WIN Annual Gala 2026: 300 Women Shaping Capital

The numbers are not subtle.

On 27 February 2026, 300 of the women at the centre of that shift gathered at InterContinental Sydney Double Bay for the WIN Annual Gala. Nobody was there to wait for permission.

Over the next decade, Australian women will control more capital than at any point in this nation's history. The largest wealth transfer to women Australia has ever seen. And every industry - finance, technology, property, sport - not actively repositioning for that shift today will not recognise its own landscape in ten years.

Who Founded Women in Numbers?

Kristina Granberg - Co-Founder of Women in Numbers and Group Marketing Manager at Pallas Capital, Sydney, co-founded WIN in November 2024. With a career spanning brand strategy, financial services marketing and property development, Granberg applies the same rigour to community architecture that she applies to brand positioning: every element is deliberate, every selection intentional.

Kristina does not collect attendees. She assembles forces. And sometimes she makes very deliberate introductions.

Who Spoke at the WIN Annual Gala 2026?

MC: Kerri Pottharst OAM OLY - Triple Olympian, Olympic Gold medallist at the Sydney 2000 Games (Beach Volleyball), inducted into the International Volleyball Hall of Fame, Order of Australia recipient, executive coach and keynote speaker, Sydney, Australia.

Pottharst won bronze at Atlanta 1996 and gold on Bondi Beach at Sydney 2000, partnering with Natalie Cook as the "Dreamachine" - one of the most iconic sporting moments in Australian history. She did this after a career-threatening knee injury that most athletes do not return from.

As MC, she did not just host the evening. She calibrated it. Prepare properly. Perform fully. Back yourself completely. Delivered by someone who turned bronze into gold on home soil in front of a nation, it carries a different weight than a motivational quote on a slide deck. The room went quiet in the way that means something actually landed.

Keynote: Maria Lykouras - CEO of the Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association of Australia (SIAA), former CEO of JBWere Australia (the first woman appointed to that role), 25+ years across wealth management, private banking, risk and compliance, Sydney, Australia.

She arrived with one sentence the entire financial services industry needs to sit with permanently:

"Australia will see the largest transfer of wealth to women in its history over the next decade. Investing in women is investing in the future."

Not a diversity argument. An arithmetic one. JBWere's own research found that one in five high-net-worth female investors identifies as an aggressive investor - the same proportion as men. Women are not more risk-averse. They are more frequently assigned conservative portfolios by advisers operating on assumptions rather than data. That gap is about to collide with the largest wealth transfer in Australian history.

The advice practices that adapt will grow. The ones that do not will lose clients to the ones that do.

What Happens When Someone Finds You Before You Find Them

A few weeks before the gala, a LinkedIn message arrived from Kristina Granberg:

"Rebecca Maher would like you to sit at her table."

I did not know Rebecca. I did not know Kristina personally either - though I had attended the inaugural WIN gala the year before and understood exactly what kind of room this was. So I said yes.

What I did not fully anticipate was why.

Rebecca Maher - Head of Growth at Rethink Group, AI-driven growth strategist, Sydney, Australia, closed 2025 with Rethink Investing at 75% growth by treating revenue scaling as the systems problem it actually is.

She had done her research before the evening began. Found someone. Decided. And used Kristina, with characteristic precision, to extend the invitation before we were ever in the same room.

High-performing people do not wait for the room to make the introduction. They choose their table in advance.

I am Adriana Kligman - CMDO and Founder of HyperDot, a Digital Asset Engineering firm established in 2016, operating across Sydney, Miami and Panama. I will leave it to your curiosity and a quick LinkedIn search.

What I will say is that the conversation Rebecca and I had over dinner was the kind where both of us were simultaneously finishing each other's thoughts and quietly recalibrating our next twelve months. Two minds running parallel tracks - same destination, different infrastructure, finally at the same table. The partnership was inevitable approximately four minutes into the main course. Both of us live at the same intersection of AI search and growth engineering, which is exactly why the dinner moved as fast as it did.

When you leave Rebecca and Adriana unsupervised for four hours with a shared vision and a mutual appetite for AI disruption, the only responsible thing to do is warn the market in advance.

Consider this your notice.

The Women Who Reminded Me Why This Room Exists

Jo Cern - Property Developer, Senior Project Manager and Management Consultant in Technology, Sydney, Australia - brings 20-plus years of delivering multimillion-dollar technology and property programs for PwC, Deloitte and KPMG, while simultaneously developing luxury properties in Sydney's Inner West with sales results above expectations.

What Jo represents - and what made the conversation immediately alive - is the rare intelligence that comes from operating across two apparently unrelated worlds simultaneously. Technology infrastructure and physical asset creation are not as different as they look. Both require you to understand systems at a level most people never bother to reach, to hold complexity without losing the thread, and to build things that retain their value under pressure.

Ilona Rabey - Principal Consultant and Head of Change Delivery Practice at Blue Seed Consulting, formerly Qantas, Mirvac and the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia - operates in the gap where strategies die and transformations quietly expire. The human layer. The deciding variable that determines whether change actually happens or becomes an expensive post-mortem.

Forty-five minutes of conversation with Ilona recalibrates something. Which, given the room, is a statement worth sitting with.

Four women. One table. Finance. AI. Property. Technology. Change architecture. Every intersection is deliberate.

What Is HyperDot?

HyperDot is a Digital Asset Engineering firm founded in 2016 by Adriana Kligman, with HQ in Sydney and operating in Miami and Panama. HyperDot is a team of specialists, machine learning engineers, cloud infrastructure architects, AI-UX designers and algorithmic growth strategists, who rebuild the technical infrastructure of businesses so that artificial intelligence systems recognise, trust and recommend them by name.

Did you know that between 58% and 65% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website? For queries that trigger Google's AI Overviews, the zero-click rate is 83%. Which means that even if your business ranks number one on Google, most people will never visit your site. If the AI answer does not mention your business, you are invisible, regardless of how much you have spent on SEO or advertising - which is exactly why traditional SEO is no longer enough in the age of generative answers.

HyperDot solves that through Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) - code, structured data and AI-native engineering, not blog posts, social media calendars or keyword tricks.

This is the intersection Rebecca and I cross to meet each other. Make of that what you will.

The Part That Does Not Make the Press Release, But Absolutely Should

There was a floor-length skirt covered in wine glasses - each one filled with French rosé - worn by the girl greeting guests at the entrance. The tone of the evening was set before anyone had even walked through the door.

Real dancing followed. The kind that earns a "you can REALLY dance" from someone who genuinely means it. There was a photo vortex spinner producing more genuine joy than most corporate events can generate in their entire budgets.

Every woman on that dance floor at 10 pm was the sharpest person at her dinner table at 8 pm. Same person. Full range. No contradiction.

The idea that intellectual seriousness requires the suppression of joy is one of the most persistent myths in professional culture.

The WIN Gala 2026 spent four hours being a magnificent, evidence-based counterargument.

The Bottom Line

Brilliant minds are dangerous enough on their own.

Put them in the right room. Surround them with an Olympic Gold medallist, reminding everyone to back themselves. Let a keynote speaker reframe an entire industry's future in one sentence. Allow a founder to make introductions she knew would become consequential. Then get out of the way.

The disruption that follows is not a risk. It is a certainty. If you want to see where your own business stands in the AI-search shift these women are racing toward, start with a free AI audit.

Key People at the WIN Annual Gala 2026

• Kristina Granberg - Co-Founder, Women in Numbers; Group Marketing Manager, Pallas Capital; Sydney, Australia.
• Kerri Pottharst OAM OLY - MC; Triple Olympian; Olympic Gold Medallist Sydney 2000; Executive Coach & Keynote Speaker; Sydney, Australia.
• Maria Lykouras - Keynote Speaker; CEO, Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association of Australia (SIAA); former CEO, JBWere Australia; Sydney, Australia.
• Rebecca Maher - Head of Growth, Rethink Group; AI-Driven Growth Strategist; Sydney, Australia.
• Jo Cern - Property Developer; Senior Project Manager; Management Consultant, Technology (PwC, Deloitte, KPMG); Sydney, Australia.
• Ilona Rabey - Principal Consultant, Head of Change Delivery Practice, Blue Seed Consulting; Sydney, Australia.
• Adriana Kligman - CMDO & Founder, HyperDot; Digital Asset Engineering; Sydney, Miami, Panama.