Senior Commercial Finance Business Partner – Operations, Corporate Functions

Role Overview

• Act as the primary finance partner to the Chief Operating Officer and Operations leadership team, supporting a newly formed Operations function as areas of focus, governance, and accountability continue to evolve.
• Partner with the COO to shape clarity on the Operations remit, translating strategic intent into prioritized, financially grounded initiatives.
• Provide proactive commercial insight and challenge to identify and deliver operational efficiencies, cost optimisation, and scalable opportunities across the firm.
• Support the COO in distinguishing between structural cost, discretionary spend, and investment activity, ensuring decisions are aligned to long term value creation.
• Work closely with Procurement to support firm wide procurement reviews, providing financial insight on supplier spend, value for money, and commercial terms.
• Lead financial analysis to identify efficiency opportunities across Operations, including process simplification, automation, and changes to ways of working.
• Partner with leadership to support premises optimisation, including space utilisation, location strategy, and cost to serve considerations.
• Quantify and track efficiency benefits, ensuring opportunities identified translate into tangible outcomes reflected in plans and forecasts.
• Support the COO in understanding root causes of delayed or inefficient billing, distinguishing between operational, commercial, and behavioural drivers.
• Ensure that billing performance and risks are transparent, measurable, and actively managed, with clear KPIs and regular insight provided to senior Operations and Finance leadership.
• Translate financial performance into clear actions and decisions (e.g., spend freezes, reforecasting, reprioritization), tracking delivery against agreed plans.
• Ensure strong financial governance across Corporate Functions (accrual discipline, cost centre hygiene, spend approval adherence), partnering with function owners to resolve issues early.
• Work alongside FP&A team to ensure that reporting for assigned divisions is in line with strategic objectives.
• Proactive engagement with stakeholders on ad-hoc analysis/reporting.
• Work alongside FP&A to deliver the Operations and Corporate Functions budget and quarterly forecasts, ensuring assumptions are robust, transparent, and aligned to efficiency plans.
• Work alongside Operations and Corporate Functions to ensure submissions on cost, headcount, and investment plans are realistic and prioritised.
• Ensure senior Operations and Corporate Function leaders are fully briefed and accountable for their financial plans and outcomes.
• As a member of the Global Finance team, you are expected to identify and implement efficiency and value improvements.
• Work with Financial Control to ensure the integrity of the financial data supplied is robust and accurate.
• Contribute to the calibration and creation of commercial financial controls policies and coordinate proper policy interpretation and execution in the region.

Requirements

• Chartered Accountant
• 10-15 years’ experience as a Commercial Finance professional
• Exceptional interpersonal and influencing skills, able to challenge and collaborate with diverse stakeholders at all levels
• Proven experience partnering with Operations, COO, or central support functions, with the ability to operate effectively where the remit, governance, and priorities of the function are still evolving.
• Strong understanding of how support functions enable front office performance, including the commercial and operational trade-offs between cost, service quality, scalability, and risk.
• Demonstrated ability to identify, quantify, and articulate efficiency opportunities, translating operational improvements into clear financial and capacity outcomes.
• Experience supporting cost optimisation, premises strategy, procurement reviews, or operational transformation initiatives, with confidence to challenge legacy ways of working constructively.
• Proven ability to prioritize competing demands and meet deadlines while maintaining quality.