Business experts hail two worthy winners

STANDARD Life's David Nish received his Financial Director of the Year Award last week, not as finance director (FD) but as chief executive, the post he took up at the start of this year.

The appointment of Nish, a chartered accountant whose career took him through professional practice, with PricewaterhouseCooper, and the energy sector before joining Standard Life.

Formerly a mutual institution, Standard Life is now a plc on the stock market, and Nish says there are more similarities than differences between it and Scottish Power, where he was formerly finance director and where he was also named FD of the Year.

He explains: "I have been able to use a lot of my experience from Scottish Power. For example, there is a lot of volatility in the energy market just as there is in the financial sector.

"Scottish Power was privatised in 1991 and Standard Life has only been in the stock market for three years; so Standard Life is still going through some of the phases that I saw at Scottish Power, for example in its financial restructuring." Standard Life actually grew its business during 2009, with net life and pension inflows of 3.2 billion, up 57 per cent on the previous year and a 25 per cent rise in third-party assets under management at Standard Life Investments. The company also increased its dividend last year.

Nish says: "A key lesson (from the financial crisis] is that we have to focus on managing the things that are under our control. Our capital has been stable, because of the steps we took previously. Now, the intention is to ramp up investment for growth."

Running Scottish Water's finance function is the "more straightforward part of the role" for Douglas Millican. Unlike its counterparts south of the Border, Scottish Water is still currently state-owned but, like them, it is overseen by a regulator which has the power to set the prices the utility is allowed to charge.

The latest round of dialogue ended last November with a settlement that, Millican says, will mean "prices for customers will fall by 5 per cent over the next five years, taking us to the second lowest level of charges in the UK."

He adds: "Your case to the regulator must be based on solid data, plus evidence and arguments to back up your case. And rightly so, since he is awarding us 6bn, after all!"

As a key board member, Millican has helped Scottish Water achieve a better-than 50 per cent improvement in performance against customer service and regulatory benchmarks over the past three years, as well as managing capital investment of 700 million over the same period to maintain and improve Scotland's water infrastructure.

He says: "It (the FD of the Year Award] is further recognition for the transformation that we've undertaken; the improvements that have been delivered and the continual quest to do even better… on the finance team we've got some great people and that makes the job so much easier."

Robert Outram is editor of CA Magazine, the journal of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland