Hannah Birch

Hannah Birch has been chief executive of Kocho, the London-headquartered Microsoft identity and security specialist, since February 2025. She succeeded co-founder Des Lekerman, who had run the business for more than a decade and stayed on the board as a strategic adviser. Birch arrived from Node4, where as group managing director she integrated four acquisitions. Before that she was European managing director at Ensono and spent 11 years at Accenture, with earlier roles at Fujitsu and Computacenter.

A target for growth

Birch took over after a year of falling revenue and set out to return Kocho to growth. Security was already growing: in the year to 31 March 2025, security services revenue grew 30%, according to the group’s accounts. She set a public target early, telling CRN UK that she wanted double-digit growth in the year to March 2026, with revenue above £50m.

Narrowing to identity

Her answer has been to narrow the business. She told IT Channel Oxygen in July 2026 that she had built a new executive team and “pivoted the business firmly towards identity and cyber”. Kocho hired Steven Jones as chief technology officer in April 2026 and earned Microsoft’s Copilot specialization in July as a step toward Frontier Partner status. It is also building Alira, its platform for managing both human and non-human identities. In September 2026 its managed service went live for Border to Coast Pensions Partnership under a four-year contract; Border to Coast pools about £120bn of assets for 18 local government pension funds.

Why it matters to the channel

Kocho is putting into practice the specialist argument Birch makes herself. “Partners that specialise, build true IP and embrace AI to meet changing client expectations will pull ahead,” she told Oxygen. “Generalists will increasingly struggle to differentiate.” As AI agents multiply the identities that need governing, that niche may widen.

Birch has rebuilt Kocho’s leadership, narrowed it to identity and security, and won a four-year managed service contract with the £120bn Border to Coast pension pool.