NCC Group has appointed Guy Ellis as chief executive officer with immediate effect, promoting its own finance chief to the top job as the Manchester cybersecurity specialist completes its transformation into a pure play cyber security business. The FTSE 250 company disclosed the change on 27 October 2026, alongside a trading update indicating that adjusted earnings for the financial year just ended will come in ahead of market expectations.
Ellis succeeds Mike Maddison, who led the group for four and a half years. He was selected after a search process run by the board that considered both internal and external candidates, and no external search firm involvement was disclosed. Chairman Chris Stone said the board had concluded that Guy is the right person to lead NCC through this next chapter, and credited Maddison and the executive team with transforming the group into a focused and strategically positioned cyber security business. Andy Beaver, the group financial director, becomes interim chief financial officer.
Ellis joined NCC Group in 2021 as director of commercial finance and was promoted to chief financial officer two years later, taking a board seat at the same time. He brings more than 25 years in finance and commercial roles, much of it in retail, including spells at Asda and Specsavers. Inside NCC he has also served as interim managing director of both Escode, the software resilience business, and the UK Cyber business unit, which gives him operating experience on either side of the group's recent split.
That split is the context for the promotion. NCC Group, founded in 1999 and headquartered in Manchester, spent years as a diversified assurance provider before narrowing to cyber security consulting and managed services for a client base it puts above 15,000 worldwide. The pivot completed earlier this year with the sale of Escode to TDR Capital for a headline consideration of 275 million pounds, which produced roughly 253 million pounds of net proceeds. The board returned 185 million pounds of that to shareholders over the summer through a capital distribution. Ellis, as chief financial officer, led the financial simplification that made the disposal possible and managed the divestment itself.
The numbers he inherits are the ones he helped produce. For the year just ended, NCC expects group revenue of about 280 million pounds and adjusted EBITDA of about 36 million pounds, both of which still include eight months of Escode. The continuing cyber business is guided to about 235 million pounds of revenue, a rise of 3.7 per cent on a constant currency basis, at a record cyber gross margin of 38.4 per cent and cyber adjusted EBITDA of 16.3 million pounds. Net cash stood at about 53 million pounds at the year end, and roughly a third of a 15 million pound buyback programme had been executed.
Two things are worth drawing out. The first is that promoting a sitting chief financial officer directly into the chief executive's chair is a continuity choice rather than a change of direction, and it is a pattern that recurs when a board wants the person who executed a restructuring to run the business that came out of it. Ellis is not being asked to set a new strategy so much as to prove that the narrower one compounds, which means deepening client relationships, growing recurring managed services revenue and lifting the EBITDA margin from the high single digits toward the mid teens the company has signalled.
The second is that the market reaction was muted rather than enthusiastic. The shares eased about 1.3 per cent on the announcement, after a strong run in the preceding days, which is a reminder that an earnings beat delivered alongside a chief executive transition tends to be read as two separate pieces of information. The appointment leaves the finance seat open on an interim basis, and how quickly that is filled on a permanent footing will say something about how settled the board considers the new structure to be.
