2025 Keynote

Jeff Smith , EVP & COO, World Fuel Services

Leadership Award Recipient

Jeff Smith, World Fuel Services

Jeff Smith retired as World Fuel Service’s Chief Operating Officer at the end of 2023. Jeff’s focus as COO was delivering innovation at the pace of the best tech companies by operationalizing culture – making it something you can learn, practice and improve. Jeff believes that talent and culture are the differentiating factors of great companies. His organization strategy centers around building, nurturing and coaching small, self-directed teams that are loosely coupled and tightly aligned to Agile practices. His leadership beliefs focus on providing clarity of purpose for his teams and inspiring diversity of thought and collective wisdom to solve problems in unconventional ways. As COO, Jeff led efforts to move all infrastructure to Cloud – this included migrating applications and closing 21 of 23 data centers, implementing a global SDWAN and transitioning all telephony and 82 PBX systems to Zoom phone. Prior to joining WFS, Jeff was Chief Information Officer at IBM. He was globally responsible for 20k IBMers across the company’s IT solutions and infrastructure. In addition, he also led the Agile transformation across the company. Before leading IBM’s IT organization, Jeff was CEO of Suncorp Business Services. He was responsible for Suncorp Group’s shared services across all companies. This included IT, Shared Financial Services, Procurement, Real Estate and Risk Management. Jeff has over 35 years of corporate experience and has held senior executive roles in several companies including Telstra, Honeywell and Toyota. Jeff has also been an Advisor to leading tech companies including Zoom, Box and Tech Mahindra. In addition, Jeff currently sits on the Board of Directors of ANZ Bank, PEXA and Sonrai Security while continuing as an Advisor to World Fuel Services. A native of Ohio, Jeff earned a bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from Miami University and an MBA from San Jose State University. In addition, he also served on the Australian Fulbright Commission awarding Australian post-graduate scholarships to US universities.