ICAS’s top Scottish accountants under 35 in profile – Colin McLellan, CFO, Skyscanner, Edinburgh
Thirteen Scottish-based accountants have been named among ICAS’s 35 Chartered Accountants (CAs) under 35 for 2017. For 13 days Scottish Financial News, will be profiling each of the Scottish representatives. Today we profile: Colin McLellan, 34, CFO, Skyscanner, Edinburgh.
Colin graduated with a degree in accountancy from Strathclyde university and qualified as a CA and tax advisor with KPMG in 2008. Since then, Colin has worked at Scottish Power and Worldmark, before joining Skyscanner in 2013 as group financial controller. He’s recently been promoted to chief financial officer.
“I qualified as a CA and tax advisor with KPMG in 2008 and after being there four years left to work with Scottish Power as their IAS39 hedge accountant. I then moved to the role of group accountant at Worldmark, a global material science and manufacturing business in the electronics sector where I learned a great deal about managing cashflows and margins.
In 2013 I joined Skyscanner as Group Financial Controller at that stage the business had around 150 people and 3 offices.
In H2’15 I took up the post of interim CEO of Skycanner’s Japan joint venture with Yahoo! Japan which involved relocating to Tokyo. On returning to the UK in H1’16 I was promoted to Finance Director.
The three most important aspects of my development and impact in the last year have been:
1) I played a key role in the acquisition of Skyscanner by Ctrip in H2’16.
2) leading the team through Squadification of our Finance Tribe, and
3) actively participating in the strategic CxO level discussions about the evolution of our products
I have recently been promoted to the role of CFO. Skyscanner now has around 900 employees and 11 offices globally and in 2016 is estimated to have facilitated over $16bn in total transaction value.”