Interactive makes dual senior executive hires in Belinda Cooney and Nick Scholefield

Interactive has made two key senior executive hires, appointing a new chief financial officer and chief information officer.

Belinda Cooney has been named the solution provider’s CFO, while Nick Scholefield has been appointed as CIO.

Cooney joins from Macquarie Capital, where she was a division director, working with technology industry clients and investee companies ranging from early-stage ventures to Fortune 500 organisations, according to Interactive. Cooney has also held several board roles and is currently an advisory board member of the CSIRO’s Data61.

Scholefield joins from Australian investment and trustee group Perpetual, where he was also CIO. His previous experience includes a two-year stint at HP, where he was software professional services delivery manager, according to LinkedIn. He also served as the head of technology in architecture and integration for BT Financial Group.

The roles are new to Interactive, with the company revealing it had not had a CFO for a number of years and that Scholefield represents the MSP’s first CIO.

Cooney said it was a delight to bring her experience to Interactive. “Interactive is an attractive opportunity due to its ability to provide customers with a unique and continually evolving breadth of leading edge technology infrastructure services,” she said.

Scholefield said: “I am very happy to be joining a company like Interactive and I look forward to helping our clients adapt and take advantage of the rapid advances in technology, particularly that of multi-cloud.”

Interactive chief executive Mal McHutchison welcomed the new executives.

“They join at an exciting time for our organisation as we continue our success and deliver for our customers in a multi-cloud world,” he said.

Like Cooney, McHutchison also joined Interactive from Macquarie Capital when he took over the chief executive role from Christopher Ride in November 2017. Ride who had served as the company’s managing director for 25 years stepped across to a non executive role.

Ride was also the business owner of IT erasure and disposal provider EraseIT, which Interactive acquired in February this year.

Interactive posted revenues of $167.8 million for the 12 months to 30 June 2017. The result represented 5.7 percent growth on a $158.7 million revenue haul in 2016.