Background
RSM UK is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading audit, tax and consulting firms, operating from 29 offices across the region with its largest UK presence spanning London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. The firm’s service portfolio covers financial advisory, risk advisory, technology consulting, management consulting, transaction services, technical accounting consulting and wealth management.
Over the past five years, RSM UK has been undergoing a sustained digital and technology transformation alongside continued strong business growth, with expanding demand from clients for technology-enabled solutions that complement the firm’s traditional advisory offering.
The challenge
Professional services remains an industry built on people and relationships, but technology is increasingly a defining differentiator, both in how firms drive internal efficiency and in how they engage with clients. For RSM UK, the next stage of that shift would be defined by a step-change in the underlying infrastructure, cyber posture and vendor landscape, alongside a broader ambition to rethink the client engagement model itself, moving from a purely time-and-materials approach toward an experts-plus-technology-solutions offering where it best served client outcomes.
With Chris Knowles, who had been leading the technology function, moving into a Chief Digital Officer remit, RSM UK sought a new Chief Information Officer to lead the next iteration of transformation across both internal systems and client-facing enablement. The scope encompassed a new five-year infrastructure plan, continuous improvement in cyber posture and maturity, a full review of the existing vendor landscape, and close alignment between the IT roadmap and the firm’s fast-moving digital strategy.
The ideal profile combined deep commercial understanding of professional services with genuine technical vision, ideally with prior experience in a client-facing advisory or consulting role that gave first-hand insight into the pain points billable staff and their clients experience. The appointment also required strong stakeholder management credentials, given the CIO would work in close partnership with internal leaders and the Managing Directors of all three client-servicing divisions.
Solution
La Fosse Executive segmented the market and focused on mid to large-scale, multi-service line professional services organisations across the UK and Ireland, prioritising consulting and advisory firms while also evaluating candidates from adjacent sectors including financial services, tax, accounting and law.
Given the emphasis on a dual profile, we placed significant weight on the full career journey of each candidate rather than only their most recent role. The blended background of senior CIO credentials combined with earlier advisory or consulting experience was central to shortlist construction, ensuring the incoming leader could speak credibly to both the technology function inside the firm and the client-facing partners driving service line strategy.
Regular progress check-ins with the RSM UK leadership team proved especially valuable when the final stages of the process coincided with the December holiday period. The rapport built over the course of the search enabled the process to conclude cleanly despite busy calendars, delivering offer acceptance ahead of the year-end break.
Result
The process took 66 days from briefing to offer acceptance with RSM UK appointing Lucian Morris as Chief Information Officer, who joined the firm in July 2026. Lucian brings the blended career profile the brief called for, having spent more than a decade at Deloitte where he progressed to director level in advisory, before moving client-side as Chief Information Officer at Metro Bank and then spending more than six years as Chief Information Officer at Mortgage Advice Bureau. In both CIO roles, he led comparable transformations focused on using technology to deepen and lengthen client relationships.
Lucian’s mandate is to help RSM UK evolve from a firm defined by the calibre of its people to one defined by the calibre of its people and the technology behind them. The focus spans platform engineering that builds real capability at pace rather than bolt-on point solutions, trusted and well-governed data as the foundation the rest of the strategy depends on, responsible AI woven into daily practice to multiply what the firm’s people can deliver, and modern, secure and resilient workplace technology built for a highly mobile, client-facing workforce.
