The Huntswood Board

Craig Coffield - Chief Executive Officer

Craig joined Huntswood in 2002 as Head of Transformation where he was charged with managing the large scale transformation of new business from Huntswood's sales to delivery functions, before taking on the role of Commercial Manager; managing a team that looked after Huntswood's key strategic accounts. In 2007 Craig was appointed to the Board as Commercial Director where he was responsible for all aspects of the Group’s commercial activity, spanning all sales, marketing and proposition-led initiatives. During this period the Group’s commercial activities more than tripled in size.

In 2009, Craig became the Group’s Chief Operating Officer where he took on the additional responsibility of overseeing three business units; Customer Services, advisory and People Learning & Development, an increase in leadership responsibility of 40 FTE.

Building on this strong track record, Craig was appointed as Huntswood Chief Executive on 1 December 2011, succeeding the firm’s owner David Brownlow, with chief responsibility for setting the company’s strategic direction and entering new markets.

In addition to being CEO of Huntswood, Craig is Group COO of the Huntswood Group and a Non-Executive Director of Conduit People Management and Conduit Accounting Services.

Prior to this, Craig worked at Deloitte (CSL) managing a section of their outsourcing business to the financial services sector. Before Deloitte's, Craig worked at the Prudential, where he spent 13 years in senior roles in compliance, pensions and customer services.

Craig is married with a young family and when time permits follows most sports.
 

Matthew Bonfield - Chief Financial Officer

Appointed to the Board in 2010 as Group Finance Director, Matthew is responsible for all Group financial and legal aspects of the business. Having joined Huntswood in 2007, Matthew has previously held the positions of Head of Commercial Finance and also Group Financial Controller. In addition to his current role Matthew is also a Board member and Finance Director of Conduit People Management, an ‘umbrella’ company providing temporary staffing requirements to third party specialist recruitment agencies. Having graduated from Aston University in 2000 with a degree in finance and management, Matthew started his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers where he qualified as a chartered accountant working within the Assurance and Business Advisory Service. He subsequently moved into industry and has since gained a wealth of financial and commercial experience working within senior roles for EDS, O2 Airwave and Virgin Media prior to joining Huntswood.

Phil Fox - Director of Operations

Phil joined Huntswood in 2001 as a project manager, quickly establishing his client management credentials.  He was subsequently appointed Operations Director in 2006, with accountability for all Huntswood’s ‘customer service’ engagements, before moving to a dedicated account manager role, overseeing Huntswood’s relationship with a large multi-brand UK retail bank. Phil left Huntswood in 2007 to work for Capita, rejoining in June 2008 as a service delivery manager, before being appointed to his current role of Director of Operations.

Prior to joining Huntswood Phil spent 23 years working for Prudential. During this time he undertook a wide variety of customer services based roles, encompassing complaints, business reviews, and sales.

Phil’s wealth of knowledge and experience provides him with a detailed perspective of the company from both internally and externally, which adds real value to Huntswood’s customer service propositions. 
 

Paul Scott - Director of Advisory Services

After studying Law at Lancaster University, Paul joined the regulator where he spent 7 years involved in supervision of retail financial services firms. During his seven years with the FSA, he worked as a supervisor and retail conduct of business expert covering a broad range of retail financial services firms including IFA's, Wealth Management Firms, Life Companies and Banks. His last two years at the FSA were spent in Major Retail Groups Division supervising one of the big four banks.

After 7 years with the regulator, Paul joined KPMG's Financial Services Advisory Practice. More recently, he has held a number of senior positions within Barclays working within their Wealth, UK Retail Bank and Western European Businesses. Within the UK Retail Bank Paul was head of Sales Quality and Investigations responsible for ongoing business quality and regulatory investigations. Within the Western Europe business unit Paul was Head of Compliance Advisory covering Spain, Portugal, Italy and France working with the business and compliance teams in each country to raise compliance standards.

Paul has over 13 years regulatory experience having worked as a regulator, a consultant and at a senior level within a regulated firm.

Sara Robinson - Director of Human Resources

Sara joined Huntswood in 2002 and leads the resource planning function, which is primarily responsible for the ongoing recruitment, referencing and placement of Huntswood's associate and permanent network of financial services professionals.

Prior to joining Huntswood Sara worked as a recruitment consultant for the Michael Page group, having gained her CIPD qualification within the HR function Ryder Logistics. Sara has been involved in large scale specialised resourcing projects, for example deploying 250 resources in two weeks for one client engagement. Trained in Thomas International's PPA, Sara is an experienced competency based interviewer and assessor.

Ian Elam - Director of Recruitment Services

Ian Elam joined Huntswood in 1997 and leads the company’s temporary and interim recruitment business function. He has over 13 years experience of working within the financial services industry in a sales and business development capacity, having held positions within all four core business functions, working closely with key clients.

In his last role Ian was responsible for the set-up, sales and marketing strategy and ongoing management of Conduit People Management, an umbrella company providing temporary staffing requirements to 3rd party specialist recruitment agencies.
 

Phil Festa - Director of Learning & Development

Phil has over 20 years' experience of leading and managing learning and development programmes for major international organisations both within and outside financial services.

He specialises in helping public and private blue-chip companies redefine their sales, service and change management strategies to align their people development with their business plans. As a former change consultant and customer service and sales learning and development manager at British Airways, Phil understands the theory and how to apply it, delivering tangible returns for clients.

Phil joined Huntswood in 2007 from customer insight specialists, dunnhumby. Prior to this he was an executive director and board member at MSB, a specialist sales and customer service consultancy. Phil’s original role at Huntswood was as a consultant in the Change team. After a brief spell as an account director – selling and managing Huntswood’s range of services to blue-chip clients – he was invited to become head of learning and development. In this role Phil works with clients in identifying the learning needs of their people and then overseeing the successful delivery of training and development programmes.

Steve Mills - Director of Risk

Steve joined Huntswood in 2003 as a Programme Manager within the customer services team and has spent a number of years ensuring successful delivery of our major client engagements.

Steve has subsequently established a Business Improvement & Control function within Huntswood ensuring continuous improvement of our core operating model’s processes and systems. Since being appointed as Director of Risk in 2011, Steve is now also responsible for ensuring that robust risk management practices are effective across the business and has oversight and control of the Legal and IT functions.

During his time with Huntswood Steve has worked with most of our clients, enabled by the wealth of experience that he has in the Financial Services sector and specifically his Operational and Project Management background.

Prior to joining Huntswood Steve worked for 18 years in Customer Service and Project Management roles with the Prudential in their UK Life and Pensions Division and has also worked as a Project Manager specialising in business improvement in the Education sector.