Friends Provident CFO Evelyn Bourke on driving a pensions super-group

Photography: Anton Hammerl

Very unusually for someone at her level and with her experience, Evelyn Bourke is clearly uncomfortable posing for photos. Her stiff grimace and rod-straight posture risk giving the shots a harshness verging on unkind.

But the spotlight is precisely where Bourke has been since 11 August this year, when, four months after joining Friends Provident as CFO, the pensions group surrendered its independence in agreeing to be acquired by Clive Cowdery’s Resolution for £1.8bn. The deal finalised on 5 November and saw Friends delisted, superceded in the FTSE-100 by Resolution and reborn as its first privately-owned subsidiary, Friends Provident Holdings. Cowdery’s long-held dream of building a super-sized life and pensions giant by buying up other major players in the market has stepped on to the road to reality with the Friends acquisition. The aim in the next couple of years is to bolt some of those onto Friends -­ and exit with a very tidy profit.

Resolution’s lack of an operating business makes this one of the easier M &A transitions.

“Resolution is basically an M&A machine and doesn’t come with an existing entity which we have to be merged into, but there’s quite a bit of knitting together the corporate governance ­ making sure you have one joined-up set of delegated authorities so that on day one, people generally know what’s what and where to go,” she says.

As Resolution got its deal on the second try (the first bid in 2007 by its previous incarnation, Resolution plc, fell through when Standard Life intercepted by tabling an offer for Resolution. The deal fell through and Resolution was bought by Pearl Group in 2008 - Cowdery set up the new Resolution shortly afterwards), Friends got to be at the front of inevitable industry consolidation and Bourke landed one of the UK’s most exciting and multi-faceted finance jobs. “We get to be the platform; we get to set the model for the future,” she says.

She continues to look after a 250-strong finance team and 50 risk and compliance staff, and joined the holding company’s operating board on 5 November alongside CEO Trevor Matthews, who she followed from Standard Life where they were respectively CFO and CEO until mid-2008. But the CFO piece is merely the nucleus of a much more influential position she has acquired.

On target
As a member of Resolution’s Life Consolidation Advisory Group, she is tasked with identifying and reviewing potential acquisition targets, working out how they might fit with Friends and where the value will be in the merged entity. In that, she will work closely with the Resolution team, including Cowdery, ex-Financial Services Authority chief executive John Tiner, CFO Jim Newman and head of mergers and acquisitions Ian Maidens (who, along with the rest, are also the owners of Resolution Operations, to which the advisory group reports).

Through that, Bourke has a once in a lifetime opportunity to lead the reshaping of her industry and turn the pressures of regulation, such as the Solvency II capital adequacy directive, into opportunity for Cowdery’s club -­ while notching up priceless buy-side experience of M&A among publicly-quoted businesses for an organisation with £310m in cash to play with.