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Jonathan Neal
“Oversees the financial management and commercial & economic strategic direction of the Institute.”
Chief Financial Officer
Jonathan Neal is the Chief Financial Officer at the Materials Processing Institute. Jonathan graduated in Business Studies at Newcastle Polytechnic and then qualified as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG in Newcastle. After qualifying he focussed on SME finance with KPMG before spending a period in industry to gain practical commercial experience.
Returning to his primary area of interest of SME and technology corporate finance in 2003 Jonathan worked with the North East Regional Development Agency ONE NorthEast to establish the five Centres of Excellence, including Centre for Process Innovation on Teesside and NaREC in Blyth, and the technology and commercial Access to Finance vehicles of NStar and Northstar Ventures. His interest in regional economic strategic regeneration, and the desire to contribute to it, is one of the primary reasons why Jonathan joined the Materials Processing Institute in 2014.
Jonathan has since helped fund and spin out several companies from the region’s universities and continues to maintain a watching brief over a number of them. In 2015 he continued his interest in companies operating in the public private sector by helping establish Impeller and the Impeller Foundation which delivers the commercial activities of the Tyne & Wear Fire and Rescue Service and channels the profits back into the community in pursuit of the Service’s public duty objectives.
As the Chief Financial Officer of the Materials Processing Institute Jonathan oversees the financial management and commercial & economic strategic direction of the Institute. Although relatively new to the steel industry he is a fervent believer in, and adopts Sir Henry Bessemer’s approach, of having “an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right” to bring his wider commercial, financial and public/private sector experience to the Institute to drive the growth of the business. Applying these general principles Jonathan continues his growing interest in the steel industry as a member of the World Steel Economics Committee.
