Ocado’s head of finance Richard Exact has taken over day-to-day CFO duties from Andrew Bracey, who left the online grocer last week.

Exact is considered a safe pair of hands having been at Ocado since the company was founded in 2000. Before joining Ocado, he was finance director at the European arm of the public relations firm Ogilvy, Adams & Rinehart (Ogilvy PR).

Exact takes up the interim role as Ocado looks for a permanent replacement for Bracey, who joined FTSE-250 international recruitment company Michael Page last Monday. After his departure was announced in January, Bracey stayed on at Ocado to finish the company’s year-end audit and annual report.

Ocado CEO Tim Steiner is understood to be keen to welcome a female CFO to the all-male company board. This week, The Grocer’s first female guest editor Fiona Dawson, president of Mars Chocolate UK, called on businesses to do more to help women climb the corporate ladder. “I think more should be done to encourage women and provide an environment where it is all right to ask for what you want,” she said.

Half the board members and managers at Mars are women - a statistic that Dawson put down largely to its family-friendly culture, which involves concrete steps such as avoiding important meetings during half terms and flexi-time options.

Last year, Morrisons pledged to double the number of women in senior managerial positions at the supermarket to 30% by 2014.

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