Mert Ilter

— a finance executive based in Hamburg with over 20 years of hands-on experience building, leading, and fixing finance functions across Germany, the UK, Canada, and Central Asia.

My career has not followed a single industry or a single type of company. I have worked in energy infrastructure, technology, retail, logistics, and food production — across organisations ranging from newly founded GmbHs with no finance team at all, to EMEA subsidiaries of publicly listed international groups. That breadth is deliberate. It means I walk into an engagement already knowing the problems you haven't told me about yet.

What distinguishes me from a typical interim hire is the combination of two things that rarely come together: operational precision and executive-level perspective. I can run your month-end close myself on a Tuesday and present your board reporting on a Thursday. I have never been a consultant who analyses from a distance — I sit inside the finance function, work the numbers, own the deadlines, and take accountability for the output.

I have built finance departments from scratch — designing chart of accounts, selecting and implementing ERP systems, establishing controls, and producing the first set of audited financial statements — at companies that previously had no structured finance function at all. I have also stepped into established teams mid-crisis: a controller who left overnight, a reporting backlog that had gone unresolved for months, an audit process that was stalling. In both situations, the approach is the same: understand the business quickly, stabilise first, then improve.

Because I work across German, English, Russian, and Turkish, I can do something most finance professionals cannot — I can be the real interface between a German subsidiary and its international parent, without anything being lost in translation. Not just the language, but the regulatory logic, the reporting culture, and the expectations on both sides.

I am not a firm. I am one person, and that is a deliberate choice.