Julia Wilson, 3i FD interview: the outtakes

Financial Director was finally granted an audience with 3i group finance director Julia Wilson in August, fully two years after we first approached her with the idea of an interview. So much time had passed between our first call to 3i and the press office returning it with a date and time that she had gone away and started a family (twins), restructured, refinanced and repositioned the business in the interim. So we made sure we covered a lot of ground in the hour we had with her – and of course we didn’t have room for all of it in her profile. So here are the other bits we thought worth sharing with you.

On being a tax geek
I trained as a tax specialist, but I always knew I wanted to do more than that. I have always found tax interesting because it can often be about strategy; tax planning can be very much at the real board-level strategic thinking so that introduced me to a lot of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions very early on in my career. All the companies I have worked for have been active in M &A

On outsourcing talent
Infosys (through whom 3i outsources some finance back-office functions) has the ability to transition its people in and train them up in a way that, as a relatively small organisation, we don’t. And the pool of private equity experienced people is relatively small so you are always at risk from turnover – so there are significant but hidden savings that come from the ability to tap into a good group of people

On keeping up with regulatory changes
There is so much flux at the moment around regulation and the financial services industry generally, I think we just have to accept that there is more regulation in many forms coming. But I think our responsibility for all of our stakeholders is making sure that that regulation achieves what it sets out to achieve, not just turning into a bureauocratic process

On sexy buyout deals post-deleveraging 3i
My absolute responsibility is making sure our group maintains a conservative balance sheet

On how long FDs should spend on business strategy versus financial issues in an average day
About 60 percent of my time is spent on business strategy. But strategy and finance are so entwined I find it quite hard to distinguish between the two

On the risk of returning to the bad old super-deal, high leverage, overpriced days of private equity
It’s about good-quality management information, good forecasting, so making sure that we don’t drift into something and say ‘oh, how did that happen, how did we get to that position?’

For the full interview with Julia Wilson, please click here