Leadership spotlight: Director of Finance Operations


In this series we will hear from the Senior Leadership Team at Three about the latest activity across the company and a little about the people behind the projects.

Vital stats

  • Name: Angela Gearing
  • Job title:             Director of Finance Operations
  • Function:             Finance
  • Tenure: 3 years, 5 months

Tell us a bit about your background

Having decided not to pursue a career in sport, I took a very different route and started working in a European finance role for a pharmaceutical company whilst studying for CIMA. I now have over 20 years of financial, commercial and operational experience including global leadership of teams >100 FTE, commercial contract negotiations, pricing, mergers and acquisitions, transformation, strategy, continuous improvement, P&L, budgetary control, and more. Throughout this time, I have been driven by two factors:

  • a passion for improving efficiency and effectiveness;
  • understanding how I can lead and develop a trusted and motivated team to deliver exceptional outcomes.

When I was approached by Three for this role, I could see how the two combined and I haven’t looked back!

In a nutshell, describe your role and how it supports Three’s objectives

We’re a large team of over 130 people, covering a variety of departments: fraud risk, commissions, payments, credit risk, credit operations, collections and commercial optimisation. As a support function, SMEs collaborate with many other teams across the organisation and telco industry and work hard to understand the customer, their journey, the economy, our competition, and then balance our decisions and recommendations with delivering margin and customer growth.

We recently reported our financial results for the first half of the year. What is Three UK’s success attributed to?

 

Firstly, I would always say our success is attributed to our people – I am proud to work with many dedicated and extremely intelligent people who have shown particular strength and resilience throughout the challenging circumstances of the past year. Secondly, we are really pleased to be delivering growth at the top line. There has been 5% customer growth year-on-year, which comes from the multiple brand offerings we have. We should be proud of our cost management, but this needs to remain a focus area to achieve the full year position. As at the half year the EBITDA has held up against the previous year. On top of this we continue to invest in our network and IT transformation, which is setting ourselves up for future profitable growth.

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