Profile: Evelyn Bourke, CFO of Friends Provident

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 August this year, when, four months after joining Friends Provident as CFO, the pensions group agreed to be acquired by Clive Cowdery’s Resolution for £1.8bn. The deal saw Friends delisted, superceded in the FTSE 100 by Resolution and reborn as its first privately-owned subsidiary, Friends Provident Holdings.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.

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 tabled 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 she joined the holding company’s operating board on 5 November alongside CEO Trevor Matthews, who she followed from Standard Life where they were CFO and CEO respectively until mid-2008. But the CFO role is merely the nucleus of a much more influential position she has acquired.

As a member of Resolution’s Life Consolidation Advisory Group she is tasked with 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).

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.

Wide-ranging experience

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”. “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.”

This is her third CFO or FD job – she was made group FD at St Jame’s Place insurance spin-off, Nascent, in 2001, before becoming COO, and was promoted into the CFO role at Standard Life Financial Services from 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 she has 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.”

In the driving seat

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.”

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 took on a role as a consultant to the company’s 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. Joining Nascent was a career highlight, says Bourke, for the sheer learning opportunity – and for the experience of winding it up when market forces turned against it.

“You learn a huge amount from winding up a business. It’s extremely revealing. 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 let 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.”

The CFO job remains her day-to-day responsibility among all the excitement and headlines. But, talking about the relationship between herself and fellow actuary Matthews, it’s clear 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 di scussion 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.”

This is an abridged version of an article that appeared in sister publication Financial Director’s December issue

ON THE MOVE

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 and 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.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Name: Evelyn Bourke

Qualifications: Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries; MBA (Distinction)

Caree:

2009

CFO, Friends Provident Holdings (UK) Limited/Friends Provident

2005

Group strategy and planning director, Standard Life

Group actuarial director/CFO, Standard Life Financial Services 2004 Managing director, Chase de Vere Financial Services; Director, Moreda Consulting

2001

Group finance director/CFO, Nascent Life

1986

Trainee actuary, Lifetime Assurance Bank of Ireland