Skanska CFO Meliha Duymaz on growth markets, Public-Private Partnerships, and the ‘myth of futureproofing in construction’

Skanska UK chief financial officer and executive vice president, Meliha Duymaz has been in her current role since 2022, having first entered the construction industry in a professional capacity in 2006, initially spending the first 16 years of her career in the rail industry, with 10 of those at transport infrastructure giant, Network Rail. Since joining Skanska three years ago, Duymaz has actively sought to increase the visibility of her finance team among her other colleagues across the organisation, to ensure the former has a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the operational and commercial functions of each department when managing the contractor’s portfolio of investments and interests. Without this first-hand familiarity with stakeholders and insight of their own businesses, Duymaz remains sceptical about how effective her fellow finance professionals can truly be in guiding the fortunes (figuratively and literally) of a construction company in prudent capital allocation and investing. 

“Finance professionals have a huge responsibility in how we ‘show up’, how we engage with the business, and meet that ‘strategic finance business partner’ concept,” Duymaz said. “If we choose to sit behind our desks looking at spreadsheets, we are never going to be that true value-adding business partner. For me, it’s how you use that financial information to engage the business and create connections. You cannot just chuck numbers at people, you need to tell the story of the business to create an emotional connection, and people will buy in to where you are trying to get to. If you don’t use storytelling, if you don’t create that capability within finance function, you are missing a trick.” 

Getting the whole business to buy into your strategy 

“Last year, Skanska began preparing for its next three-year business planning cycle,” Duymaz said. “While we were doing this planning, we involved every section of the business – all divisions and support functions – and we asked them, what is their business plan and priorities for the next three years. We could have done that behind closed doors as a senior management team, but I strongly believe in getting a buy-in – in whatever plan we create – from the whole business. Once that plan was in a shape that we were happy with and we all agreed on strategic priorities as an organisation, we had a launch event to ensure every member of the leadership team understood what the plan was and their role in it before taking it to their respective teams. When you go about it in this way, you create collective ownership, and you can see the interdependences rather than having plans being built in isolation. Financial planning for the organisation is not just something I am accountable for; it is every employee’s responsibility – and it is the same for safety, customer service, sustainability, people etc.” 

Skanska currently employs around 3,500 people, operating across a range of disciplines and in different countries, and Duymaz was candid about the challenge of implementing and managing any grand vision across such a vast remit. She said Skanska’s strategy is less about achieving ‘consistency across every aspect of the organisation’ – an aspiration she described as a kind of ‘utopic’ (and therefore unrealistic) thinking among many contractors – but rather the adoption of a practical and pragmatic approach to the standardisation of business-critical systems and processes, paired with a willingness to be adaptable to change, or, in her words, remaining “agile” when it is necessary to do so. With support from management within the senior leadership teams, she and her finance colleagues are pursuing a culture of “transparency and honest communication” among and between departments at Skanska, with their individual and collective progress being reviewed and goals refined at the end of each quarter, creating a coherent interconnectedness with regards to delivery and accountability.  

The myth of futureproofing? 

Like any construction finance professional worth their salt, Duymaz is tasked with managing a complex investment portfolio on behalf of her employer, whose composition is carefully curated to withstand market volatility through prudent risk management expressed in diversified investments and assets, while capitalising on high-value opportunities made possible through healthy cash flow and profit generation. And in a recently declared financial performance by Skanska UK, Duymaz was quick to praise the role of the Facilities Management and Infrastructure businesses in helping the contractor to deliver a surge in pre-tax profit from £27.3 million in 2023 to £77.8 million last year. That success notwithstanding, Duymaz remains humble, returning to the fundamentals of prudent investing and portfolio management when doing her day job – with market intelligence at her disposal and a proactive approach to risk scenario planning against emerging trends and events in the wider economy as well as the built environment. And while she remains unconvinced there exists any strategy to realistically “future-proof” against a shifting economic landscape, Duymaz believes there are certain political and regulatory events on the horizon we can all prepare for.  

“Clearly inflation and interest rates have created an interesting environment over the last couple of years and made businesses, especially in construction, really think about how to best deal with those factors […] as well as the availability of funding and borrowing costs,” Duymaz said. “We are seeing the impact of that within our Commercial and Residential arms within Skanska. In the UK, a couple of trends I am watching very closely at the moment is the emergence of Public-Private Partnerships in the Infrastructure sector. I think because of the state the government’s finances are in, there is going to be a reemergence of that, and we are very closely monitoring and supporting the government in that space. The other one I personally think will have a huge impact on construction, is the government’s ambition to make changes to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and I think the construction industry really needs to be involved and have its voice heard.” 

She added: “You cannot really ‘future-proof’, but you can prepare your business […] not only to be profitable, but predictable and sustainable. One of the main things I spend a lot of time looking at is whether [Skanska UK is] in the right sectors, working with the right clients and contract types – also where the world is heading. If you take the last couple of years, investment in road and rail has really gone down quite significantly whereas – because of the geopolitical environment and government ambitions – we are seeing a very different picture in defence and energy. There is a lot of thought behind how one pivots the organisation to be able to take those differences into account and respond to that. In the regulatory environment, ESG has been an increasing trend and there is an interesting shift – depending on where [a contractor] operates there is a difference in attitudes and narrative – but as European businesses, ESG is still a ‘big ticket’ item.”  

A word on premium bonds  

Contractor insolvency has run rampant through the construction industry, with recent findings by the Insolvency Service detailing that more than 4,100 firms had gone out of business in the 12 months to March of this year – the highest of any sector. Time and again the sudden (and occasionally unexpected) loss of a major player from the landscape will reverberate through the supply chain and invariably take with it in the process countless smaller businesses that are still suffering the effects of legacy, fixed-price contracts, long after the coronavirus pandemic era has ended. But the effects are multidirectional, also cascading into the financial and insurance markets, and thus weakening the foundations for mutual investment, recovery, and growth. Michael Crouch, insurance expert and partner at global insurance broker Gallagher Specialty, estimates that bond premiums in construction written by the insurance market since 2022-23 have skyrocketed from approximately £200 million, to claims now approaching more than £1 billion. He said insurance underwriters are less inclined to take on contractor liabilities unless more favourable terms can be negotiated to guard themselves from the “scourge of the industry” (contractor insolvency), consequently making the acquisition of bonds by contractors more difficult.  

Source: Construction Wave CFO Summit 2025