Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2016 Winners Edition

www.finance-monthly.com 36 Chris Blaxall CFO at Per formance Horizon About Chris Blaxall Chris is Performance Horizon’s CFO and is responsible for all finance and HR matters in addition to providing support across a range of commercial areas. Chris held a number of senior finance roles worldwide prior to joining Performance Horizon in 2014. How did your career path lead your current position? My early career followed the traditional route of qualifying as a chartered accountant by joining Touche Ross—a Big 4 practice—in London straight from Imperial College after completing a mathematics degree. I had a brief tenure at the 3i Group, where I learned many of the basics of venture capital investing, before I joined a 3i-funded company that took me out of London and up to the Newcastle area, where I am now based. This company was the Derwent Valley Food Group, which is best known for its Phileas Fogg snack foods. I ended up managing the company’s successful sale to United Biscuits a few years later. From 1997, I spent 8 years based in Sydney, Australia, where I first developed the national private equity advisory business as a Deloitte partner. I was later headhunted into a global CFO role for a software business that was headquartered locally, and this was my first real experience in a technology- led company. My work took me all over Australia, to many countries in Asia and across North and South America. My international experiences provided me with great insight into the cultural, structural and business differences in these locations. I eventually returned to the UK in 2005. After some involvement in an early stage company with some former Phileas Fogg colleagues, I moved to a global business that sold its technology-led product in more than 50 countries world-wide. As combined COO and CFO, I assisted this 75 year- old company to expand its operations across Europe, USA and into China, increase its revenue by more than 400% over 4 years and move from losses to a significant profit. I came across the Performance Horizon business in late 2013, at which time I was already involved in a different start-up of my own. However, after having helped set up processes and systems and recruited staff to manage day-to- day operations, I stepped back from day-to-day activities to become non- executive chairman. We sold this business successfully in mid-2015 to a major Publicly Limited Company. When I met Mal Cowley, CEO and Paul Fellows, COO of Performance Horizon, I was really impressed not only by their drive and enthusiasm, but Firm Profile Performance Horizon is the leading provider of SaaS solutions for digital partner marketing, enabling large enterprises to drive significant sales through their online marketing partners and affiliates. The world’s top digital content, retail, travel and financial services companies rely on Performance Horizon’s highly scalable platform to generate over $3 billion in sales across 185,000 marketing partners. The benefits include highly flexible partner management capabilities; real-time measurement of performance on the web and on mobile apps; optimization through deep analytics across multiple performance models; and settlement in over 50 currencies in 183 countries around the world. With offices in the U.S., UK, Japan and Australia, Performance Horizon is backed by top-tier investors, including Mithril, Greycroft Partners and DN Capital. We continue to see increasing demand for our product in the key verticals in our geographical markets. With companies continuing to seek greater returns on their marketing spend, we provide the perfect solution to enable them to gain greater control over this area of expenditure and optimise their activities. Better data and more sophisticated technology are shaping the marketing industry, including the partner marketing category. However, a lack of transparency into program performance coupled with outdated performance-based models and technology solutions that many advertisers continue to work with can force even the most seasoned advertisers to stagnate. Advertisers must also adapt their marketing activities to address changing consumer behavior as digital content is consumed across a wider variety of devices, and mobile in particular. While other channels have rapidly transformed to incorporate and leverage ‘big data’ (think ad exchanges, search, and display) to drive the online advertising marketplace, traditional affiliate marketing remains largely reliant on static historical performance as the core program driver to determine commissions. Advertisers who use data to optimize their partner marketing spend are increasingly migrating away from reactive data processed in Excel to proactive real-time data that allows them to escape crunching numbers and return their focus to advertising. In addition, advanced advertisers are using methodologies that help them understand how their customers use multiple devices to complete their customer journey. Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2016