Damien Fortune
CEO & Finance Director, Rogue Digital
Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom
Who I am
I'm an ACCA-qualified accountant with over twenty years working for both leading global financial-leasing companies and fintech lenders. My background is the hard edge of finance — credit and asset risk, collections, taxation, data structure, and decision analytics — and I founded the finance and risk practice at Rogue Digital to give growing businesses that calibre of finance leadership without the cost of a full-time CFO.
I've always sat at the join between finance and data. A strong academic grounding in mathematics, the discipline of professional accountancy, and years of hands-on analytics let me build a genuine specialism in SME application and behavioural scorecards in the automotive-leasing industry — work that earned an AIRB endorsement of the risk models from a national bank. The thing I care about most is data-led insight: developing holistic, cross-functional analytics that find real opportunities to improve the bottom line, rather than dashboards that look busy and change nothing.
What that means in practice is finance that helps a founder steer rather than just stay compliant. The most valuable thing a finance leader does is make the numbers tell the truth — clearly, early, and in time to act on them.
Experience
CEO & Finance Director — Rogue Digital (2025 – present)
Leading Rogue Digital through its transformation into an AI-driven business, with ownership of finance, risk, and commercial strategy. I also lead our fractional CFO engagements — bringing board-grade forecasting, risk analytics, and reporting to founders who are scaling faster than their finance function.
Risk Director — Renaissance Asset Finance (2024 – 2025)
Risk Director for a specialist asset-finance lender — owning the credit and asset-risk framework across underwriting, portfolio, and collections.
Director of Digital Analytics & Customer Insight — Vanarama (2018 – 2023)
Served multiple markets — from individual customers to SME and fleet — with a focus on developing technology and analytics that put customers first to deliver deals and service. I was part of the leadership through the business's journey to its £200m acquisition by Auto Trader plc.
Head of Risk — Hitachi Capital Vehicle Solutions (2016 – 2018)
Part of the Senior Leadership Team, managing the Risk Department with responsibility for Credit Risk, Asset Risk, Operational Risk, and Collections — and leading the automation of regulated underwriting, which won a Hitachi Capital Presidents Award for innovation.
Earlier career
Earlier roles spanned credit risk and scorecard development across the leasing industry, including the Advanced Internal Ratings Basis (AIRB) scorecard work with LeasePlan UK. Those years built the regulatory-grade discipline I bring to risk and decision analytics today.
What I focus on
I'm most useful to founders making financial and risk decisions whose consequences play out over years — building a forecast you can steer by, getting credit and collections risk under control, or preparing the numbers for a raise or an exit. My work pairs finance discipline with data, so the strategy is grounded in evidence rather than gut feel.
- —Financial strategy, forecasting and unit economics
- —Credit, asset and collections risk
- —Behavioural scorecards and decision analytics (AIRB-grade)
- —Automated and regulated underwriting
- —Management reporting, KPIs and board packs
- —Fundraise and exit readiness, taxation and controls
Recognition & credentials
- ACCA — Chartered Certified Accountant.
- AIRB endorsement — risk models I built endorsed by a national bank.
- Hitachi Capital Presidents Award — for innovation in the automation of regulated underwriting.
- BSc Mathematics — University of Hull.
Get in touch
If you're scaling faster than your finance function — or thinking about a raise, a refinance, or an exit — I'd be happy to hear where you're trying to get to.