YP Business Profile: Christine Hewson - KPMG

A biologist by background, Ms Hewson went into the profession on initially a temporary basis following her graduation from St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

However, after 28 years in the profession, all of them with KPMG and 11 of them as partner, Ms Hewson has never looked back.

Speaking from KPMG’s offices in Leeds, she told The Yorkshire Post: “To be honest I joined for three years while I worked out what I wanted to do.

“Twenty eight years on I am still here. But every three or four years I seem to do something different, so challenge-wise it has been great for me.”

Ms Hewson’s career has seen her work across the entire country, the majority of which has been across the north,

For the last seven years she has had a pan-northern role looking after tax matters but currently her principal base is Leeds.

Unlike many other senior personnel in professional services Ms Hewson did not study finance and economics.

And while science may not be the most commonly travelled pathway to the profession, the analytical and experimental approach she became steeped in at university prepared her for a career which would see her continually innovate ways to prepare her clients for future marketplace developments.

“I am a scientist by background, I always want to know why and how.

“I did not stay in science. I loved the research, I did genetic sequencing.

“I felt I needed a job that was with people all the time. That is what has kept me in it. But I do think the science has helped, I was always the kid who put their hand up and asked what was going on.

“That means we have to be really close to the business and not coming in after the event.

“It has to be in real time. It has to be about taking opportunities and planning for the future. One of my clients is currently facing a significant cost-pressure on its profits.

“It is around £7-8m a year due to things that have come in around the apprenticeship levy etc. Its profits are around £30m, so if you think £7-8m walking out of the door and they are not all in yet, know it is coming over the next four years .So we are talking about whole different parts of their business that they might go into.”

The considerable economic, societal and technological changes of the last two decades has seen Ms Hewson and the teams she has led make seismic changes to the way they handle their clients, who increasingly want specialists in their chosen field.

She said: “A lot of what I do on a day-to-day basis is interacting with clients and targets helping, them see through complex tax areas and asking ‘how do we really help them make decisions?’.

“The biggest changes I have seen of late are definitely around the disruptions from automation and technology, and the opportunities that they bring, both within our business but externally too.

“In retail there have been huge changes to revenue channel to the way they go to market to what the customer demands from that, the way they organise themselves internally.

“Now they are looking at doing something completely different altogether. It has made us much more client focused. It has made the job much more interesting but equally it is challenging.

“While it is a really tough landscape, from my perspective it has been brilliant.”

The challenges of being so market-focused are born from the reality of the day-to-day financial services in the UK.

The amount of business Ms Hewson’s team does on a recurring basis is around 18 per cent, as compared with 60 per cent not so long ago.

This environment influences the whole way her team operates,

“Everyone has got to be very market facing, they have got to love having conversations, to be curious and be interested in finding out about businesses.”

“We are much closer to business now. That is incredibly rewarding, whether it is from the individual basis or the corporate basis. The other side is what it does to our business.”

A recurring theme develops when you talk to Ms Hewson, with the subject returning time and time to team and personnel. It is a trait developed in her childhood and seems to underpin her entire career to date.

“A big passion of mine is getting everyone to be the best they can be. That really comes from my parents and background.

“I am a firm believer in what I call, very inarticulately, ‘round peg, round hole’. If we find the area that you excel in, we call it ‘be extraordinary’.

“We were one of the first firms in the north to specialise our people in quite narrow areas of tax but recognising that that was what the external environment was asking for. They need people who can go really deep into an area.”

From studying cutting edge science at one of the world’s top universities to being a leading tax expert may be an unusual route but when you see Ms Hewson’s drive to build relationships, and people, you can see why the lab coat was never going to be a viable option.

And, when she spots a young person who constantly has his or her hand up looking for answers she knows where to steer them.

“We are incredibly proud of them, they’re just brilliant. It is part of the reason that I never left KPMG and people who come and join us say we are very collaborative, a big team effort, because we are allowing people to be themselves.”