Senior Finance Business Partner

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Contract Type: Full Time, Fixed Term 6 months
Location: Brighton, Brighton Head Office - Remote

Join us as a Business Partner and Commercial Lead, partnering with Executive Committee stakeholders to influence decision-making and drive business performance. You'll deliver deep commercial insight, lead the standardisation of business case development and evaluation, strengthen cost management, and champion Commercial Finance across key business projects and change programmes.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Business Partnering and Relationship Management
- Be proactive in producing forward looking insight and analysis and ensure a joined-up approach to Business Partnering by taking a holistic view across the business.

- Identify key areas of opportunities and risks across the business, communicating these to the business areas and devising actions plans to support and follow these plans through

- Lead efforts to strengthen financial controls over student acquisition costs, including discounts, commissions, and related expense drivers

- Use data and improve use of Power BI as golden source to support better insight for analysis

- Ensure the delivery and quality of analysis, reports, benchmarking, KPI identification and measurement, and historical trends to the business to enable proactive decision making.

- Representing the interests and requirements of commercial finance in organisation-wide projects, change initiatives, core process and systems evaluation and implementation.

- Ensure awareness of and incorporate industry benchmarking, competitor analysis, market trends, macro factors impacting business performance.

- Champion a growth and cost efficiency mindset across wider business as two key principles to move the business forward

- Co-ordinate with Business Partner team and wider Finance colleagues to ensure a standardised approach to preparation and evaluation of business cases, that provide financial evaluation and assess financial implications, across the portfolio and establish a mechanism of internal cross-portfolio benchmarking.

- Oversight (and ownership, where appropriate) of capital investment business case preparation and evaluation, ensuring a standardised model across the organisation.

- Establish a mechanism for post-implementation project evaluation.

- Challenge the business on commercial decisions including, but not limited to: Gate Meetings, Forecasting Cycles, Commercial Committees

- Have and maintain clear working files / directory across the team which are clean and easy to use (e.g.: for business cases / scenarios)

- Foster and drive improved team capability, financial models, and processes to deliver enhanced and standardised commercial analysis across the business.

- Provide commercial expertise in the preparation (and delivery) of reporting and operational presentations to Study Group Senior Leadership Team and Executive Committee.

- Continuous improvement – identify and feed in improvements to the planning process in striving towards best practise.

- Working closely with FP&A team to ensure clear lines of accountability working in collaborative approach

- Collaborate with HR and other key partners to align on data and insights, strategies and expectations, working closely to solve problems and ensure compliance.

- Ensure CFO and Director of Commercial Finance are kept up to date through maintaining the project activity planner and tracker

- Taking ownership of the monthly P&L results analysis to highlight improvement areas and to manage the vehicles which non finance stakeholders are engaged on their performance (monthly meetings etc)

Leadership
- Deputising for Head of FBP and Director of Commercial Finance where appropriate, involving providing project-based Finance support to members of the Executive Committee and other key stakeholders.

- Leadership and development across the wider Commercial Finance team through providing thought leadership, coordination and mentoring.

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