Recruitment Awards 2015 Corporate Vision 17

Alexander Ash Consulting specialises in placing change and transformation talent within the financial services, technology and consulting sectors. Our FS Practice covers wealth, Investment, asset management, Investment banking, private banking, commercial, corporate and retail banking.

Whilst our technology practice delivers into various areas including digital, analytics, big data, BI, cloud, datacenter services, workforce management, HCM and collaboration technologies across a range of verticals. Our client list includes global banks, tier 1 consultancies and major players in the communica-tions, media, technology and legal sectors.

Our range of services includes contingent and search based recruitment as well as consultancy services. Through this consultancy practice we offer a cost effective alternative to the widely used management consultancies. Within this business model, once a specific programme of work has been scoped out by our client, we will provide either a full team of delivery consultants or ‘parachute in’ specialist individuals to spearhead change initiatives. In addition, we offer an executive search service where we define target clients and fully map the specified market to create an initial target list before discreetly approaching and qualifying individuals.

This success comes from offering a consultative approach to providing resource for our clients and the guarantee of one point of contact throughout the process. Across our FS Practice for instance we are a niche provider of cross functional (finance, risk, front office, operations, IT, compliance, HR etc), cross business change resource and because we don’t deviate away from what we know, we understand all aspects of the change and transformation space in great detail.

Additionally, our consultants are trained to a very high level while our core team have been with the organisation for many years – we are therefore able

to talk with clients throughout the functional domains about the subjects that are relevant to their area of focus. We focus on speaking with our clients about their businesses, and where their businesses need to be, not about recruitment.

My role at Alexander Ash has evolved during my tenure and over that time I discovered that I enjoy fo-cusing on improving how we work as an organisation. I now head up operational excellence and process improvement. After all, as a company that specialises in change and transformation, making sure we are at the cutting edge of the recruitment industry through continuous improvement is essential to our business model.

Our clients and candidates are central to us main-taining the hard won reputation we have built in the market. Communication, responsiveness and market knowledge are all central to our approach which we believe sets us apart from the rest of the pack. However, I would say there is one element that by far outweighs all else – our people. Alexander Ash is celebrating its 10th Year in business this year and I am proud to be part of a management team that has helped shape and drive the business; developing the operating model and growing the business not just in terms of revenue generated but more importantly, our people.

We are continuously developing both our people and the consultants that operate within a central delivery function. This enables them to work across a range of accounts and understand the end to end project lifecycle and the holistic view of clients. An example industry would be financial services, where

Best for Wealth Management Recruitment - UK

the themes of change and transformation tend to be similar across the industry so our consultants can discuss several clients’ requirements with potential candidates. Alexander Ash has never worked in silos or operated in a vertical environment. Our whole ethos revolves around cross functional, cross business, cross industry change.

We work closely with the Big 4 Consultancies in addi-tion to working with the end clients so we have a good understanding of key themes within financial services and technology. FS has been impacted by continuous regulatory challenges and compliance re-engineering over the past 12 months which are high on the priority list.

Digital is now all-encompassing. We are working with banks to digitise their customer journeys; as con-sumers we are demanding a more stream-lined and interactive customer service with mobile banking apps for personal / corporate banking, making payments and mortgage calculators. Banks are also gearing to-wards becoming more digital within the internal client community; sales / trading relationship managers / wealth managers see the benefit in joining the dots and linking their CRM / ecommerce platforms with Pricing and also Client Intelligence. We are also work-ing with strategy houses to look at future utilisation of digital solutions; one area we think has real potential is digital communication within change programmes and projects (stakeholders, sponsors, users and project teams).

Company: Alexander Ash ConsultingName: Maria VavoulasEmail: maria.vavoulas@alexanderash.comWeb Address: www.alexanderash.comAddress: The Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, London, N1 0QHTelephone: 02077045819