CLAIRE THOMAS-JONES
United Kingdom
Summary
Strategic People Leader with 20+ years' experience in global Financial Services and Utilities, partnering Boards and Executives to deliver large-scale organisational transformation, cultural evolution, and sustained business performance. Commercially astute and outcome-driven, with a proven record of designing and executing innovative people strategies that unlock growth, build inclusive high-performing cultures, and future-proof capability.
Expert in organisational design, M&A integration, leadership and succession development , and strategic workforce planning. Recognised for influencing at Board and C-suite level , aligning talent, culture, and operating models with strategic ambition. A trusted advisor and coach to senior leaders, building leadership capability and resilience to meet the evolving needs of customers, colleagues, and shareholders.
Overview
26
26
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work history
People Partnering Director
FLUTTER ENTERTAINMENT
03.2025 - 06.2025
- Led a global operating model transformation across Product and Technology to create offshore centres of excellence, rightsize for a single tech stack, drive greater efficiency through streamlined SPOC, and create agile future-ready job families. The programme delivered a benefit of £50m.
Managing Director HR: Retail, Wealth, Personal and Private Banking
HSBC UK plc
11.2021 - 03.2025
- Partner to the GM of Retail, Wealth, Personal and Private Banking with responsibility for 15K colleagues in the UK, and 10k offshore, including HSBC, M&S Bank and First Direct.
- UK steering and board member for disability, ethnicity, supporting the achievement of the gold standard award for inclusive employers. Appointed trustee for the UK healthcare board.
- MRT and delegated SMF risk steward accountability with responsibility for managing and mitigating people risk.
- Development of a globally aligned people plan to support HSBC UK to attract, retain, a high performing workforce that is customer centric and inclusive, delivering stronger engagement scores, improved leadership capability, a more diverse succession pipeline, and a workforce transformation plan directly aligned to the bank's digital strategy and future skills needs.
- Data led approach to understand future workforce demographics, skills and technology shifts in order to drive a series of strategic workforce planning and capability test and learns to revolutionise how customers are served resulting in improved outcomes.
- Designed and executed the “Colleague of the Future” vision — equipping our workforce to thrive in a digital, customer-centric, and agile environment — while driving both cultural and commercial outcomes. 7,500+ colleagues engaged in future skills programmes, +12pt uplift in colleague confidenc e navigating change alongside a 20% capability uplift. Engagement +9pt , internal mobility up 12% , retaining critical capability and reducing external hiring.
- Improved the strength and depth of executive succession plans and talent pipelines through robust market mapping, hiring and skill development to accelerate readiness, resulting in a fully inclusive talent pipeline across all inclusion lenses from branch to boardroom.
- OD review to increase SPOC to 12 , reduce layers to 8 , remove grade on grade reporting to c2%, and 10% reduction on overall headcount through centralisation.
- Led and embedded the inclusion strategy to achieve a strategic ambition to become truly representative of the customers we serve and communities we live in, supported by a diverse culture of respect and belonging. Female representation improved by 8% at senior levels, and black heritage at senior levels tripled.
- Led a global project across multiple geographies/markets to embed a new customer service behaviour framework that drove customer obsession resulting in improved customer outcomes.
- First direct Transformation – Working with the fd CEO, to deliver a new TOM. Reduced legacy roles by 122 (7% of workforce), releasing an $8 million cost save to enable reinvestment in new technology.
Head of People – Group Customer Services
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
06.2016 - 09.2020
- Partner to the MD of Group Customer Services. Scale/complex business of 26K permanent, contingent and contractors both onshore and offshore. Servicing 250m customer contacts each year across multi channels and products.
- Designed and led the development of a divisional approach to understanding the people impacts of organisational change. Resulting in analytical insight to support MD's to agree consistent and optimised colleague treatment strategies, mitigate the loss of key skills and maximise future leadership bench strength, increase visibility of key talent, critical roles and required capabilities and improve BU and Retail succession plans by proactively unblocking critical roles resulting in a 50% improvement in talent to value alignment.
- Led the colleague proposition for the UK and offshore contact centres during the COVID19 crisis. Influencing the pay provision for permanent colleagues and contingent workers. Shaping the vetting and attestation approach for 15k key workers to work remotely from home, whilst developing an innovative social responsibility initiative to help colleagues become financially confident.
- Led the Organisational Design to integrate a number of teams to create a new Group Customer Services team to drive competitive advantage, optimise CI and transformation activity to strengthen end to end customer interactions resulting in FTE optimisation and cost reduction of 12%.
- Development of a business change plan to align Telephony, Complaints, Fraud & Disputes into a series of multi-disciplinary regional customer contact hubs enabling deduplication and driving economies of scale to reduce operating costs by £8m . Redesign of the OD to build a new target operating model to remove handoffs, increase customer first point of resolution, and maximise future workforce flexibility.
Head of People – Group Telephony
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
08.2017 - 12.2019
- Member of the Retail HR Leadership Team with accountability for all UK and offshore telephony sites c15K FTE.
- Strategic advisor on Group Telephony Strategy including UK and Offshore footprint, Remote advice, AI and colleague proposition.
- Influenced and led a wellbeing test and learn activity to introduce a free flu vaccine for colleagues that resulted in a 15% reduction in cold and flu related absence, delivered £5M cost saving and increased colleague engagement by 10 pts . This was shortlisted for two prestigious Personnel Today awards.
- Group steerco member transforming the approach to performance, embedding the move to a simpler, straightforward and more collaborative approach.
- Lead the HR integration team working on the MBNA acquisition.
- Nominated HR lead on confidential cultural challenges. Working with GIRE and Audit, reporting into the board and regulator to identify organisational thematics and recommend strategies to mitigate significant organisational exposure. 10% reduction in colleague complaints.
- Played a lead role in the redesign of the Bank's retail footprint on the high street. Shaping a colleague proposition that balanced the complex challenge of removing sales targets and replacing with customer led outcomes, alongside investment in new branch formats, technology/AI and colleague capability in an aim to redefine the human side of banking.
- Worked with the MD population to develop a new approach to the Group's talent strategy. Facilitated a series of engaging hackathon's to identify the pain points in the journey resulting in the design of a four pillared strategy: Attraction, Mobility, Blockages and Movement. Significant improvements were made, including a 33% increase in executives with a strong alignment to future capabilities, and improved overall bench strength aligned to succession requirements.
- Worked with the Retail MD's to develop the Divisional Employee Value Proposition. Re-focussing our colleague proposition to create a compelling narrative that reinforced our purpose, created unique points of differentiation and instilled pride.
- Partnered the Group Recruitment and On-boarding teams to transform the R&O journey through AI/automation, improving the candidate experience by 20 points and reducing time to hire by 25 days.
- Led the development of the homeworking people proposition for the Group, resulting in 250 contact centre FTE servicing customers in a home environment. Benefits included a 15% reduced absence and 20-point increase in engagement.
Head of People – Retail Community Banks
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2016 - 08.2017
- Proud member of the Retail HR Leadership Team with accountability for three Retail branch networks: Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland c35K FTE.
- Strategic advisor on Retail Distribution Strategy, Bank of the Future, Branch formats, flexible workforce planning and business transformation delivering cost reduction of £20M.
- HR lead on the FCA thematic review on Performance Management within the Retail environment including ensuring remedial actions and compliance, reducing grievances by 15% and speak up's by 4%.
- Active member of Wales Ambassador Executive committee representing Retail at pan Wales events, to broaden and deepen our talent pipelines.
HR Business Partner – Group Telephony
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2013 - 01.2015
Organisational Development Partner – Insurance
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2009 - 01.2013
HR Business Partner – General Insurance
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2006 - 01.2009
Head of Learning and Development
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2005 - 01.2006
Head of Learning and Development
CENTRICA
01.2003 - 01.2005
Head of Quality Assurance
CENTRICA
01.2001 - 01.2003
Graduate Programme
CENTRICA
01.1999 - 01.2001
Education
BA - English Literature
University of Swansea
Accomplishments
- Led the HSBC UK Future of Work programme – embedded hybrid as a strategic enabler, aligning culture, capability, and technology to future skills and digital disruption though 400 ‘Future-Fit Leaders' trained as change catalysts across the UK. Engagement rose by 10 points, 25% improvement in leadership capability and hybrid activation improved by 50%.
- Designed and implemented UK Strategic Workforce Plan, enabling data-led decisions on workforce shape, size, and skills investment which unlocked 25% efficiency gains in contact centres and 10% savings in support services, while redeploying branch FTE into higher-margin Premier and Wealth roles that drove revenue growth.
- Winner – Personnel Today 2023 Best Leadership Initiative.
- Led UK performance management transformation, embedding performance behaviours, routines, a new reward framework and embedding a customer-centric culture. Underperformance recovery improved by 33%, and leadership capability improved by 20%.
- Redesigned the UK/European Product and Technology operating model and organisational design to enable growth, innovation, agility and high performance, delivering a £50M benefit.
- Designed Global Wealth proposition to build a parallel strategy of internal talent acceleration and selective external capability acquisition. This enabled HSBC to grow its wealth business rapidly, strengthen the talent pipeline by 15%, and enhance P&L performance—all while embedding a high-performance, customer-centric culture.
- Designed global COO review across geographies/divisions – embedded new mass-market operating model, delivered economies of scale, and optimised capabilities. Delivered 200 FTE reduction.
- Led an inclusion strategy to shift the organization from activity-based inclusion to outcome-driven inclusion, ensuring that our colleagues felt valued, and our products and services were accessible and trusted by all customer segments. Improved diversity of inclusion pipeline by 80%, and enabled a strategic partnership with the RNID.
- Chaired attrition taskforce, cutting frontline voluntary turnover from 77% → 33%, and delivering a £5M reduction in costs.
Certification
- Coachmatch - Qualified Executive Coach
- Psychometric Practitioner - SDI, NEO & NLP qualified for executive hiring and development
- Six Sigma - Green Belt
Timeline
People Partnering Director
FLUTTER ENTERTAINMENT
03.2025 - 06.2025
Managing Director HR: Retail, Wealth, Personal and Private Banking
HSBC UK plc
11.2021 - 03.2025
Head of People – Group Telephony
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
08.2017 - 12.2019
Head of People – Group Customer Services
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
06.2016 - 09.2020
Head of People – Retail Community Banks
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2016 - 08.2017
HR Business Partner – Group Telephony
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2013 - 01.2015
Organisational Development Partner – Insurance
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2009 - 01.2013
HR Business Partner – General Insurance
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2006 - 01.2009
Head of Learning and Development
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
01.2005 - 01.2006
Head of Learning and Development
CENTRICA
01.2003 - 01.2005
Head of Quality Assurance
CENTRICA
01.2001 - 01.2003
Graduate Programme
CENTRICA
01.1999 - 01.2001
BA - English Literature
University of Swansea
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