There are moments in corporate life when the hardest thing to do is nothing.
Five years before Vodafone sold its stake in Verizon Wireless for $130bn, Andy Halford (Industrial Economics, 1980) and his colleagues were under pressure to sell it for far less. Vodafone held 45 per cent of the US mobile operator, a stake it had bought for about $30bn, and investors were pushing for an exit at a valuation many believed to be fair. Halford, then Group Chief Financial Officer, thought otherwise.
“There was a lot of investor pressure to sell the stake,” he recalls. “We resisted that pressure. We said: no, we think there is a lot of upside in value. Most people probably thought the stake was worth about 45, maybe $50 billion max. A few years later, we sold it for 130 billion. That, for me, was vindication.”
The Verizon sale became the third-highest value deal in corporate history: Vodafone returned two thirds of the proceeds to shareholders in what remains the biggest share buyback in UK corporate history, while the gain on the sale exceeded the company’s entire annual turnover.
The deal was so large that converting the dollar proceeds into sterling risked moving the exchange rate itself. Halford found himself having to work with the UK Treasury to manage the settlement so it did not distort the currency market. “That is not something most CFOs have to deal with,” he notes drily.
Halford graduated from Nottingham in 1980 and credits the practicality of Industrial Economics with helping set him on that path. “There were a lot of courses at other universities that seemed a bit more theoretical, a bit less practical,” he says. “Industrial Economics encouraged a breadth of thinking, rather than just specificity. For a lot of business roles subsequently, that has put me in very good stead.”
Across nearly a decade of “supernormal growth” at the telecom giant, Andy’s role stretched well beyond financial control and reporting: into investment assessment, acquisitions, fundraising and, critically, investor communication.
The modern CFO, as he describes it, is no longer simply the person responsible for balancing the books. The job has become more strategic, more public, and more dependent on the ability to hold a line under pressure while taking others with you.
“Being numerate is helpful,” he says, “but increasingly it’s about being a clear thinker and a clear communicator - somebody who can cut through complexity and simplify it.” Emotional intelligence is increasingly vital, too. “EQ is every bit as important as IQ. Not everybody likes to be influenced quite the same way.”
If Vodafone was a story of growth, Standard Chartered was something else entirely. Halford had left Vodafone on a high and was not initially looking for a move into banking.
"The only thing I said to headhunters was: do not approach me about any business that has got the letters B-A-N-K in them, because financial services is not my background," he says.
Ultimately, Standard Chartered appealed because it was international, UK-based and complementary to the geographies Vodafone had covered. It was also thought, at the time, to be in reasonably good shape following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. "My first nine months there were proving exactly the opposite."
Within a year there was a clearout of management. Within eighteen months, a $5bn emergency rights issue and the bank's first annual loss in 26 years. Much of the next eight years was spent rebuilding the institution - and, just as urgently, rebuilding its credibility with the people watching from outside.
At Vodafone, Halford had learned that external scrutiny ebbs and flows with performance. "When things are going well, the level of intervention and interest from third parties tends to be a bit lower," he says. "When things are not going so well, that level of scrutiny can rise very, very quickly."