Maria Casley, head of buying, international voice business, Cable&Wireless Worldwide
Can you briefly describe a typical working day for us?
A typical day as head of buying for Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s International Voice division starts with a quick catch up with the team and check-in with our trading manager for urgent routing and buying issues that need immediate attention.
My team and I speak with our destination and voice managers throughout the day to negotiate new and existing deals. The dynamics of this market are such that my team and I are constantly looking at our costs and monitoring our deals to ensure we are maximising our margin potential and driving quality supply lines. I am lucky to have a small and highly professional team around me who make sure that I am aware of any potential issues.
Throughout the day I work with our team to plan for specific destinations and regions all over the world which we have defined on a global basis. My role requires me to provide expertise and support to define a clear buying strategy that adapts to the marketplace and the internal demands of our trading team, sales teams and ultimately customers.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a wholesale buyer for Cable&Wireless Worldwide? What’s the most challenging?
Solving problems, ours and our partners, is always particularly rewarding. Maintaining strong relationships with our carrier partners is essential to the continued growth of the business. In parallel to planning, I also manage key carrier relationships and talk regularly with them to ensure we are aligned to benefit from working together.
The buying team is responsible for delivering competitive cost levels and industry leading quality that our trading team can use to ensure we can grow our business with both existing and new carriers. Our team also has internal targets within the business to hit, so the pressure is on us to ensure we do all we can to get the right numbers!
As head of buying, I am really lucky to be dealing with great people not only in Cable&Wireless Worldwide but also in many of the major carriers around the world.
In what ways do you think your role might evolve over the next couple of years, as driven by the changing nature of the global wholesale telecoms sector?
Well, I don’t have a crystal ball, but there is no doubt in my mind that we will continue to see significant changes in the days ahead. Consolidation, product convergence, new services and the emergence of application providers in the consumer market create opportunity and a new set of requirements and challenges.
