Chief Operating Officer candidate in Harrogate, England, United Kingdom

Summary

Innovative, commercially-minded transformational Leader with a track record of success across Banking and Finance, Government Funded Organizations, and the Military. My Masters in Business Administration and military background provide a foundation for dynamic, strategic thinking that disrupts norms and drives growth, efficiency, and cultural change. I have led large, dispersed Operations, Marketing and Change teams of 300+ across multiple countries, delivering impressive results through innovative, focused, and passionate leadership. I have a knack for creating and leading transformative change.

I excel in strategy and commercial development, leveraging people, processes, data, and technology to improve organisational performance. Described as a thought leader, I have won multi-million pound B2B commercial deals and have a strong track record in delivering significant business change, leading merger integrations, deploying Agile an Six Sigma programs, as well as delivering significant cost reduction strategies, with multi £m P&L responsibilities.

Communication and stakeholder management is a core strength, as I excel in developing and maintaining cross-functional and global networks to drive successful outcomes.

I am passionate about learning and being positively disruptive on group think, existing process, controls and ways of working I will be one to challenge, try new things and be happily different. As a leader, I value open communication and have a talent for building strong teams. I have led large dispersed teams, multiple £m projects and programs across multiple sites I really proud of increasing employee engagement from 77% to 93% in Operations (>300 FTE).

My passion for customers, colleagues, innovation, and ethical impact drives me to make a difference every-day.
I give back by in a voluntary capacity by being a Chair of School Governors, NED at Leeds Credit Union (helping those that really need it) and I have also guest lectured at Loughborough University for the Building Society MBA course on Strategic Operations Management. I am also an FCA approved person in the new Senior Managers Regime.

Key Achievements
Organisational Transformation Created, championed and led the transformation of Skipton (over 1,500 colleagues) into an Agile organisation; Skipton is now Product Value Stream led with Product Owners, Product Hubs with colleague and customer alignment, this has resulted in 70% improvement in customer value deployment and significant increase speed of change as well as colleague and customer satisfaction. I also championed and led the implementation of a Six Sigma process improvement approach resulting in over 300 colleagues being trained and improving processes resulting in a >200% increase in productivity. I also introduced and implemented organisational capacity increases by introducing Robotics, E2E Digital workflow Capacity Management and Digital signature capability.
Mortgage Transformation Created and lead the Mortgage Strategy programme. The Vision was to create day 1 offers for Mortgage customers and Brokers, reducing from 14 day turn around Created the ability to deliver instant offers through use of data, new technology, reviewing and adjusting risk appetite, removal on non value processes and controls and the inclusion of digital signature capability as well as real time Hunter (Fraud data), instant income verification via partners all resulting in ability to provide instant answers and winning best Mortgage Lender technology in the UK in 2022.
Savings Transformation Created and led the new Saving approach to enable Ease, Empathy and Expertise; resulting in customer experiences powered by a modern digital architecture, connected data and harmonized with human expertise. In first 6 months multi- channel capability was launched from siloed channel led product capability enabling customers to interact anywhere, any time (massive cultural, system and process shift through an Agile approach it reduced time to implementation by more than 50%. Created the capability to onboard 150k new LISA customers in 6 months (BAU c30k)
Customer Created and led Customer Experience E2E experiences (All channels) using insights, in the moment customer reviews, customer in home interviews (over 60 hours), digital tools such as Hotjar and tracking data flow in understanding and improving the experience resulting in Top 250 customer experiences in the UK for 7 years (KPMG Nunwood) highest 7th Trust pilot score of 4.6 (highest in Banks and Building Societies UK) along winning multiple awards including best Customer Experience for a large organisation by UK Institute of Customer Services (I was also short listed as UK Customer Experience leader of the year). With a key focus on Accessibility, winning Disability Smart Award as well as sponsor of the general AccessUK launch UK wide, and internally training over 1,500 colleagues to improve access for customers.
Commercial Led Skipton Business Finance through COVID (from potential £1.4m 2020 loss to record profits in 2022, £7.4m), from £850m invoices Financed in 2019 to >£1.5bn in 2022 by changing strategy and moving from broad sector small business strategy to focus to medium and large enterprises in key growth sectors based on data, performance, and efficiency (record profits 2022. Led multiple £million commercial deals in GE and Remploy roles as well as >£3m contract negotiations (with significant savings) with 3rd party providers of technology and services.
Integrations Led 2 major business integrations of people, process and systems in Australia and the UK - £3bn and £1.2bn loan book including creation and managing data room, TUPE, data, systems, process and people migrations, along with post migration integrated services agreements and removing c25% of cost an non value add processes - End to End

Expectations

Working at a place that has a clearly defined purpose that is believable, a place where colleagues thrive. a place open to innovation, challenge and is open to investing its its long term future even if it challenges it current model and approach.