Advisory Director, Capital and Performance — Integration

Not a second CFO, and not a deal adviser

The Advisory Director, Capital and Performance does not run finance and does not sit on the board. Nor is the appointment a transaction mandate. It is a 24-month advisory seat at the side of the Group Chief Executive Officer, built around one question: which of the organisation's commitments remain affordable if the downside case, rather than the plan, turns out to be true.

Living with the downside case

Most organisations build a downside case, file it, and plan against the base case anyway. The value of this adviser lies in making the downside case a working tool. Your counsel will help the Group Chief Executive Officer agree how decisions are divided, with clear thresholds for local leaders, and you will advise on which facts should drive choices about investment, capacity and controls. You will recommend which inherited commitments should go on, be paused or end once tested against the downside. You will challenge proposals carrying cost or risk that no one is accountable for, and value cases that leave out take-up, dependencies or downside. You will also advise on the escalation route and on how often progress, exceptions and still-open decisions surface.

Where integration choices are being made in a listed bank, the discipline matters twice over. Integration decisions create long tails of cost, and investors tend to judge them by whether management saw the downside coming.

An adviser with a record of honest baselines

The organisations behind your record will have had at least $470 million in revenue and 800 people, operating in six countries. Professionalisation is the most relevant experience, especially where you kept the board's account and the operating evidence aligned; succession and scale-up complete the set. The capability profile is capital allocation at level 4, supported at level 3 by FP&A forecasting, by risk judgement, and by controls and reporting. The Group Chief Executive will want to hear about baselines you set that survived challenge from senior leadership and from the people closest to customers, capital and controls, and about useful controls you protected while exposing the cost of each exception.

The two-year arc

Inside the first ninety days, you and the Group Chief Executive Officer should settle a downside case, and every inherited commitment should be queued for testing against it. Around month nine each of those commitments should have been reviewed against the downside, with a recommendation on whether to keep, hold or end it. By month 24 integration decisions should routinely be made against that tested downside discipline, and the reporting rhythm should stand without the adviser.

Selection, from the chief executive outwards

The Group Chief Executive Officer has the first conversation, a discreet video conversation during week one. The Regional President spends a working session with you in the third. Executive leaders from each function meet you in person as a panel in the fifth week; the full board of directors then discusses your appointment in the seventh week. Expect a response in writing within five working days of each.