If you’re in the UK and you order goods online, there’s a high chance your parcel will be brought to your door by Evri, one of several companies competing in the delivery market. And if it is Evri, Mark Laine-Toner FCCA, finance director – Operations, has been instrumental in getting your package to the right place at the right time, the company’s aim as it delivers over 800 million packages a year to over 220 countries and territories worldwide.
Laine-Toner has been with Evri for nearly five years, structurally re-shaping his operation finance team into a focused finance business partnering function, underpinned by strong processes, insights and robust data. Delivering insights is the critical element.
He doesn’t see himself in the traditional mould of a finance leader, though. ‘I like to think of myself as a businessman first and accountant second,’ he says. ‘It’s much more about setting and delivering strategy, analysing performance, understanding where the opportunities lie and driving performance improvement. I think that’s what I’m good at: being able to connect lots of disparate information together to be able to form strategies and change plans.’
‘I really love to drive change’
Laine-Toner got his start in accounting straight out of college at David Lloyd Leisure, an upmarket chain of gyms, where he worked on income reconciliation. Then, during an eight-year spell at Sainsbury’s, where he was the first non-graduate to join the supermarket’s graduate finance programme, completing his ACCA studies and qualifying in 2003.
Stints with other supermarket chains followed – at Asda and Co-op – and at the end of 2021, seeking experience at a private equity backed company, he made the jump to Evri. At that point the business was owned mostly by Advent International, a private equity house; in 2024, it sold the business to Apollo, another private equity house.
Apollo’s confidence in Evri looks well justified. In 2024-25, the business took £1.85bn in revenues: up 12% year on year, based on 807 million deliveries enabled by 8,800 staff and 28,000 self-employed couriers. The company booked an £80m pre-tax loss but, with the merger with DHL eCommerce UK and other investments, Evri remains in a rapid-growth phase.
Dual roles
Laine-Toner sees his role as dual function: delivering the reporting, planning, performance and insight for Evri operations; and driving change projects either within finance or across operations, leveraging his experience leading change projects at Co-op.
CV
2021
Finance director – operations, Evri
2013
Joined as senior finance business partner, rising to director of financial planning and analysis, Co-op
2008
Joined as employment costs business development manager, rising to space insight and strategy manager, Asda
2000
Joined as operational auditor, rising to financial business partner, Sainsbury’s
1998
Auditing and margin accounting: internal audit, David Lloyd Leisure
1997
Accounts assistant UK, TV3
1996
Income reconciliation clerk, David Lloyd Leisure
Where once his operations finance team of 20 was spending three to four days a week on reporting the numbers, with big issues in data quality and accuracy, this is now down to one day. Instead, the majority of the team’s time is devoted to partnering the business to improve performance. ‘Now we are data driven and can be confident in our conclusions.’
This is critical for Laine-Toner and speaks to his belief that it is his core role not just to do the analysis and reporting but also to make recommendations and deliver on them inside an organisation that demands key members of staff to add value.
‘I don’t like “steady-state”; it’s just not something that appeals to me’
When he took over the team, his purpose was to turn it into a ‘world-class’ business partnering team working at pace. This focus takes ‘relentless ambition’, says Laine-Toner: ‘If the team and I didn’t prioritise dedicated time to our change plans, we wouldn’t be here now.’
This goes to the heart of his professional identity. Laine-Toner sees his value constructed from providing the analysis but also what he calls a ‘step into accountability’. This takes the finance professional from originator and interpreter of numbers into ‘crafting’ and delivering solutions.
‘I really love to drive change,’ he adds. ‘Inherently I am a person who likes to grow and improve myself. I don’t like “steady-state”; it’s just not something that appeals to me.’
Future challenges
Laine-Toner has optimism and concerns in equal measure about AI and how it could impact finance roles. That leaves the profession with a problem it ‘hasn’t solved’: how will new finance professionals acquire the training and experience that leads to senior roles if AI does so many basic functions? And how does the profession stay relevant when AI can analyse and answer questions on performance?
But he is certain that finance professionals will be needed. Reflecting on a ‘magic triangle’ of skills, he argues that operations people and BI analysts cannot do without finance experts, who are geared to understand business and strategy.
‘If you want to be in a commercial role, you need to be curious’
They also know that a business requires ‘curiosity’ from even the most highly skilled finance professional. ‘If you want to be in a commercial role rather than a controls-based financial role, you need to be curious,’ he says. ‘If you are, you start asking the right questions, you start getting into the business, you start understanding the business.’
Challenges at Evri are many and varied – not least working with so many self-employed couriers. Getting his head around the contracts and the pay modelling was an intellectual challenge that ‘really got me hooked’, says Laine-Toner.
But he quickly becomes strategic and takes the conversation back to fundamentals. ‘The biggest challenge I have right now is how I balance my time between the two businesses [Evri and Evri Premium DHL e-Commerce UK],’ he says. ‘You have to pick carefully through that. Am I spending my time wisely? Am I investing in the right things? Where are my risks?’
He adds: ‘I have to show my continued value – Evri and I expect that.’
