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

Setting out how she will make the finance function a leading facilitator in Cowdery’s big idea gets her going. Eyes light up, arms uncross and start to gesticulate. “Where it gets really exciting is when the next acquisition comes along because that will require analysis, evaluation of how the companies fit together, putting together detailed plans on how you might integrate things and at what pace you integrate ­- if you do integrate,” she says.

Make it happen
While she won’t comment on rumours that Resolution is preparing a New Year approach to Lloyds Banking Group-owned Clerical Medical, Bourke says that Cowdery’s Guernsey-domiciled business is “keen to make at least one thing happen in 2010.” And she is ready for it. “The most exciting part of the role is really driving the business performance, identifying where there might be synergies, market opportunities or opportunities to do deals that increase new business. It’s understanding what profitability you can deliver from this business, how you can improve it, identifying ways you can make the balance sheet work better for the company and the shareholders,” she says. “It’s at that strategic front-end where you can really measure how much you’re actually adding to the bottom line and driving the value through the balance sheet.”

Clearly not a showy person, perhaps reserved in the manner you might expect from an actuary, it is hard to picture Bourke defending her opinion against the force of Cowdery’s personality until you see the depth of experience on her CV. She is now on her third CFO or FD job, having been made group FD at St James’s Place insurance spin-off, Nascent, in 2001 - before becoming COO – and she was promoted into the CFO role at Standard Life Financial Services from serving as group actuarial director. Switching to a mini-career in board-level financial services consulting before joining Chase de Vere Financial Services as managing director in 2004 shows an entrepreneurial flair that many FDs may lack, while having joined Standard Life in 2005 as group strategy and planning director gives her the breadth of grown up, non-financial management experience that will bear fruit in her current role. Formative years at Tillinghast Towers Perrin, where she became a principal and spent a lot of time covering M&A deals, are also useful.

“I was often at the table when those transactions were being conceived and negotiated and was often closely involved in the due diligence,” she says. “But I didn’t have that much direct involvement with the post-merger integration stuff, the real heavy lifting about how to combine organisations.”

Final frontier
That will happen at Friends. Her ambition is to re-list the enlarged Friends as its chief executive.
“I hanker after a CEO role and certainly want to be a candidate for it,” Bourke admits. “It’s where you get the maximum opportunity to shape things. You’re in the driving seat. It’s also clearly the highest risk [role] because you are even more in the firing line than the CFO,” she admits. “That’s something that’s still an unfulfilled desire. It would be very rewarding having been part of Friends’ de-listing to take it back to the market a stronger and more formidable player, to see it through.”

It’s a fairly safe bet that Resolution will look to pull off a big move in 2010, so Aviva, Legal & General, Old Mutual, the Prudential and Standard Life will be watching their backs. Standard Life, in particular, may be feeling vulnerable since Friends’ CEO Matthews was CEO of its principal operating business until mid-2008 while Bourke was its UK financial services CFO until her resignation last November; the pair worked very closely together. She has worked equally closely with Standard Life’s CEO-designate, CFO David Nish and as Resolution plc was almost gobbled by it three years ago, Cowdery knows it well. Friends’ board also has first-hand inside knowledge of Legal & General by way of independent director Robin Phipps’ time as an executive director there.

Interestingly, all six of these companies installed new FDs or CFOs in the past year, with the new hires mostly coming from those same six companies. Bourke’s appointment came at the same time the Pru’s FD Philip Broadley departed for Old Mutual, while Norwich Union’s Nic Nicandrou took over at the Pru this October as Willis CFO Patrick Regan joined Aviva. David Nish’s deputy CFO Jackie Hunt was made interim group CFO at Standard Life in November.

Bourke says the Friends job came to her through a headhunter but doesn’t deny that knowing the new CEO smoothed the course. “Obviously things started to move when Trevor resigned from Standard Life, but it didn’t at that point necessarily present itself that I would be approached about the CFO job,” she reveals. “When I was approached that autumn, I was immediately very interested. Having been FD of the biggest operating entity in Standard Life -­ if you measure it in balance sheet terms, it was probably 70% of the group -­ and worked extremely closely with two group CFOs, I felt I was ready for that plc CFO role. I felt I would like that number two job and Trevor provided that opportunity. I really wasn’t going to say no.”

Friends reunited
In fact, her arrival at Friends is something of a reunion. Matthews aside, Bourke is a long-time associate of Cowdery having met him while he was still at Scottish Amicable. She and Resolution’s Maidens worked together while both principals at actuarial firm Tillinghast in the 1990s.
“I know Clive going way back. He is a larger than life, extremely colourful, extremely energetic, extremely dynamic character ­ what he did at Resolution plc was amazing. You can’t take that away from him,” she says of the controversy around his views on corporate governance. “He’s a character that’s easy to paint in terms that make him jump off the page, but that is the guy.”

She may also empathise with Cowdery, Tiner and Maidens by way of questions over their professional reputations. Tiner has come under fire following the report into the FSA’s handling of Northern Rock’s demise while he was head of the regulator. An FSA investigation this March looked into ‘certain actions’ it said Cowdery, Maidens and Newman had undertaken between October 2007 and May 2008 pertaining to Resolution plc’s takeover by Pearl. It did not disclose what the actions were, but concluded the investigation this summer with no action taken. Resolution’s acquisition of Friends was then cleared by the regulator.

Bourke has had some mud flung her way, too. Amid speculation over who might take up Sandy Crombie’s seat at Standard Life, there were suggestions that she had somehow failed to spot the “serious monitoring and record-keeping inadequacies” the FSA fined St James’s Place £250,000 for in 2003, two months after she a role as a consultant to company’s the chairman and CEO.

A £1.1m fine imposed by the regulator on AWD Chase De Vere in 2008 for “serious failings in its pension transfer, pension annuity and income withdrawal business that resulted in mis-selling” between February 2006 and October 2007 threatened her otherwise good reputation. Even though the time period in question was two years after her departure, things like that can be damaging in an age of heightened reputational risk.

You could argue that experience of managing trickier situations creates the kind of vibrant leadership one would hope to see in a post-crunch environment. Bourke’s record treads a lot of interesting ground, from her early professional years at Bank of Ireland to the unpleasantness in winding a business up when market forces turn against it – as they did for Nascent in 2002. “I went in as the third or fourth employee [at a Bank of Ireland initiative] when it was basically the CEO, myself and an application for a license for authorisation. ­Within two years, there was a company with 10% market share and 300 employees,” she recalls. But in Nascent’s wind-down, Bourke found an opportunity to learn some tough lessons. “It’s extremely revealing. It really asks a lot of people, their commitment and willingness to see something through the nasty phase of tidying up,” she reveals. “You realise there are all these things that crawl out of the woodwork, which you feel if you’d known about upfront, you’d never have left it happen -­ contracts which look fairly benign in a going concern situation often have all these clauses which kick in and start to be critically punitive in a wind-down situation. I think it’s a situation where character really shows through.”

Of Standard Life Bank, under her remit when she was CFO of the UK financial services business and recently sold to Barclays, she says: “A really nice business, but it was a huge struggle to get the volumes needed to make it deliver an acceptable return for shareholders. I think Standard Life has done the right thing. ­ It’s a good exit.”

The CFO job remains her day-to-day responsibility among all the excitement and the headlines. But talking about the relationship between herself and Matthews,­ both actuaries,­ it’s clear that the lines between their roles are very blurred - especially as someone of her experience would be wasted boxed into the chief beancounter job.

“Trevor has a greater reach operationally than I would have and probably more regular interaction with the sales guys and the folk driving different parts of the business on a day-to-day basis.

Ultimately, he leads the strategy discussion at board level and I complement him by being able to articulate the financial consequences. But both strategy and the financial consequences of strategy are something we’re both very engaged in,” she explains.

“It’s not a black and white separation. More of a continuum,” she quips. “Two sides of the same coin.”