Mark Lewis, who just missed out on the top job at John Lewis, will become the new chief executive of the price comparison site Moneysupermarket.
Lewis, currently retail director at the department store group, will take over from Peter Plumb as CEO of Moneysupermarket, a FTSE 250 company, by 4 May next year.
Earlier this week, Paula Nickolds was appointed managing director of John Lewis, one of the UK’s most respected retail brands. She will take over from Andy Street in January, joining the handful of female executives in retail, an industry that employs mainly women.
Street told told staff in a memo: “Although this is very sad news for John Lewis, I am sure we will all want to congratulate Mark on this appointment. He let me know a little while ago that, however much he has enjoyed the partnership, his long-term ambitions take him back to his natural world of digital disruption.”
Lewis joined the department store group in early 2013 as online director. Two years later, he was put in charge of running both shop and online operations. He previously served as chief executive of the courier firm CollectPlus and before that worked for eBay. He holds a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the French business school Insead.
Moneysupermarket was founded by Simon Nixon in 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom. Nixon, who dropped out of his accountancy degree because it was “too boring”, floated the business on the stock market in 2007.
