Leeds Finance Business Partner

As the Leeds Finance Business Partner working for this well-known Financial Services business in Leeds you will partner with the COO in order to provide insightful financial analysis of costs, support business case modelling contribute to key decision making and proactively drive improved business performance. This role is to cover for a period of maternity leave and will be for a period of twelve months.

Key responsibilities:

• Business partner to Chief Operating Officer, providing insight for £100m+ annual spend.
• Understand the business area (commercial drivers & strategy) in order to provide strategic support, insightful analysis and advice on any upcoming opportunities whilst also being able to flag risks and agree actions to mitigate them. Accountabilities include but not limited to:
• - Deputise for Senior Manager Cost & Investment team
• - Support Senior Manager Cost & Investment in defining business partnering strategic priorities
• - Produce Group level analsyis and insight for Finance, Board and EXCO reporting.
• - Coach & motivate a high performing business partnering team
• Identify, develop and manage key strategic relationships, contributing to crucial meetings (Chief level and Cost Forums) and acting as a trusted advisor by providing financial input that informs the debate and strategic thinking/plans.
• Educate the business on industry best practice and options for cost management, highlighting how LFBP role can add value through upskilling and sharing specialist. Eg Capitalisation rules and other accounting policy treatments.
• Drive commercial thinking to improve decision making, challenging the business on process, approach and submissions to ensure better outcomes for the Group and challenging behaviour that puts achieving longer term plans at risk - egg recruitment or repatriation of budget.
• Apply professional judgement balancing timely updates to stakeholders with longer term analysis of emerging issues.
• Proactively drive improvement, improving forecasting and identifying opportunities to streamline and automate process/reporting through HFR/Hyperion/VBA etc. utilising the Cost operations team.
• Anticipate challenges from the business. Translate the C&I strategy of reducing reporting/handle turning and increasing insight to allow the business to better understand why changes/requests are made
• Act as finance SME enabling the business to track progress towards targets and supporting the director to understand their commitments in the cost tracker and 2020 cost target in order to deliver the savings.

You will be able to demonstrate:

• Will possess an accounting qualification (CIMA/ACCA/ACA) - exams and experience complete.
• Ability to convert high level strategy and goals into operational plans
• Ability to work with autonomy and make time sensitive commercial decisions with support from line manager
• Highly numerate, intellectually strong and capable of digesting and interpreting technical information.
• Analytical thinker able to identify key issues and gather data to drive improvement
• Ability to apply professional judgement
• Proactively seeks to improve processes and outcomes
• Ethical in approach
• Self-confident, resilient individual who is able to anticipate issues and overcome them
• Experience of working in a deadline-driven financial reporting environment.
• Able to interpret new guidance and regulations and educating/informing the business of any changes and their implications.
• Able to translate these requirements into a set of business deliverables and ensure any outputs are reviewed and tested sufficiently to ensure correct accounting treatment and reporting