My career journey has been a series of fortunate events - working with and for a number of inspiring colleagues, and being given challenges that pushed me out of my comfort zone. I started in accountancy before going into Internal Audit, which gave me a great foundation, helped me understand the need to be able to take a step back and take a strategic view as well as to pay attention to the finer detail, and the opportunity to travel.
I've worked in Financial Services for nearly nine years - I've been given great opportunities to shape brand new roles and built teams which have delivered risk and assurance programmes as well as leading on change management and projects.

My current role was new to the organisation so it has been great to shape it in collaboration with my colleagues. I manage all assurance relationships for the business so work closely with colleagues from our regional and global teams, as well as our external auditors. It's been really satisfying to see how building stronger relationships translates to more effective controls, quicker statutory reporting, and decreased issues.
I also get the opportunity to lead on key projects, which recently have focused on the ESG agenda. I've implemented new business models and income streams which have really transformed our product offering as well as supporting ESG objectives.

"AI is a great challenge as well as opportunity. There are wonderful opportunities to improve processes and increase efficiencies, freeing up time and resource for the value add side of financial services. However it is such a paradigm shift in ways of working that there is no template for how to take advantage of these emerging technologies whilst maintaining governance and control. Finance professionals also need to manage the expectation gap between what senior management believe is possible with AI, and what can be achieved in the short and longer term."

One of the biggest challenges we must all be aware of is the ever increasing sophistication of cyber-crime but also the simple vulnerabilities that often allow these attacks to succeed. The impact is enormous - for example, the estimated cost of the JLR attack to the UK economy was £1.9 billion, impacting on over 5,000 businesses in the supply chain.

In my spare time I'm a big music fan and love to see live bands - 2025 included Dropkick Murphys, Bruce Springsteen, the Stereophonics and the Pogues. I also like to get outside for walks and runs, and did the Great North Run this year (I have the Sunderland medal to prove it!).

One piece of advice I'd share with other finance professionals is don't be afraid to ask questions - there's usually someone else in the room also thinking the same thing!