iplicit appoints first Director of Talent Development

iplicit, the cloud accounting software vendor targeting the UK and Ireland mid-market, has appointed Sarah Clancey as its first Director of Talent Development. The newly created role is designed to protect and formalise the company's people function ahead of what the firm describes as its next stage of growth, with headcount expected to rise from around 200 today to approximately 330 by 2028.

Clancey joins from hospitality technology scale-up Mews, where as Principal Talent Development Partner she supported the business as it doubled from roughly 700 to 1,400 employees. Before Mews, she spent almost eight years at travel and loyalty specialist Collinson, rising to Head of People and Performance, and held learning and development and operational management roles across the AXA group. She brings more than two decades of experience in talent and organisational development to iplicit.

The role and its priorities

Clancey's initial focus will be on building manager capability across the business, a priority she frames as structural rather than remedial. "The biggest reason people leave a job is their manager, not because managers are bad people, but because they have not been given the tools to support their teams properly," she said. "Get manager quality right, and the impact multiplies across every team that manager runs."

Alongside the management development agenda, Clancey will lead iplicit's internal AI enablement programme, using what she describes as a community-led approach centred on practical, hands-on adoption. Her view on the technology is measured: AI can personalise and accelerate development at scale, but, she argues, it is not a substitute for human interaction and should support peer-to-peer learning rather than replace it.

The internal enablement work sits alongside iplicit's product-level AI investment. In May 2026 the company launched iplicit AI Pulse, an AI platform encompassing analytics and reporting tools, AI-enabled invoice processing and an anomaly detection feature called AI Detect. The intent, according to the company, is to build AI confidence inside the business at the same pace as AI capability is being built into the platform itself.

Market context and competitive backdrop

The appointment is framed against iplicit's placement in the top five medium-sized businesses on the 2026 Sunday Times Best Places to Work list, which is judged entirely on anonymised employee feedback. WorkL's engagement survey of iplicit returned a 96% average engagement score, which the company says is 12 percentage points above the technology sector benchmark, with 95% of employees reporting that they feel they are developing in their role.

The mid-market ERP and cloud accounting segment is competitive, with established vendors including Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite and Unit4 competing for the same buyer profile. Talent retention and culture are increasingly used as differentiation signals by growth-stage software vendors, particularly in a remote-first operating model where employees have fewer in-office touchpoints. Iplicit is a remote-first organisation with a small Bournemouth headquarters, and currently serves more than 50,000 daily users with system access from 103 countries.

Forward look

Olivia McMillan, chief operating officer at iplicit, said the combined investment in product and people is positioning the business to advance towards becoming a "category-leading" mid-market finance platform in the UK. The company has previously featured on the FT1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies and placed 40th in the Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50, though neither ranking carries a current-year citation in the release.

The strategic logic of a dedicated talent development function at this scale is sound: mid-market software vendors that miss their culture-at-scale transition frequently find that the very engagement scores that attracted talent become harder to sustain past the 250-employee mark. Whether iplicit can preserve its 96% engagement benchmark through the next growth phase will be a practical test of the hire.