Financial Operations Director - Analytics & Compliance

Business Summary

Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable (APAR) play a critical role in protecting the company’s financial assets, enabling customers and suppliers, and managing billions of dollars in financial transactions. As our operations become increasingly digital, data-driven and automated, we need strong capabilities at the intersection of finance, technology, analytics and risk.

This role offers a unique opportunity to build and scale an organization from ground up: including hiring and developing managers, establishing team structure, and creating the processes and culture that enable a function to operate independently at scale. The APAR Analytics and Compliance Director will lead a multi-layered organization responsible for strengthening how APAR uses data, technology, controls and process improvement to operate more effectively and manage risk. This role will partner across Finance, IT, Customer Operations, Sales, Procurement, Internal Audit and other organizations to modernize APAR processes while maintaining a strong global control environment.

What You’ll Do

Analytics & Data

- Lead the APAR analytics strategy and develop actionable insights that improve financial performance, operational efficiency and decision-making.
- Establish meaningful KPIs, dashboards and analytical frameworks across accounts payable and accounts receivable.
- Use transactional data to identify trends, exceptions, root causes, control gaps and improvement opportunities.
- Develop and maintain strong data governance practices, including data quality, ownership, lineage and reconciliation.
- Enable predictive and exception-based analytics to shift APAR from reactive processing toward proactive management.
- Build analytical capabilities within the team and increase effective use of data throughout APAR.

Process Improvement & Transformation

- Lead cross-functional projects focused on simplifying, standardizing and automating APAR processes.
- Evaluate existing processes and systems to identify opportunities for automation, digitization and improved controls.
- Apply process improvement methodologies and process-mining techniques to identify bottlenecks, exceptions and non-value-added activity.
- Translate business problems into technical requirements and partner with IT and other organizations to implement scalable solutions.
- Lead project governance, requirements definition, testing, implementation and change management for APAR initiatives.
- Identify opportunities to apply AI, workflow automation and emerging technologies to finance operations.

Compliance, Controls & Risk

- Own and continuously strengthen the APAR control and compliance framework.
- Ensure appropriate controls supporting SOX requirements, PCI DSS and applicable global regulatory requirements.
- Partner with Internal Audit, external auditors and business stakeholders on control design, testing and remediation.
- Design controls into processes and systems rather than relying primarily on manual detective controls.
- Establish continuous monitoring and analytics to proactively identify control failures, unusual transactions and emerging risks.
- Assess payment, fraud, data privacy, access and operational risks across APAR.
- Support segregation-of-duties, access-control and sensitive-data requirements across financial systems and processes.
- Maintain Compliance policies and procedures and ensure they reflect regulatory obligations, corporate requirements, industry best practices while also addressing new business initiatives and technology enhancements.
- Stay abreast of related industry trends and standards.

Payments & Technology

- Provide technical leadership across B2B and B2C payment processes and technologies.
- Understand payment methods and infrastructure including ACH, wires, cards, virtual cards, direct debit, payment gateways, bank interfaces, settlement and reconciliation.
- Understand system integrations including APIs, REST services, JSON, middleware, SFTP and other system-to-system interfaces.
- Partner with IT and platform teams on architecture and integration decisions affecting APAR.
- Evaluate emerging payment technologies and their implications for operational efficiency, customer/supplier experience, security and risk.
- Manages relationships with vendors, leads QBRs, participates in conferences, etc

Leadership

- Build and scale a high-performing management team
- Establish clear priorities and accountability while developing deeper technical and analytical capabilities within the team.
- Build strong partnerships across Finance, IT and business organizations.
- Communicate complex technical, financial and risk topics clearly to both technical teams and senior leadership.
- Create an environment that encourages curiosity, disciplined problem solving and continuous improvement.
- Build a culture of psychological safety, respect, and inclusion

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means APAR becomes increasingly data-driven, automated, controlled and scalable. The organization has reliable data and meaningful insights, fewer manual processes and exceptions, stronger preventive controls, faster execution of transformation initiatives, and greater ability to identify risks before they become problems. This leader will help build the technical and analytical foundation that enables APAR to evolve beyond transaction processing into a modern financial operations organization.

Required

- Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Information Systems, Data Analytics, Engineering, Computer Science or a related discipline.
- 8+ years of experience in finance operations, financial systems, analytics, controls, technology or related functions.
- Leadership through others; experience managing and developing other people managers
- Experience with SOX controls and financial control environments.

Preferred

- Working knowledge of APIs, system integrations and modern data architectures.
- Strong technical mindset with the ability to translate between business, finance and technology organizations.
- Demonstrated process improvement and root-cause-analysis capability.
- Experience with business intelligence and visualization platforms such as Business Objects, Spotfire or equivalent.
- Strong SQL capability and experience working directly with large transactional datasets.
- Knowledge of B2B and/or B2C payment processes and payment technologies
- Strong understanding of accounts receivable and/or accounts payable processes.
- Experience standing up a new function or organization, from initial hire to operational maturity
- Demonstrated leadership of teams and complex cross-functional projects.
- Experience with PCI DSS and payment-card environments.
- Experience supporting international financial operations, regulatory requirements or global compliance frameworks.
- Python or comparable scripting/programming experience for analytics and automation.
- Experience with ERP platforms such as SAP or Oracle and understanding of APAR subledgers and general-ledger integration.
- Knowledge of data modeling, master data management, data lineage and data-quality frameworks.
- Experience with workflow automation, RPA or intelligent automation.
- Practical knowledge of generative AI, large language models, AI-enabled workflows and AI governance.
- Understanding of cybersecurity concepts relevant to financial operations, including identity and access management, encryption, tokenization and sensitive-data protection (PSD2/PSD3, data privacy laws)
- Experience with fraud detection, anti-money laundering, KYC, payment-risk analytics or continuous controls monitoring.
- Process/project management certification or experience