Lessons from a finance revolution at Mars, with Colin Moss

Colin Moss worked for more than 10 years at Mars, which produces some of the world's best-loved brands including Royal Canin, M&M’s and Snickers. In this role, he partnered with the global Finance leadership team to design to stand up the new FinTech function, strengthening the connection between Finance and IT and leading a portfolio of 40+ initiatives, establishing resource and financial management disciplines (before that he was at famed confectionary maker Cadbury). In 2025 he took the leap to set up his own business, CM Strategies working  with organisations navigating growth and complexity, helping them redesign how the finance department partners with the business and builds capability .

 

His message about the function of FP&A is resonant and powerful: “One  of the ways that I've seen it described is that your business, and  leadership team is, is the “head”, and FP&A is the “neck” because FP&A is showing that team where to look. In this context, FP&A is helping what's the context we're operating in? What's the strategy that we're executing against? And what does that mean for where we focus? What do we put our attention on? And that can be showing up in what KPIs we look at, but also what processes we need to improve.?”

 

In this episode

• Path to creation of my own business (in a “hard to leave” business)
• Early audit roles as the foundation of my career
• My early lessons about business partnership at Cadbury and Mars 
• Lessons from global finance transformation at Mars including KPI design and management reporting
• Power of judgement in FP&A 

 

Find out more about CM Strategies at  www.cmstrategies.co.uk