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/

Featured & recognised by:

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

Executive Biography

Ian Finn is a Senior Product Leader 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 Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), Chartered Marketer, 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 FTSE 100 companies, two Fortune Global 500 organisations, and three UK government departments.

Currently at Tesco PLC, Ian leads the Identity platform — the front door to the entire Tesco ecosystem, serving tens of millions of customer accounts across five markets and eight Group subsidiaries. Under his leadership, the platform has grown by several million users, reduced unnecessary authentication challenges by 35% in a single year through ML-based risk signals, and played a central role in two of Tesco's most significant recent corporate/M&A events: the £700 million divestiture of Tesco Bank to Barclays in November 2024, and the first-ever Group-level identity integration — in the shape of Tesco Insurance & Money Services.

Before Tesco, Ian spent a decade as founder 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 120 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, 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 eighteen years of product leadership into five principles for building products that survive contact with real-world complexity. 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. 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 discussions, and media commentary on identity, platform strategy, and AI-era product leadership — bringing the rare credibility of someone who has built, written, and spoken about these challenges in equal measure.

£1.7bn+

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

Identity & IAMAI & ML ProductsPlatform ProductDigital StrategyProduct StrategyeCommercePersonalisationM&A IntegrationSenior Stakeholder ManagementDigital TransformationP&L OwnershipAgile · Scrum · KanbanAPIs & CloudOmnichannelData & AnalyticsZero TrustCyber Security

Education & Qualifications

BA (Hons) English & American Literature, University of Warwick — First in Marketing dissertation. Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), Chartered Marketer (CMkr), 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  |  Speaker — Surrey Cyber Connect · June 2026 · London  |  Keynote — Tesco Ignite Global Technology Conference · 5,000 colleagues live  |  Cited contributor — Cost to Catalyst, Change Makers, 2026  |  Newsletter — Product at Scale · productatscale.substack.com

Featured by: