Hi, I'm Phil

Phillip Pearson

Founder and Principal Consultant · Arete Data & Analytics Ltd

The last twelve months

Most of the past year has gone into three engagements. A data platform build for a UK children and families charity: a lakehouse on Microsoft Fabric, ingestion, data quality, security, cost control, and defining and recruiting the permanent analyst role that will inherit it. Enterprise data architecture for a large UK housing provider, delivered through a consultancy partner, designing a single target platform to replace two legacy estates while their core operational system is being migrated.

Alongside that, I have built out a productised data strategy offer: an eight-pillar model, five fixed-scope sprints and a maturity assessment anyone can run on themselves in two minutes.

Before that

I have led analytics teams, owned platforms and designed strategies across professional services, retail, insurance, health insurance and consumer subscription businesses. Clients and former employers are described by sector, not named.

• A global professional services firm. Led the architecture and governance design for an enterprise-wide data product platform. Conceived and led a firm-wide data and analytics community of practice serving more than 26,000 people. Ran a company-wide AI readiness review and built the framework behind it.
• A major UK retailer. Designed and led the reconciliation of a multi-billion-pound offline order process spanning several hundred suppliers, replacing manual collation with an automated extract.
• A direct-to-consumer subscription scale-up. Built the data function from scratch as Head of Analytics: migration to a modern stack, a single customer view, churn and expansion models, and third-party data enrichment. Cut cloud data platform cost by around 70%, worth more than £100,000 a year.
• A UK health insurer. Led sales and retention analytics for a contact centre of more than 300 agents. Introduced call prioritisation and lead scoring models that increased premiums written by 20% and reduced the resource needed by 30%.
• A national insurance intermediary. Designed and rolled out incentive schemes across 50 contact-centre areas and led their redesign for FCA compliance. Discount strategy analysis worth around £10m a year in additional commission.

How I work

I have been hands-on across the whole lifecycle, from strategy and governance through architecture and analytics to AI implementation. That matters mostly because it means I can tell you when something is not worth doing.

Good data work balances people, process and technology. Most programmes buy the technology first and treat the people as a rollout audience at the end. I start with the problem, agree who owns the outcome, and let the platform follow.

Being a single practitioner is a constraint. I take work I can deliver, I say when something needs a team I do not have, and I plan engagements to end.

Sectors

• Charity and not-for-profit
• Social housing
• Professional services
• Retail
• Insurance
• Health insurance
• Consumer subscription
• Legal services

Tools I have delivered on

What I have built with. The right stack depends on what you already run and who maintains it afterwards.

• Microsoft Fabric
• Azure
• Databricks
• Delta Lake
• Snowflake
• Fivetran
• dbt
• Power BI
• ThoughtSpot
• Tableau
• Purview
• Unity Catalog
• Semarchy
• SQL Server
• Python
• Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Google Gemini

Certifications

Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals, Azure Data Fundamentals, Azure Fundamentals. CIMA Foundation Level.

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