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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Chief of Finance

💰 $ - $

FinanceExecutiveLeadership

🎯 Role Definition

The Chief of Finance (Head of Finance) is the senior finance executive responsible for designing and executing the organization's financial strategy, ensuring accurate and timely financial reporting, leading budgeting and forecasting (FP&A), managing cash and capital, maintaining strong financial controls and compliance (GAAP/IFRS/SOX), and partnering with executive leadership and the board to drive sustainable growth and shareholder value. This role combines strategic planning, operational excellence, stakeholder management, and hands-on financial stewardship across accounting, treasury, tax, audit, and systems.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Finance Director / Director of Finance with cross-functional P&L responsibility
  • Corporate Controller or Head of Accounting with demonstrated systems and controls leadership
  • VP Finance / Financial Planning & Analysis leader in a complex or high-growth organization

Advancement To:

  • Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or Group CFO
  • President / Chief Operating Officer (COO) in smaller or matrixed organizations
  • Non-executive Director / Finance Committee Chair on corporate boards

Lateral Moves:

  • Head of Corporate Development or Strategy (M&A lead)
  • Head of Treasury / Capital Markets

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Define, own and continuously refine the multi-year financial strategy aligned to corporate objectives — including capital allocation, working capital optimization, and investment prioritization — ensuring alignment with growth targets, profitability goals, and liquidity requirements.
  • Lead preparation and delivery of accurate, GAAP/IFRS-compliant monthly, quarterly and annual financial statements, management accounts, and board-level reporting packages that provide actionable insights for executive decision-making.
  • Own annual budgeting, rolling forecasts and scenario planning processes (driver-based models), coordinating cross-functional inputs and producing consolidated forecasts that support strategic planning and investor communications.
  • Design and manage the FP&A function to deliver robust financial models, scenario analyses, KPI dashboards and variance explanations that translate strategy into measurable and monitored performance.
  • Steward the organization's cash and liquidity strategy, including treasury operations, cash forecasting, short- and long-term borrowing, bank and lender relationships, and margin/covenant management to protect solvency and funding flexibility.
  • Lead capital raises, debt financing, refinancing and capital markets interactions, preparing investor materials, conducting due diligence, and negotiating terms with banks, private investors, and institutional partners.
  • Direct accounting, tax, payroll and statutory compliance functions to ensure on-time filings, effective tax planning, transfer pricing considerations, and adherence to local and international regulatory requirements across jurisdictions.
  • Establish, monitor and continuously improve robust internal controls, SOX readiness (if applicable), audit trails and finance policies to minimize financial risk and provide auditability for internal and external auditors.
  • Orchestrate M&A strategy and execution: target evaluation, financial due diligence, valuation modeling, integration planning and post-merger performance tracking and synergies realization.
  • Develop and maintain financial systems strategy and roadmap (ERP, consolidation tools, reporting platforms), lead ERP implementations or upgrades (e.g., NetSuite, Oracle, SAP) and ensure finance automation and data integrity.
  • Manage enterprise-wide pricing, cost-to-serve and margin analysis programs to identify margin improvement opportunities and influence product, commercial and operational decisions with finance-backed recommendations.
  • Provide executive-level analysis for strategic initiatives such as new market entry, product launches, joint ventures, and restructuring, quantifying financial impact and risk/reward trade-offs.
  • Build and lead a high-performing finance organization: recruiting, coaching, career planning, succession management and establishing clear roles, metrics and service-level agreements for finance-delivered services.
  • Serve as a primary business partner to the CEO and senior leadership, translating financial implications into strategic options, measurable objectives and operational plans.
  • Drive performance management processes including cost discipline, budget-to-actual reviews, monthly business reviews and corrective action plans that tie to enterprise objectives.
  • Manage relationships with external stakeholders including banks, auditors, tax authorities, insurers and rating agencies; prepare and present financial narratives for board and investor meetings.
  • Implement data governance and analytics best practices within finance — standardizing master data, improving data pipelines, and using visualization tools (Power BI, Tableau) to democratize financial insights and accelerate decision cycles.
  • Establish and enforce financial policies (capital expenditure approval, expense policies, delegation of authority) to maintain consistency and mitigate operational and compliance risk.
  • Lead enterprise risk management activities related to financial exposures including currency, interest rate, commodity, counterparty and credit risk — and implement hedging, insurance and mitigation strategies as appropriate.
  • Oversee procurement-finance alignment for contract reviews, vendor payment terms optimization, and working capital initiatives to release cash and improve supplier relationships.
  • Champion continuous process improvement and finance transformation initiatives that reduce close time, increase forecast accuracy and reduce cost-to-serve through automation and standardization.
  • Prepare and lead investor relations activities when required: earnings call preparation, investor roadshows, financial Q&A, and producing transparent, consistent messaging for shareholders and analysts.
  • Ensure integration of ESG/CSR metrics into financial reporting and decision-making, collaborating with sustainability leads to quantify financial impacts, reporting frameworks and disclosures where relevant.
  • Manage complex tax, regulatory and statutory projects such as transfer pricing studies, international restructuring, and multi-jurisdiction compliance programs to reduce tax risk and optimize effective tax rate.
  • Provide ad hoc executive financial analysis for special projects, litigation support, compensation plan modeling, and other strategic initiatives requiring deep financial expertise and cross-functional coordination.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Act as an advisor to functional leaders on financial implications of operational decisions and process changes.
  • Facilitate cross-functional workshops to align financial objectives with commercial, operations and product teams.
  • Mentor finance staff on analytics, stakeholder communication, and business partnering skills.
  • Review and approve high-value supplier contracts, leases and financing agreements from a financial risk perspective.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Advanced financial modeling and valuation (DCF, LBO, scenario analysis) for strategic decision support and M&A evaluation.
  • Deep knowledge of GAAP and IFRS accounting standards and experience managing complex multi-GAAP reporting environments.
  • Expert-level budgeting, forecasting and FP&A methodologies including driver-based planning and rolling forecasts.
  • Treasury and cash management expertise, including credit facilities, covenant monitoring, cash pooling and intercompany financing.
  • Experience with ERP systems and finance transformation (NetSuite, Oracle Cloud, SAP S/4HANA) and consolidation/reporting tools (Adaptive, OneStream, Hyperion).
  • Strong experience with audit processes — internal audits, external statutory audits and SOX control implementations and remediation.
  • Tax planning and compliance acumen across corporate tax, indirect tax (VAT/GST), and international tax matters, including transfer pricing.
  • Proficiency in Excel at an expert level plus familiarity with SQL, data extraction, and BI tools (Power BI, Tableau) to build automated dashboards and analyses.
  • Capital markets and investor engagement experience, including preparing investor packs, roadshow materials, and negotiating financing terms.
  • M&A end-to-end experience: target screening, due diligence, purchase price allocation, integration planning and synergy tracking.
  • Knowledge of financial risk management techniques including hedging strategies for FX, interest rates and commodity exposures.
  • Understanding of regulatory reporting frameworks and experience managing statutory filings across multiple jurisdictions.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinker who translates finance data into long-term strategic recommendations and actionable roadmaps.
  • Executive presence with excellent written and verbal communication for board, investor and C-suite audiences.
  • Strong stakeholder management and influence skills to drive cross-functional alignment and change adoption.
  • Leadership and talent development: ability to attract, retain and coach high-performing finance teams.
  • High ethical standards, integrity and commitment to governance and transparency.
  • Problem-solving orientation with a focus on pragmatic solutions and continuous improvement.
  • Change management experience to lead finance transformation and cultural shifts.
  • Time management and prioritization skills in a dynamic, high-pressure environment.
  • Negotiation skills for vendor contracts, financing terms and commercial arrangements.
  • Detail orientation combined with the ability to synthesize complex financial information for non-finance audiences.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business Administration, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

  • MBA, Master's in Finance or Accounting, or professional qualification such as CPA, CA, ACCA, or CFA.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Accounting
  • Finance
  • Economics
  • Business Administration
  • Corporate Governance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 10–20+ years of progressive finance experience, including accounting, FP&A, treasury and financial operations.

Preferred:

  • 12–20 years with at least 5+ years in senior leadership (Head of Finance, VP Finance, Corporate Controller) and proven experience in strategic finance, M&A, capital markets or scaling finance functions in high-growth or complex multinational environments.
  • Experience reporting to CEO and Board, leading investor/analyst interactions, and managing multi-jurisdictional compliance.
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