Virgin Media O2 UK Replaces BT Group Poached CFO with David Melcon
Combined broadband and mobile giant Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) have today announced that they’re set to replace their former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) since 2021, Patricia Cobian, with David Melcon from 2nd April 2026. In case anybody has forgotten, Patricia announced last year that she was jumping ship to the BT Group (here).
David joins VMO2’s Executive Leadership Team with more than 25 years of telecoms experience, most recently as CFO of Vivo (Telefónica Brazil). During his decade long tenure at Vivo, in another highly competitive telecom market, David played a key role in shaping a customer-first strategy that helped to double the company’s market value; led to the highest customer satisfaction score in the sector; and saw Vivo become the most sustainable company in Brazil.
Suffice to say David will have plenty of work to get on with when he arrives at VMO2, which is going through somewhat of a transition following last year’s major Strategic Review by Joint Venture partner Telefónica.
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Lutz Schüler, CEO of Virgin Media O2, said:
“David has the experience, knowledge and mindset to really deliver for Virgin Media O2 and he will be a fantastic addition to the team, with this move bringing him back to a market he knows well.
What stands out for me is not just the scale of what David has delivered, but how he’s done it, with a strong focus on customers, AI driven transformation and building high-performing diverse teams. This is exactly the talent we need to accelerate our own transformation and build for long-term growth.”
I also want to thank Mark Hardman and Nick Taylor, who have jointly led Finance & Strategy throughout this interim period. Their calm leadership, sound judgement and professionalism have kept us moving forward and they will continue to be exceptional members of our senior team.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Their use of AI as a method to interact with customers seriously needs to be reviewed as it feels it’s been bodged into their existing systems without any thought of the customer experience. AI can be good if it’s thought out properly and interfaces with systems which have been delivered to integrate effectively, I’ve seen this with fuse energy, but sadly not with virgin media, the customer experience has been a on a downward spiral for some time, a mix of poorly implemented AI and even poorer trained international call centre colleagues who are unable to deal with customers and give terrible customer experience, if they ever wonder why their customer service base is shrinking, all I have put above are contributory factors. Look at the industry trends and see where you’re going wrong, because you are going wrong… yes your core product is stable, but everything else in the customer experience is awful and keeps getting worse.