Interim Chief Investment and Finance Officer — Renewal

Reading assumptions as costs

Many investment cases in banking are approved on a return calculation that quietly assumes the technology will be delivered, the controls will be built and the operations teams will absorb the change. The finance leader this cooperative or mutual banking organisation needs has learned to read those assumptions as costs. You have done it in an organisation of at least $810 million in revenue and 1,500 people, operating in two countries, and you have done it through buy-side M&A, integration and digital transformation, the three settings in which hidden dependencies most often surface after the money is spent.

The capability profile is capital allocation at level 4, then level 3 in FP&A forecasting, in controls and reporting, and in risk judgement. Capital allocation at level 4 means designing hurdles, not just applying them: deciding what a case must show before it can be compared with others, and making those rules stable enough that business heads stop relitigating them each quarter. You should also be able to show a well-liked commitment you closed, why, and the capacity that closing released.

Decisions the Group Chief Executive will look to you for

The appointment is interim and executive, with the Group Chief Executive Officer as the reporting line. You will set the financial decision framework, including the limits local leaders keep, and decide what proof investment, operating capacity and controls decisions must rest on. Each inherited commitment will proceed, be held or stop on your decision. Finance proposals that move cost or risk with no accountable executive stop with you; so do cases that leave out take-up, dependencies or downside. You also approve the finance leadership structure and escalation route, and resolve disputes with operating leaders before capital is committed.

In a mutual, capital is members' capital, and it cannot be replenished by a share issue in a bad year. That makes the discipline of turning down a weak case more consequential than in many shareholder-owned banks, and it is why hurdles here must be explicit rather than negotiated case by case.

Twenty-four months of investment discipline

Early on, within the first ninety days, the investment hurdles should be reset so that every case shows its delivery and control dependencies, with someone accountable for each. Around month nine inherited investment commitments should have been re-tested against those hurdles and kept, held or ended on the evidence. By month 24 capital allocation, finance escalation and reporting should run through a renewed structure that works without the interim officer.

Four meetings, chief executive to full board

The Group Chief Executive Officer meets you privately on video in the opening week. The Board Chair takes the third week, in a working session of its own. Executive leaders from each function form an in-person panel in the fifth week; the seventh week ends with the full board of directors in discussion. Every stage is answered in writing within two working days.