Interim Chief Financial Officer — Controls

A finance leader who hands the forecast back

This board wants someone who, during a succession, has reset who decides, how work is funded and how often the business takes stock, and who believes a forecast belongs to the people running the business rather than to finance. That work was done in organisations spanning three countries, employing at least 500 people and turning over $345 million or more, and you have kept an investment, distribution and fiduciary platform operating without interruption while decision rights changed hands. You can be candid with the Board of Directors about what is unsettled and still recommend action, and you accept that your first clear win might be a finance commitment halted rather than a new one started.

The experiences under closest examination are succession, integration and value creation. The capability profile is capital allocation at level 4, with risk judgement, FP&A forecasting, and controls and reporting at level 3. Someone who needs unanimous agreement from country leaders before halting a finance commitment, or who wants influence without carrying the result for the full 24 months, will not be comfortable here.

Where your decisions fall

Forecast ownership sounds administrative until it is tested. The hard decisions are about who signs a number and what happens when it is missed. A business-unit head who owns a forecast must also own the explanation for the variance; a finance team that owns it on their behalf ends up defending numbers it did not make. Moving that ownership is a change in accountability, and it needs executive authority.

You will hold that authority. You will set the rules for finance decisions, decide how much business-unit heads may approve without you, and pick the measures that steer capital, people and control. Every financial commitment will get your verdict to keep going, pause or stop; proposals that push cost or risk onto a unit that has not taken it on will stop with you, as will investment whose case says nothing about adoption, what it depends on or the downside. You will approve the finance leadership structure and the route by which problems surface, and broker disputes between the board and business-unit heads before funds are committed.

In an asset manager, the forecast that matters most is often the one finance controls least: the revenue line that moves with markets and flows. A good interim CFO separates what business units can genuinely be held to from what they cannot, and makes that distinction explicit in how the forecast is built and judged.

The arc of two years

In the first ninety days, ownership of the forecast should be agreed for each business unit, together with the thresholds and controls the board will apply. By around month nine, every business-unit forecast should follow a common method, and any commitment with no one financially answerable for it should be on hold or closed. By month 24, forecasts should be owned by business-unit leaders and tested by finance rather than written by it, with control exceptions reaching the board on a regular cadence.

Opening and closing with the directors

Your first conversation is with the Board of Directors itself, by private video call in the opening week. The Regional President takes you through a working exercise in week three. Week five gathers, in person, executives who each lead a function, and the seventh week returns you to the full board. Expect a reply on each stage inside five working days.