Interim Senior Vice President, Finance — Integration

When the numbers and the decisions belong together

Reporting quality is usually treated as an accounting matter: accurate, timely, compliant. Decision challenge is treated as a commercial matter: is this investment sound, is this contract worth signing? Finance leaders who keep the two apart end up with clean reports that nobody uses to decide anything, and confident decisions resting on figures nobody has checked. This interim Senior Vice President, Finance is appointed to bring them together, so that every significant decision can be traced to the reporting it relies on, and so that finance challenges decisions on the strength of numbers it trusts.

Answerable to the Audit Committee Chair, this is an executive seat with decision rights of its own. You will set the finance decision rules, including which thresholds local leadership keeps. You will determine which figures govern capital and capacity, and which show whether controls are holding. Inherited commitments carry on, be paused or be stopped on your decision. You will reject proposals that leave cost or risk sitting with nobody, and investment cases that skip take-up, links to other projects or downside. You will approve the finance leadership design and the route issues follow, reconcile the audit committee and business heads when they disagree, and decide how often progress, breaches and pending choices are reported.

Integration work makes all of this harder and more important. When businesses come together, charts of accounts, cost allocations and definitions of a customer or a margin rarely match, and a decision taken on a blended figure can look sound while resting on two incompatible sources. In logistics, where asset availability and customer reliability can be measured in quite different ways, that risk is sharp.

Eighteen months from baseline to one cadence

Within 90 days a reporting baseline should be agreed with the audit committee, and every key decision should be linked to the reporting it depends on. Around month nine, finance challenge should be visibly applied to integration decisions, with unsupported commitments paused or ended and the reasons on the record. By month 18, reporting quality and decision challenge should run as a single cadence, and a successor should be ready to lead finance.

The finance leader, and how you will be met

You have led finance for an organisation of 4,000 people or more, earning $755 million or more across at least three countries. Your experience of succession, M&A buy-side work and turnaround will be weighed, as will capital allocation at level 4, and risk judgement, FP&A forecasting, and controls and reporting at level 3 each. The audit committee will want to hear about a time the figures were incomplete and you made a call you could undo, then firmed it up as better numbers arrived. You keep board narrative and operating evidence joined, even when separating them would be more comfortable. You accept, too, that an integration commitment halted could be your first real achievement here, and you can defend that choice.

The process is short, and each stage has a different audience. The Audit Committee Chair begins, in week one, with a private conversation over video. The following week, week two, the Regional President hands you a case to work through together. In the third week you meet the board directors face to face. Within four working days of each step, our written response reaches you.