune 50 $63 billion food and beverage company. As PepsiCo’s Chief Accounting Officer, Ms. Gallagher is responsible for PepsiCo’s global financial reporting and SOX processes, overseeing a staff of almost 5,000 finance, reporting and control employees.  She sets the agenda for PepsiCo’s Audit Committee of the Board of Directors.  She presents PepsiCo’s results to the Committee each quarter.  Ms. Gallagher also directly oversees PepsiCo’s division controllers and their organizations, as well as provides guidance on accounting and business issues to all other corporate functions.  She is responsible for reviewing certain Compensation committee material such as the Proxy.  She provides a strategic view on all M&A activities, primarily in emerging markets.  She is part of the PepsiCo Cybersecurity Council. Ms. Gallagher is currently leading PepsiCo’s finance transformation efforts, resulting in the establishment of a Global Shared Services strategy in which certain aspects of finance are being outsourced to a third party, resulting in significant cost savings. She is heavily involved in PepsiCo’s Employee Risk Management. She played a key role in the integration of the acquisitions of Pepsi Bottling Group ($12 billion), PepsiAmericas ($6 billion).  She is also a member of PepsiCo’s Capital Expenditures and Commodity Risk Management Committees.  Additionally, Ms. Gallagher serves as the Audit Committee Chair of the Board of the Pepsi Lipton International Partnership.

She is a member of PepsiCo’s Diversity and Inclusion Council.  She is also the New York Mosaic lead, which is PepsiCo’s African American Network.  She was awarded the Steven Reinemund Award for her diversity and inclusion efforts at PepsiCo.  She also annually leads a PepsiCo-sponsored Continuing Professional Education program for 300 consumer product company finance professionals.  In addition, Ms. Gallagher sponsors a consumer products industry-wide summit, where emerging issues are discussed with peer company controllers and assistant controllers.  She recently participated in a Harvard Business School online accounting class and, as a guest instructor, at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.  In January 2016, she was appointed to the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC).

Prior to joining PepsiCo in 2005, Ms. Gallagher served as Assistant Controller of Altria Corporate Services, Inc., where she was part of the team that led the Nabisco acquisition ($19 billion) and the Kraft IPO.  She joined Altria (then Philip Morris) in 1992.  During her tenure at Altria, she also led its shared services initiatives, as well as an SAP implementation.  Prior to that, she was a Senior Manager at Coopers & Lybrand in the New York office, where her clients included Goldman Sachs and Altria.  She led discussions on various issues with the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors of Altria.

She is a Certified Public Accountant and has a B.B.A. in Accounting from Pace University.  She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the American Woman’s Society of Certified Public Accountants, Financial Executives International (Committee on Corporate Reporting) and the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants.  In 2010, she was a YWCA New York City Academy of Women Achiever Inductee. 

Marie is a member of the Boards of Junior Achievement of New York, the Cottage in Darien and the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC).  She is the Audit Committee Chair for MTC and is also a member of MTC’s Executive and Finance Committees.  Marie also recently co-chaired MTC’s annual gala.  She previously served on the Board of the Quorum Federal Credit Union.  Marie and her husband, Joseph G. Henn, have three adult children, Timothy, Meaghan and Colleen.