Mark Moffat’s path to CEO started in a hotel kitchen, where he worked his first job at 13. By 17, he was a trained chef. By 20, he was running the place. “You don’t get more intense than that,” he said. “Working in that intensity and making prioritization, trade-off decisions in the kitchen environment, the broader hotel environment or customer service are so important.” That early immersion in service and pressure stuck with him. So did the habit of outworking expectations.
Years later, after training as a chartered accountant and spending two decades at PwC, ultimately becoming CTO for UK & EMEA consulting, Moffat joined IFS in 2022 as Chief Customer Officer. When he took over as CEO two years later, he leaned in heavily. “In my first keynote to the company following my appointment as CEO, I pledged that I would meet 100 customers in 100 days,” he said. That commitment to listen—to CEOs one day, CFOs the next—shaped his message to employees: “We’re high touch, and customer-obsessed in our nature.”
He describes IFS as “running our own race.” But Moffat’s ambitions go well beyond pacing the field. “My long-term aspirations and ambitions for IFS are for us to dominate asset and service,” he said. “I want the IFS brand to be synonymous with asset management and service management functional domains in the same way you could argue that Workday is for HCM, SAP and Oracle are for finance, and Salesforce is for CRM.”
Despite the company’s €15 billion valuation and rising market share, Moffat isn’t rushing toward a public offering. “We have a huge amount of flexibility to be entrepreneurial, to invest in the long term,” he said. That includes sustainability initiatives like appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer to the executive board immediately after taking the helm and acquiring Copperleaf Technologies to support ESG-linked capital allocation. “We want to be more relevant to our customers than just delivering dollars,” he said.
What Moffat returns to, again and again, is execution. “You’re as good as the last project you delivered,” he said. With his sights set on scaling IFS into a global category leader, there’s no margin for coasting.