Coherent Appoints Harsil Patel as Chief Growth Officer and General Manager of EMEA

Former EY leader joins the enterprise platform for spreadsheet intelligence and automation to lead finance and risk growth globally and expansion across European insurance and finance

LONDON, 12 August 2026 — Coherent, the operating system for enterprise Excel, today announced the appointment of Harsil Patel as Chief Growth Officer and General Manager of EMEA. Patel leads Coherent's global growth strategy across finance, audit, and risk. He also takes charge of the company's EMEA business from London, leading its expansion with insurers and financial institutions across Europe, beginning in the London markets.

Patel joins from EY, where he was a Director in finance transformation. He began his career inside insurance finance functions and has spent more than 15 years in the industry, from life and pensions to general and commercial lines and the specialty markets. He will broaden what the platform offers finance and risk teams in the region, building on a European client base that spans those same insurance markets alongside global banking, in the UK and continental Europe.

“Harsil knows the finance and risk functions of major insurers from the inside, and he has spent his career solving the problems our platform now solves,” said John Brisco, CEO of Coherent. “European institutions have been pulling us deeper into this market, and with Harsil at the helm in EMEA, they get a partner who understands how they operate and who will build for this market, not adapt from somewhere else.”

Across European insurance and banking, pricing, risk, and financial close run on Excel, and that logic has outgrown the controls and visibility built around it. Coherent puts that logic on one platform, where institutions understand their estate, govern what should stay where it is, and industrialise what should scale into every system and AI agent they deploy.

“Financial services has spent a decade being told that regulation slows it down. In the next wave of transformation, that flips,” said Patel. “Regulators have pushed insurance, banking, and the wider financial services ecosystem to evidence and govern the calculations their businesses depend on, and that pressure is only growing. I've seen that discipline first-hand, and I've seen where it collides with Excel — business-critical logic that's too hard to trust and too hard to change. The discipline isn't a constraint. It's the foundation for modernising safely and at speed, whether the destination is automation, AI, or whatever comes after it. Coherent gives financial services firms across London and Europe the platform to move first.”

About Coherent

Coherent is the operating system for enterprise Excel, trusted by more than 100 financial services firms including Tier 1 insurers, wholesale brokers, asset managers, pension funds, and banking institutions. The platform gives organisations visibility across their entire spreadsheet estate, applies enterprise-grade governance and audit controls without moving teams out of Excel, and turns the models behind pricing, underwriting, risk, and financial reporting into tested, API-ready services. Coherent accelerates time to market, reduces risk, and enables smarter decisions. Learn more at www.coherent.global.