ACCA-qualified Finance Director with extensive experience across financial services, debt management, and regulated finance businesses. A genuine builder of finance functions — having taken on a business with no finance team in place and grown it into a fully controlled, board-ready operation. FCA Approved Person and elected Chairman of the Board, bringing real governance credibility alongside technical finance leadership.
Career built entirely within regulated financial services, with hands-on responsibility for everything from day-to-day cash management through to board-level strategic decision-making.
What makes them genuinely different:
- Elected Chairman of the Board and FCA Approved Person — rare governance-level credibility alongside the finance leadership role itself.
- Built a finance function entirely from scratch, including recruiting, training, and developing the team, and bringing all accounting services in-house — saving £100k per year in the process.
- Identified and submitted an R&D tax claim that delivered a £300k tax saving — strong technical grounding in often-overlooked specialist tax areas.
- Reduced company debtor days from 62 to 14 through new credit control processes — a significant, measurable improvement to cash performance.
- Secured a £200,000 working capital facility, working directly with external lenders to access funding to support business growth.
- Earlier in career, identified £1.5m in historical bad debt and reduced this by 70% through new financial controls — consistent track record of finding and fixing real financial risk.
- Restructured a finance department to reduce headcount by 50% whilst increasing both productivity and employee morale — a genuinely rare combination of cost discipline and people leadership.
- Full ownership of statutory accounts, external audit, and regulatory compliance across multiple FCA-regulated entities.
Best suited for: Finance Director or Financial Controller roles within regulated financial services or debt management businesses. The ideal hire for an owner or board that needs a finance leader who can build a function from the ground up, bring real governance rigour, and be trusted with full financial control of the business.
