James Phillips

General Manager - Finance & Operations at Mitsubishi Corporation Finance

Since January 2017, as General Manager, James has been responsible for the Finance, Operations and all other back office and administrative functions at Mitsubishi Corporation Finance PLC (MCF), the treasury centre for Mitsubishi Corporation’s European operations and one of Europe’s leading issuers of corporate paper and the winner of Capital Markets Daily Corporate Issuer of the year for both 2018 and 2019.

Over the past three years, James has been leading the digitization of internal back office processes and are now, with a new CEO at the helm are embarking on a wholesale digital transformation across the treasury business.

Before joining MCF James has extensive experience in the banking industry. Starting his CIMA journey as a Trainee Accountant at NatWest Bank’s IT Division in 1996 he moved to a treasury focused role at The Bank of New York (Europe) in 1999. It was at the Bank of New York that James was tasked with, what with hindsight, could be called his first digitized initiative. Reduce the reporting time and reduce the errors for daily by automating Daily P&L reporting.

In 2005 James was appointed Head of Management Accounting at Scandinaviska Enskilda Banken’s (SEB) London branch and shortly after became Head of Finance for both the Paris and London branches. A number of international positions followed including time in Stockholm, implementing SEB’s Accelerated Close initiatives and Senior Adviser to the CFO of SEB Denmark where James was integral part of the Finance Transformation team tasked with near-shoring of the finance function to SEB’s Shared Service Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. Before leaving SEB for MCF in 2017 James was appointed Finance Delivery Manager, where sharing his time between Stockholm, Copenhagen, London and Vilnius, he was responsible for the managing the delivery of the near-shored finance functions that had been recently transferred.