Head of Financial Planning and Analysis (Full Time )

• Budgeting and Forecasting: Lead the development of annual budgets and rolling forecasts, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives.

• Financial Modelling: Build and maintain complex financial models to support scenario planning, investment decisions, and business cases.

• Performance Analysis: Monitor and analyse financial performance against budgets and forecasts, providing actionable insights to senior leadership.

• Strategic Support: Partner with business units to identify opportunities for cost optimization, revenue growth, and margin improvement.

• Reporting: Deliver timely, accurate, and insightful financial reports for executive management, Board, and regulatory bodies.

• Variance Analysis: Investigate and explain variances between actual results and forecasts, recommending corrective actions where necessary.

• Data Integration: Collaborate with BI teams to ensure financial data integrity and leverage analytics for enhanced decision-making.

• Stakeholder Engagement: Act as a key liaison between Finance and other departments, translating financial insights into operational strategies.

• Process Improvement: Drive continuous improvement in FP&A processes, tools, and methodologies to increase efficiency and accuracy.

• Lead the BI team to deliver high-quality analytics and reporting solutions aligned with business objectives. Drive the evolution of the Society’s data and analytics capabilities to enable informed, strategic decision-making across all business areas.

• Develop and execute a BI strategy that supports organizational growth and operational efficiency.

• Gathering and documenting business requirements, performing gap analysis, facilitating workshops, and translating business needs into BI solutions.

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, providing insights that influence strategic decisions.

• Collaboration with Finance teams, budgeting and forecasting support, and financial KPI alignment.

• Provide thought leadership on how BI can shape future products, services, and customer experiences.

• Stay updated with industry trends, regulatory change and emerging BI technologies.

• Leading the design, delivery, and maintenance of BI programme to support business needs.

• Providing guidance to BI team on priorities based on business need, processes and business drivers.

• Providing vision and leadership to the bi function and team members.

• Production of financial models and other insight and analysis tools to assist with forward planning and strategic vision.

• Ensuring regulatory reports are maintained and up to date and meets the societies regulatory needs.

• Build solid working relationships with 3rd parties and within the BI team environment.

• Validating the reconciliation of data across the Society’s systems.

• Providing commentary on internal and/or external datasets showing trends relevant to the Society.

• Analyse, model and interpret large datasets.

• Ensure that staff and members’ data is secure, accurate and used correctly in line the Society GDPR policy and standards. Adhere to the Society Financial Crime Policy, the controls and report any internal or external incidents of actual or suspected fraud, money laundering or financial crime, either in accordance with the internal money laundering process (Suspicious Activities Report) or via the Society’s Whistleblowing Policy. Complete and pass an annual dedicated financial crime and bribery prevention computer-based training test.

• Undertake a role of Data Owner within data protection policy and Information Securities policy in your business function and provide oversight for management of data accuracy and processes including deletion, remediation, security and access. Provide support and directions to Data Stewards in operating of controls in place and escalation of exceptions or support for improvements.

• Any other duties as required by the Financial Accountant, Head of Finance and Finance Director that may from time to time be allocated and that are commensurate with the grading of the post.

• Experience in budgeting, forecasting and analysis (sector experience desirable)
• Strong stakeholder management skills
• Project management / ability to prioritise work compared to business needs.
• Ability to develop and evolve long term strategies while driving tactical projects.
• Excellence in planning and execution.
• Ability to liaise with both technical (Infrastructure) and non-technical (Operational) business areas.
• Actively promote a Right First-Time culture within BI.
• A committed team player, who can prioritise appropriately and work effectively towards tight deadlines in a fast paced and pressured environment.
• Passionate, positive, and enthusiastic.
• Proactive with a can-do attitude and a desire to challenge and improve the norm.
• Effective communication skills (written and verbally) – able to communicate with both internal and external stakeholders.
• Numerate and analytically minded, with a passion for the accuracy and quality and an investigatory capability.
• Meticulous and detail orientated, with strong evaluation skills.
• High level of literacy and the ability to present information in a user friendly, logical format.
• Knowledge of IT systems and Microsoft Office, in particular Excel.
• Be able to rise to the challenges presented in a demanding environment, whilst maintaining a high standard of work.
• Self-motivated and ability to use own initiative.
• Excellent time management, organisation, and administrative skills.
• Ability to act in good faith toward retail customers.
• Ability to enable & support retail customers to pursue their financial objectives.

Qualifications

Essential

• Advanced Excel skills (e.g. Macros, Pivot tables, Vlookup etc.) and intermediate Microsoft Office.
• Knowledge of the Microsoft SQL server suite including SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
• Detailed understanding of Data Warehouse concepts, different data sources and transactional applications.
• Working knowledge of MS Office packages – in particular strong excel skills.
• Understanding of BI Best practice / methodologies

Desirable

• Qualified Chartered Accountant
• Microsoft SQL Server Experience
• Experience in writing and developing queries using SQL and using these to produce extracts from Data Warehouses.
• Experience with other relational database management systems (RDBMS) such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Datawarehouse Experience
• Experience in Microsoft BI Stack
• Kimball understanding
• SSRS Experience
• SSIS Experience
• T-SQL Experience
• SSAS
• Sector Experience
• Prudential Risk Experience
• Regulatory Reporting Experience