Lead — Commercial Finance & FP&A

The role You will own the group profit and loss account in its entirety — what drives revenue, what it costs us to earn it, and what we spend running the business. Today those three questions are answered in different places by different people, and nobody holds the whole picture or challenges any of it.
This is not a reporting role. Producing the numbers is the smaller half of the job. The larger half is testing them: proving that revenue recorded is revenue earned, challenging the cost of sales the operating teams submit, and taking a hard commercial view of what the group spends. You will carry a cost-saving target and be measured against it.
You will lead an analytics team and work directly with the Head of Finance and the senior leadership team. The function reports into the monthly close and into the quarterly executive pack, so your work is read at board level from the first month. What you will own Profit and loss
- Full ownership of the group P&L — revenue, cost of sales, operating expenditure and the margin between them, by entity and by business line.
- A single commercial view of group performance that reconciles to the ledger, with the variance against budget and prior period explained rather than described.
Revenue assurance
- Trace revenue from transaction to ledger and prove that what is recorded reflects what was earned.
- Maintain a weekly and monthly register of revenue analysis: what has worked, what has not, where revenue is being lost, why, and whether the loss is a deliberate commercial choice or a leak.
- Test recorded revenue for consistency against normal operating patterns and escalate what does not fit.
Cost of sales
- Challenge the cost of sales submitted by each operating vertical — payout, acquiring, banking and the e-money business — and test it against the ledger and prior periods before it consolidates.
- Report cost per transaction and cost as a percentage of volume by counterparty, so that routing and partner decisions can be made on cost rather than on habit.
- Return a submission that does not survive challenge to the vertical that produced it.
Operating expenditure and cost optimisation
- Own an annual cost-saving target agreed with the Head of Finance and deliver against it. Savings are evidenced and tracked to the ledger, not asserted.
- Challenge operating expenditure across the group: vendor spend, licence and subscription costs, professional fees, travel, and the recurring cost base generally.
- Build and maintain a pipeline of cost initiatives with a quantified value, an owner and a date against each.
- Test proposed spend before it is committed and give the business a commercial answer, not a budget line.
Planning, forecasting and reporting
- Monthly financial performance reporting and the monthly management pack.
- Rolling forecast, with forecast bias measured and reported each quarter.
- The annual budget — build, challenge and finalisation across every entity.
- The quarterly executive deep-dive pack and the annual report pack.
- Weekly revenue analysis, campaign and declined-transaction analysis, corridor performance, and the dashboards and data layer behind them.
- Scenario and sensitivity analysis to support pricing, corridor and investment decisions.
Commercial and transaction support
- Financial due diligence on mergers, acquisitions and new market entry, including the model, the assumptions behind it and the evidence under them.
- Counterparty risk assessment, transferring into this role during the first year once the assessment standard is written and approved.
- Analytical review and surveillance of the group’s real-estate and associated-company interests.
Challenge in the close
- You hold challenger authority in the monthly close. Submissions from the operating verticals pass through this role before they consolidate, and the challenge report is produced alongside the challenge rather than after it.
Leadership
- Lead and develop a team of analysts, setting the review and challenge standards the function works to.
- Work directly with the operating verticals, treasury, growth and the senior leadership team. Much of the value of this role comes from holding a position in a room where the loudest view is not yours.
Your first hundred days You will agree a thirty, sixty and ninety day plan with the Head of Finance in your first week. In broad terms:
- By day thirty — the cost-saving target agreed and the initiative pipeline opened; the revenue analysis register running weekly.
- By day sixty — cost of sales challenge exercised across a full close cycle; the first OPEX challenge delivered with quantified savings.
- By day ninety — the P&L view established end to end, the counterparty assessment standard drafted, and the forward plan for the function agreed.
What we are looking for Essential
- A qualified accountant — ACCA, ACA, CA or CIMA — or an equivalent finance qualification with the experience to match.
- Six or more years in commercial finance, FP&A or a comparable analytical finance role, including time spent challenging the numbers rather than only producing them.
- Demonstrable cost optimisation experience with savings you can quantify and evidence.
- Strong command of Excel and a working ability in SQL, Python or Power BI — enough to interrogate a dataset yourself rather than wait for someone to extract it.
- Experience owning a P&L or a material part of one, with accountability for the variance.
- The judgement to know which number matters, and the composure to hold a position under challenge from people more senior than you.
- Clear written English. Much of this role is read, not presented.
Desirable
- Experience in payments, remittance, banking or another regulated financial services environment.
- Multi-entity, multi-currency group reporting.
- Exposure to transaction due diligence or corporate development.
- Experience building a function rather than inheriting one.
What success looks like A year in, the group knows what it earns and what it costs to earn, by entity and by counterparty, from a single source that reconciles to the ledger. Cost of sales submissions have been challenged for twelve consecutive months and the challenge has changed decisions. The cost-saving target has been met and the savings are visible in the accounts. And the executive team asks you what the numbers mean before they ask anyone else.