Ian Finn at the Britain's Got Talent × Tesco partnership event — delivering consumer engagement at scale for millions of Clubcard holders.

Surrey Cyber Connect - EP3: Doing AI Right
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7465425060972044288/

Upcoming Event:
I’ll be a guest at Product Econcomics’ ‘Secure by Design’ Podcast on 12.10.26, talking about data, privacy and trust topics at scale.

Further details on the event:
Event Overview: https://lnkd.in/p/ede32AgU
Registration lLink: https://luma.com/2q7i973j

Featured & recognised by:

Upcoming…

Speaking Topics

• Product Leadership at Scale

• Strategic Tech Debt

• Digital Transformation in Enterprise

• AI & Customer Experience

• Building Better Digital Products

Contributor & cited expert —
Cost to Catalyst, Change Makers, 2026

Ian Finn is a Senior Product & Transformation Executive with VP and Associate Director-level experience, operating at the scale and complexity typical of Director and CPO-level mandates — across Identity & IAM, eCommerce, platform transformation, and AI-driven personalisation. A CIM Chartered Fellow (CFCIM) and Member of the Institute of Directors (MIoD), Ian brings a rare combination of commercial grounding and senior product leadership, consistently connecting individual product decisions to macro commercial and institutional consequences across six senior leadership roles since 2008, spanning three FTSE 100 companies, three Fortune Global 500 organisations, and one major international.

Currently at Tesco PLC, Ian leads the Identity platform — a mission-critical product domain serving tens of millions of customer accounts across five markets and twelve Group subsidiaries. He defines strategy and product vision across web, app, loyalty, and in-store experiences, with responsibility across seven engineering teams and a multi-million pound annual budget secured across ten consecutive C-Suite budget cycles. He rebuilt Tesco's authentication approach using ML-based risk signals, cutting friction 35% in a single year and improving conversion across 17 million monthly shopping missions, and spearheaded the 100% in-house build of Passkeys (passwordless authentication), delivering 9x faster login for up to 6 million web users. He played a central role in two of Tesco's most significant recent Group events: the £700 million divestiture of Tesco Bank to Barclays in November 2024, and the first-ever Group-level identity integration — bringing Tesco Insurance & Money Services onto the core identity platform.

Before Tesco, Ian spent a decade as a founder and Director of Next Level Digital, delivering senior interim product leadership at Director, VP and Head of level across seven sectors, including assignments at Motorola, Sky, Barclays, Vodafone, BT, Centrica, the Department for International Trade, BEIS, and HMRC. Key engagements included leading a £30m digital transformation at Sky (sales failure rate reduced from 30% to 10%); pioneering Barclays' first-ever digital self-service insurance platform in just 16 weeks; and turning around a critical Global CRM programme ('Data Hub') for the Department for International Trade in four months — used across 110 countries by trade and diplomatic offices, trebling user satisfaction across 3,000 colleagues, and underpinning a Foreign Direct Investment pipeline of £1.3 trillion.

Ian has also held senior roles including Associate Director at Fidelity International, a Marketing Manager role at Sony Ericsson leading UK & Ireland go-to-market campaigns during a fiercely competitive period for the mobile device market, and a senior product role at O2 (Telefónica UK) with P&L ownership across £20m–£180m product segments — including a mobile proposition turnaround that took P&L margin from a £150k loss to £4.5m profit within a single year.

Ian is also the author of Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale, published June 2026, distilling a 20-year track record of product leadership into five principles for building products that survive contact with real-world complexity. He publishes original frameworks, including the Three Ps of Performant Systems, the Four Fs of Compounding Capability and the Personalisation Phases Paradigm - translating operational experience into reusable models for other leaders. He speaks regularly on identity, platform, and AI at scale — most recently at CX in Financial Services (June 2026) — because the best operators should also be able to explain what they build and how they build it — not just build it.

Ian is known as a turnaround leader — five proof points across government, banking, telecoms, and retail — and as someone who typically delivers the programmes and outcomes others said couldn't be done, recognised through 46 industry awards across his career. He energises and empowers teams, surfaces ambiguity early, and finds simplified ways forward at genuine enterprise scale.

This combination of delivery at scale, published thought leadership, and active engagement on industry stages makes Ian a compelling voice for speaking engagements, panel and podcast discussions, and media commentary on identity, platform strategy, as well as AI-era product leadership — bringing that rare credibility of someone who has built, written, and spoken about these challenges in equal measure.

£1.8bn+

Incremental Value

£700m

Tesco Bank Sale

£2.3bn

Tesco Online Sales

£1.3tn

FDI Pipeline · DIT

£150k → £4.5m

P&L Turnaround, One Year

Areas of Expertise

Passkeys (Passwordless)Identity & IAMAI & ML ProductsPlatform ProductDigital StrategyProduct StrategyGTM & Go-to-MarketeCommercePersonalisationM&A IntegrationSenior Stakeholder ManagementBuilding TeamsDigital TransformationP&L OwnershipEMEA/ GlobalAgile · Scrum · KanbanAPIs & CloudOmnichannelData & AnalyticsZero TrustCyber Security

Education & Qualifications

BA (Hons) English & American Literature, University of Warwick — First in Marketing dissertation. CIM Chartered Fellow (CFCIM), and Member of the Institute of Directors (MIoD). Product Faculty Crystal Training™ 2024 (Tesco-sponsored, #1-ranked, Google/Meta/Microsoft practitioners).

Speaking & Publications

Author — Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale, June 2026  |  Speaker — Customer Experience in Financial Services 2026 · 17–18 June · London  |  Keynote — Tesco Ignite Global Technology Conference · 5,000 colleagues live, 2024  |  Cited contributor — Cost to Catalyst, Change Makers, 2026  |  Newsletter — Product at Scale · productatscale.substack.com

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