About London Stock Exchange Group
London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) is one of the world's leading financial markets infrastructure and data providers. Its portfolio of international market infrastructure businesses includes the London Stock Exchange, LCH.Clearnet, Borsa Italiana and MTS. Those operations depend on resilient engineering systems and facilities that support continuous, 24/7 business activity. Within LSEG, the Property Services team keeps offices, technical spaces and data-centre environments safe, reliable and fully operational.
Our work with LSEG
Maxwell Stephens has recruited two roles for LSEG's Property Services team in London:
- Facilities Manager, Paternoster Square headquarters and Earl Street offices
- Engineering Facilities Manager, with a particular focus on the Paternoster Square headquarters
Facilities Manager, Paternoster Square and Earl Street
LSEG needed a Facilities Manager to lead hard and soft services across its headquarters at Paternoster Square and its Earl Street offices. The remit covered building maintenance and engineering services, cleaning and environmental services, security, front-of-house and workplace services, contractor and supplier management, service charge management and budgeting, landlord and tenant liaison, compliance and risk, workplace strategy and agile working, and stakeholder engagement.
Three features of the brief narrowed the field:
- Breadth across every service line. Managers strong on engineering but light on front-of-house, or the reverse, are common; those credible on both are not.
- Service charge and landlord exposure. The role needed a manager who reads a service charge budget critically and can hold a managing agent to account, a different skill from running an in-house team.
- A high-profile financial services environment. Tolerance for visible failure is low, and the appointee had to bring the compliance discipline a regulated environment expects of every support function.
Working with the Property Services team, we searched for candidates from complex corporate estates and financial services environments, weighting that exposure above job title, and assessed building operations, budgetary control, service charge administration, compliance and risk, supplier performance and customer service. Maxwell Stephens placed an experienced Facilities Manager with expertise across hard and soft FM, service charge budgeting and governance, and membership of relevant industry and professional bodies, who took responsibility for facilities operations across LSEG's London estate.
Engineering Facilities Manager
LSEG also needed an Engineering Facilities Manager for Property Services, with a particular focus on Paternoster Square, able to operate in a mission-critical 24/7 environment where downtime has significant business consequences. The brief required working knowledge of high-voltage networks, HVAC and Building Management Systems; continuity of engineering services across critical premises; capital and refurbishment projects in live environments; supervision of incumbent maintenance contractors; control of engineering and utility budgets; health, safety, statutory and environmental compliance; and confident senior stakeholder management.
Individually, none of these requirements is unusual. Together, in a financial-markets estate where tolerance for engineering failure is close to zero, they describe a much smaller pool than the title suggests.
We targeted candidates from financial institutions, data centres and other 24/7 estates; those limited to standard commercial offices, however senior, were unlikely to have the instincts the role demanded. Assessment put technical depth first, then leadership under pressure and credibility with senior stakeholders. The Engineering Facilities Manager placed took responsibility for continuity across critical systems, technical oversight of HV, HVAC and BMS, capital works in live 24/7 environments, contractor performance, engineering and utility budgets, and compliance.
Why it worked
Both roles fail when they are recruited as generalist positions. Facilities Manager briefs in financial services often list every service line and then get filled by someone strong in one area who learns the rest on the job, and engineering roles in mission-critical estates fail when treated as facilities posts with a technical element attached. In each search we took the full brief at face value, tested for it directly and prioritised candidates who had already carried the same combination of responsibilities in comparable estates.
If you are recruiting a facilities or engineering lead for a high-profile or mission-critical estate, get in touch with our team.
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