Rachel’s role at Places for People is Group Managing Director, where she is responsible for the organisation’s affordable housing business. She joined Places for People in April 2023 from GSA, a 26,000-home housing association, where she was Executive Director of Operations – overseeing housing management, customer services, repairs and maintenance, and business change.
Prior to its merger with Accord housing association, Rachel was the Executive Director of Customer Experience at Green Square, leading customer-facing operations and overseeing the merger due diligence and business integration. Within the sector, she has held held Non-Executive Board member roles at SHAL and Magna housing associations and Chaired the Governance & Remuneration Committee at the latter. She stepped down from her role at Magna in March 2024 after a 3-year term to allow her to focus on her work at Places for People.
Rachel considers herself first and foremost a customer services and transformation professional; these skills have been the golden thread throughout her career in financial services and utilities and are particular skills she brings to her career in housing. At HSBC, she leads branch banking services at branch, area, and regional level, leading teams to achieve KPI performance across a balanced scorecard – including customer satisfaction, finance, risk and people metrics.
After a few years she moved to the HSBC head office to lead large scale transformational change across lending products, most notably leading the creation of HSBC Intermediaries, the mortgage broker arm of the UK retail bank. It was therefore a natural fit to move into the role of head of mortgage acquisitions where she was responsible for the end-to-end mortgage journey for HSBC and first direct customers, working on media campaigns, propositional development, and improving customer experience across all branch, digital and contact centre channels.
Before joining the housing sector, Rachel was on the executive team at Pelican Business Services, a joint venture by Bristol Water and Wessex Water, where she was responsible for overseeing all customer services operations.
Rachel lives in Cheltenham, with her husband Edd and two boys Theo and Gabriel. Trail and hill running is her passion, along with going to the gym, gardening, and cookery.
