What a Day TSG Accelerate 2025 Was

18th November 2025 | Cavendish Conference Centre, London 

CFOs and finance directors came to tackle three challenges: how to optimise IT costs, secure their business properly, and enable productivity through AI. 

What they discovered: most businesses are working with incomplete information. 

Not because they're doing anything wrong. Because technology moves fast, vendors oversell, and nobody has time to separate signal from noise. 

The Morning: Facing Reality 

Rebecca Taylor didn't sugarcoat the cyber threat. She walked through how Ransomware-as-a-Service truly works - the operators, the affiliates, the economics behind attacks targeting UK businesses. 

Then Paul Abbott from Knights of Old shared what happened when the Akira ransomware gang hit KNP Logistics. A £100M business. 900 staff. ISO 27001 certified. £1 million cyber insurance. Full audit showing low risk. 

None of it mattered. A 158-year-old company collapsed within months. 730 job losses. 

The room went quiet. The Q&A at the end of the session allowed attendees to ask the all-important questions on their mind. Several finance directors booked Security Risk Assessments before lunch. 

Rory McKeand and Stuart Byers followed with the hard numbers on IT waste. 30% of software goes unused. £15k annual waste for small businesses. 93% affected.  

They demonstrated OneView, TSG's executive dashboard that gives finance leaders visibility across their IT environment - from cyber threats to Azure spend and unused licences. A real client example showed the impact: £12k saved in Azure costs across a year, £3.5k in licences over 12 months, just by seeing where money actually goes.  

Several attendees thought they had visibility into cloud spend. What they had were invoices. Not the same thing. 

The Knights of Old session was excellent. Rather than deep dive on specific technologies, it set a very practical and human context for cyber security. And it is something people couldn't have got elsewhere.

David Reinhardt, Head of IT at BioPhorum 

AI: Separating Fact from Fiction 

Joshua Wöhle delivered exactly what his session promised: a down-to-earth look at AI, separating fact from fiction for non-technical employees. 

He started by showing how AI can tailor messaging from different role perspectives. Using voice recognition, he'd say "draft this plan from a marketing director perspective," then shift to a CFO angle, then operations. The AI didn't always get it right on the first attempt - and that was the point. Joshua spent time showing how to refine prompts, tell the AI what's not hitting the mark, and iterate until you get what you need. 

Then he demonstrated how anyone can create tailored AI tools without coding. No technical background required. 

He walked through AI's evolution using short video clips showing the progression of what's possible. From Google's detailed 8-second videos to the genuinely unsettling: a woman talking on screen, generated entirely from a single uploaded photo. Her mouth moving naturally, discussing any topic you feed it. 

The message landed: organisations like Hyatt, Pearson, and Lufthansa are using these tools with non-technical employees today. The barrier isn't technical capability. It's knowing where to start. 

We would not want to miss a future conference because sessions on Cyber Monitoring and Cloud Care are critical. These topics provide deeper insights into cybersecurity, which is an ever-changing and evolving landscape, and help us stay updated to anticipate threats and adopt best practices. 

Jalpa Shah, IT Manager at The Institution of Fire Engineers

Making Data Work Harder 

Steven Osprey demonstrated TSG's Customer Insights Assistant in the Joy of Data session. It identifies which customers are at risk of leaving and why - pulling signals from ERP, CRM, email, support tickets, and Teams. The kind of early warnings that get missed when you're relying on Net Promoter Scores or waiting for customers to complain. 

The ERP breakout sessions (Business Central, Sage Intacct, Pegasus Opera 3) revealed a consistent pattern: most businesses use a fraction of what their system can do. Finance teams know there's more. They're just not sure what, or how to access it without disrupting operations. 

What Hit Hardest 

The networking was as valuable as the sessions. Finance leaders across sectors - housing, financial services, manufacturing, hospitality, education - compared notes and discovered they're facing identical challenges. 

Peer comparison removed the guesswork. You're not wondering if your setup is adequate. You're seeing how it stacks up against organisations with similar budgets, threats, and board pressures. 

The feedback themes were clear: 

Cyber security is more urgent than most businesses realise. Multiple attendees compared their setup with peers and realised gaps they didn't know existed. 

IT budgets are leaking in predictable places. The shelfware problem, unused licences, inefficient procurement. Businesses asked for visibility tools and waste audits. 

AI needs clarity, not hype. Finance leaders are under pressure to implement AI but don't know where to start. Several requested demonstrations. Others signed up for the complementary AI Strategy Session with a TSG Chief Technologist. 

I really liked how you structured the sessions in themes but mixed up the formats. And I liked that there was lots of practical things but also the demo at the end that showed the art of the possible. I thought that was excellent as it kept me engaged - I usually prefer being behind the scenes but did not clock watch at all.

Anonymous Attendee 

See You Next Year 

We'll be back in 2026. Expect more networking time, deeper dives into the topics that resonated most, and the same straight-talking approach. 

No sales pitches. No theory. Just honest answers from people who've been doing this for decades. 

More on what we covered: 

TSG Cyber Care | TSG Cloud Care | Get in touch