Paul Durno

Paul is a highly commercial Finance Director who builds partnerships with business leaders, and helps to drive business growth and profitability. He thrives on helping businesses to solve and work through their challenges in a financially sound and disciplined manner.

With over 25 years experience as a Finance Director, Paul has a proven track record in the design, implementation and execution of business strategy. Paul is a team player, reliable and detailed, enjoying business analytics and has significant people management experience.

Paul enjoyed over 20 years in global investment banking, managing various functions in his career from Financial Planning and Analysis, Corporate Access, Commission Management and most recently Client Strategy and Business Analytics.

He is flexible, methodical, execution orientated, focused on tangible commercial outcomes and disciplined in his approach and adherence to best practices.

Over the course of his career, he has extensive experience in:

• Business Growth: The design and production of high quality and detailed management information. This is complimented with regular meetings with business leads, clearly defined measurable goals, and disciplined follow up to action points, to help business areas achieve growth ambitions, some over 300% in 2 years.
• Business Planning: Implementation of targets and goals for annual business plans and growth initiatives, with ongoing targeted review and assessment.
• New Business Set Up: Successfully led a significant change management project, driven by a regulatory landscape change (MiFID II) including the implementation of an effective new operating model, systems, processes, controls and best practices.
• Business Management: COO for a significant business, with overall responsibility for Management Reporting, Finance, Marketing, Operations, Tax, Legal, Credit Control, Compliance & Risk.
• Business Analytics: Analysis and review of individual client revenue and resources at a holistic client level, fostering the mantra of cross product selling, led to the continuous optimisation of market share and ongoing resource re-alignment.
• Working Capital Management: Implementation of effective and practical credit control measures in a new business.
• People Management & Development: Active management of a team of specialists in London and India, responsible for training, personal development, coaching, supervision, daily team meetings, individual one to ones, mid-year and year end appraisals. Active participation in graduate recruitment.
• Relationship Management: Maintained strong and effective relationships with CEOs, CFOs and COOs, business leaders, tax experts, lawyers, risk & compliance.
• Mentoring: Paul mentors several colleagues, coaching and acting as a trusted sounding board to them in current and now roles, and guiding them successfully through promotions.
• Business Opportunities: The collection and consolidation of all client financial information, both internal and using external benchmarking surveys, to fully assess the client opportunity.

Paul qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Baker Tilly 25 years ago and was immediately seconded to the Royal Bank of Scotland as the internal finance expert accountant in the London Specialised Lending Services Division.

BACKGROUND

In the wake of complex regulatory changes in the banking industry, Paul took on the task of implementing a new operating model that would transform the way the business worked, yet enable it to continue functioning effectively and profitably.

At the same time, Paul needed to ensure that well-established relationships with over 600 clients were protected through significant contractual and pricing changes, and that those clients could continue to expect and receive at least the services and service levels they had benefited from before.

This was no ordinary change management exercise….