Louise Cole FCMA is a supply chain and commercial finance specialist whose career sits at the intersection of financial rigour, operational performance and strategic decision making. With over three decades of global and domestic operational experience across FMCG, pharma, engineering, utilities and low carbon technology, she has partnered with every function of the business from factory floor to executive leadership. Louise is recognised for her ability to translate complex financial insight into clear and practical guidance that enables non-finance stakeholders to make confident and commercially grounded decisions.

She has worked inside FTSE 100 global supply chains, led major finance transformation programmes and delivered high impact consulting assignments for organisations including SABMiller, GSK, Maersk, Rolls-Royce, Cadbury and Mondelez, Nando’s and Octopus. Louise has also completed two international postings in Russia and South Africa where she built finance capability from the ground up in complex and culturally diverse environments, leaving behind fully capable local teams.

As Principal Consultant at FinPar Ltd, Louise specialises in supply chain and commercial finance, FP&A, strategy analysis including reduction in working capital, and finance partnering capability development. Her work includes designing finance infrastructure for rapidly scaling businesses, mapping and improving global FP&A processes and developing strategic analysis models that help organisations understand maturity, profitability and performance, and building competency frameworks including digital capability platforms. She is known for cutting through complexity, diagnosing process issues quickly, designing solutions that work in practice and strengthening the capability of the teams she supports.

Her recent role as Financial Controller for Supply Chain at Octopus Energy Services demonstrates this impact. Louise joined at a pivotal moment in the company’s growth and designed and embedded the financial controls, reporting frameworks and inventory processes required to support a rapidly expanding low carbon technology supply chain. She rebuilt core processes such as cost of sales, implemented three-way matching, created inventory reconciliation frameworks and applied Power Query and AI tools to bring speed and accuracy to multi-system environments. She also led the business through two Deloitte year-end audits, providing the financial discipline needed in a fast-scaling organisation.

Before founding FinPar, Louise built an extensive independent consulting career that includes her own consultancy, delivering embedded interim assignments and working as an associate within established consulting practices — equally comfortable operating within existing frameworks as designing new ones. Earlier in her career she held senior roles at Cadbury Schweppes including Global Supply Chain Financial Controller and Group Operations Reporting Controller where she led global capex, working capital initiatives, value chain redesign and consolidated reporting to the Group CFO and Board.Across all roles, Louise’s focus is consistent. She enables better decisions by strengthening financial capability, improving processes and translating complex financial insight into clear and actionable guidance. Her specialisms include supply chain finance, FP&A, commercial finance, strategic profitability analysis, finance business partnering, capability building, change management, route to market modelling and working capital improvement. She brings international experience across the Americas, APAC, Africa and Europe and a track record of delivering clarity, confidence and capability in complex environments.