The Management Team

Phil Fox - Head of Customer Services

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 Head of Customer Service.

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. 

Dave West - Head of Sales

Dave embarked on a career in financial services with NatWest Bank in 1988, performing a wide variety of roles for both NatWest Mortgage Services and NatWest Life. In 1998 he became Head of Private Clients for a large IFA practice based in Swindon before joining Marsh Financial Services in 2000, where he had national responsibility for their training and competence Programme.

Dave became a contract associate with Huntswood in 2002, overseeing a number of large-scale client engagements. He joined Huntswood as a permanent employee in July 2006 and fulfilled a number of operational and relationship roles in key client accounts before moving to the Head of Sales Role in January 2010.

Ian Elam - Head of Recruitment

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.
 

Sara Boulden - Head of Resourcing

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.

Phil Festa - Head 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.

Jarrod Nicolson - Head of Consulting

Jarrod joined Huntswood in 2007 and leads the customer management and business transformation business. Prior to Huntswood Jarrod was with Xchanging from the early years through to its floatation. He has been involved in transformation programmes with blue chip organisations operating in aerospace and defence, retail, financial services, oil and gas, across a number of geographies. Recently Jarrod has been involved in large scale remediation projects for retail financial institutions. He started his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Studied in Oxford and is an Alumni of Templeton College, Oxford.