“If it makes sense, let’s do it. If not, let’s find an alternative.”
Nicolas Karaiskos Aretos is a senior finance executive, board advisor, entrepreneur, and ACCA-qualified professional with more than 15 years of experience spanning corporate finance, strategic planning, financial reporting, treasury, governance, operational leadership, and business transformation. His career has developed across listed companies, multinational organizations, maritime businesses, international film production, nonprofit environments, and entrepreneurial advisory assignments, giving him a distinctly broad perspective on how organizations create, protect, and enhance value. Throughout his professional journey, Nicolas has built a reputation for looking beyond financial statements to understand the commercial realities, operational pressures, risks, and strategic assumptions behind the numbers.
At the center of Nicolas’s leadership philosophy is a commitment to independent judgment and rational decision-making. He believes that effective executives and board members must do more than validate performance or accept conventional assumptions; they must be willing to ask difficult questions, evaluate evidence objectively, and challenge strategies when the underlying logic does not support the desired outcome. His personal motto, “If it makes sense, let’s do it. If not, let’s find an alternative,” reflects a pragmatic approach that combines financial discipline with intellectual flexibility. Rather than becoming emotionally attached to a particular course of action, he focuses on identifying the solution that best serves the organization, its shareholders, and its long-term objectives.
Nicolas currently serves as Founder and CFO/Board Advisor of NKA Advisory Ltd., a boutique international advisory firm providing senior-level financial and strategic support to shareholders, entrepreneurs, and executive teams. Through NKA Advisory, he focuses on financial architecture, capital structuring, investment feasibility, governance, strategic growth, financial modeling, scenario analysis, and executive decision support. His advisory work demonstrates his ability to move comfortably between detailed financial analysis and high-level strategic thinking, helping decision-makers understand not simply what the numbers indicate, but what those numbers mean for capital allocation, organizational priorities, risk, and future value creation.
Alongside his advisory activities, Nicolas serves as Chief Financial Officer of Filmiki S.A., an international film production company, where he oversees broad financial leadership responsibilities within a fast-moving, project-driven environment. His role includes supporting executive leadership on funding matters, negotiations, institutional stakeholder relationships, financial planning, and strategic decision-making. His involvement in the film industry, including CFO responsibilities connected with film production businesses, has broadened his experience beyond traditional corporate finance and provided exposure to an industry where creativity, international collaboration, financing structures, production risk, and commercial execution must coexist. This experience reinforces his ability to bring financial structure and commercial clarity into environments characterized by complexity and rapidly changing demands.
Before entering his current advisory and film leadership roles, Nicolas served as Head of Finance and Accounting for a shipowning and shipmanagement company operating bulk carriers. In that capacity, he oversaw the full finance and accounting cycle across both the management company and shipowning entities while working closely with financial institutions, fund managers, lawyers, chartering professionals, shipbrokers, and insurance brokers. The position deepened an already substantial connection with the maritime sector and strengthened his understanding of asset-intensive businesses, liquidity management, commercial negotiations, counterparty relationships, and the financial dynamics that influence international shipping operations.
A defining stage in Nicolas’s executive progression was his tenure as Group CFO and COO of AST Group plc, a raw-materials trading and shipping organization listed on the Malta Stock Exchange. Combining responsibility for finance and operations placed him at the intersection of governance, financial control, commercial decision-making, purchasing, shipping activities, investment appraisal, and executive negotiations. He directed an international accounting team, oversaw statutory reporting and internal controls, and participated in negotiations involving owners, charterers, suppliers, and customers. Among his notable achievements was the renegotiation of major group agreements that generated cost reductions approaching six figures, demonstrating his ability to translate detailed financial analysis into tangible commercial results.
His work at AST Group also highlighted his interest in innovative financial structures and emerging technologies. Nicolas prepared an €8 million bond issuance utilizing a blockchain-based structure designed to reduce intermediary costs, an initiative that reflected both his technical financial capability and willingness to consider unconventional solutions when they offer legitimate commercial advantages. This combination of disciplined analysis and entrepreneurial thinking has remained a consistent feature of his career. He is comfortable operating within established governance frameworks while also questioning whether traditional structures remain the most efficient or valuable option for an organization.
Earlier in his career, Nicolas served as Financial Controller for Greece and Cyprus at FMC Corporation, a multinational agricultural sciences and chemical company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. There, he managed finance activities across reporting, commercial finance, treasury, FP&A, financial controls, audits, and internal processes while coordinating with international shared-service functions. He also participated in an extensive change-management initiative involving the transition from SAP3 to SAP4, testing and redesigning procurement, financial, and internal-control processes. This experience sharpened his ability to work within complex multinational systems while understanding how technology, process design, internal controls, and organizational behavior influence financial performance.
Nicolas’s career also includes meaningful experience within the nonprofit sector through Save the Children International, where he worked with senior management on budgeting, forecasting, financial policies, donor audits, partner financial assessments, and the authorization of funding releases. He helped supervise financial operations across eight branches in Greece and trained more than 100 colleagues in fraud awareness and fraud identification. That experience strengthened his appreciation for accountability, organizational integrity, compliance, and the responsibility finance professionals carry when managing resources entrusted to an institution for a wider social purpose. It also developed his ability to communicate complex financial and risk-related subjects to professionals outside traditional finance functions.
His professional foundation was developed in the maritime sector during several years with Ventouris Ferries, where he worked across general-ledger accounting, credit control, commercial accounting, management reporting, tonnage taxation, reconciliations, and credit-risk assessment. He introduced automated daily accounts-payable and accounts-receivable reporting and contributed to reducing long-overdue receivables from six-figure levels to four-figure levels without relying on outsourced collection agents. He also prepared weekly ferry profit-and-loss reporting and budget-versus-actual analysis, building the analytical discipline and operational understanding that would later support his progression into controller, CFO, COO, and advisory leadership positions.
Academically and professionally, Nicolas has continually invested in expanding the range of perspectives he can bring to leadership and boardroom discussions. He earned an MBA from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds academic qualifications in Accounting and Finance, while his professional credentials include membership in the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and Accountant A’ Signatory Rights through the Economic Chamber of Greece. He has also undertaken additional development in communication, negotiation, creativity, and complex problem-solving. More recently, he has pursued advanced studies in International Relations and Strategic Studies at Panteion University, extending his interests beyond corporate finance into the geopolitical, institutional, and strategic forces that increasingly shape global business.
Across his career, Nicolas has developed particular strength in CFO leadership, financial advisory, capital structuring, FP&A, treasury and liquidity management, financial reporting, investment appraisal, governance, internal controls, negotiations, SAP and ERP processes, commercial finance, business transformation, and executive decision support. His international exposure across shipping, multinational commerce, nonprofit operations, financial markets, film production, and advisory work enables him to approach challenges from multiple perspectives rather than through a purely accounting-oriented lens. Fluent in English in addition to his international professional experience, with working exposure to German and Italian, he is comfortable working across cultures, disciplines, and stakeholder groups and is open to travel in support of advisory and board responsibilities.
Nicolas is particularly interested in contributing to organizations operating within maritime industries, film and creative production, and business or strategic advisory environments, although his board philosophy is ultimately industry-agnostic. He is attracted to situations where independent thinking, financial clarity, governance discipline, and constructive challenge can improve the quality of executive decisions. For Nikolas, board service is not simply an extension of financial oversight; it is an opportunity to help management teams and shareholders see problems more clearly, test assumptions more rigorously, evaluate alternatives more objectively, and align capital, people, strategy, and risk around sustainable value creation.
His approach to leadership is defined by clarity rather than complexity. Nicolas believes strong governance should protect organizations without burying them in unnecessary bureaucracy, that growth should remain ambitious without becoming disconnected from risk, and that constructive challenge must ultimately support execution rather than delay it. In board and executive environments, he seeks to be the person willing to examine what others may overlook, articulate the financial and commercial implications of a decision, and push conversations toward evidence-based conclusions. His objective is straightforward: to leave every organization he serves stronger, more resilient, more disciplined, and more valuable than he found it.
Character:
Nicolas demonstrates independence, integrity, pragmatism, and the confidence to challenge assumptions without allowing ego or emotion to interfere with sound business judgment. He approaches difficult decisions with a solutions-oriented mindset, believing that when an existing path does not make commercial or strategic sense, leadership has a responsibility to identify a better alternative.
Knowledge:
His expertise has been developed across more than 15 years in finance, accounting, treasury, governance, commercial operations, maritime businesses, multinational organizations, film production, technology-enabled finance, and strategic advisory work. His combination of ACCA qualification, advanced academic study, operational exposure, and executive finance leadership enables him to connect technical financial knowledge with the wider realities of business performance.
Strategic:
Nicolas consistently looks beyond historical results to examine assumptions, capital structures, risks, opportunities, stakeholder priorities, and the long-term consequences of executive decisions. His experience with investment appraisal, restructuring agreements, innovative financing, scenario analysis, process transformation, and board advisory work allows him to translate complex information into commercially grounded strategic choices.
Communication:
Communicating financial and strategic issues in a clear, rational, and accessible manner that enables executives, board members, employees, and non-financial stakeholders to engage confidently with important decisions. His experience presenting to leadership teams and training more than 100 professionals in fraud awareness illustrates his ability to turn technical concepts into practical messages that encourage understanding, accountability, and action.
