Assignment brief
The platform helps businesses issue and manage payment instruments, employee spend, approvals, reimbursements and related finance workflows. Its commercial model may combine software, payment economics, programme partners, customer balances, interchange or transaction income and implementation. The company requires a Board-level consultant to prepare its finance and control architecture for listing scrutiny.
The consultant will advise; management and the Board retain all decisions and statutory responsibilities. The assignment is not a director appointment and does not confer authority over auditors, employees or regulated counterparties.
Six readiness work packages
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Regulatory and principal-agent map. Document the company's role across software, payment initiation, instrument programme, fund flow, credit or advance features, reimbursements and partner services. Align contracts, accounting and risk ownership with actual conduct.
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Customer-fund and settlement architecture. Reconcile funding, authorisation, clearing, settlement, refunds, failed transactions, chargebacks, reserves and unused balances. Separate company liquidity from all customer-related money and restricted accounts.
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Revenue-quality review. Disaggregate subscription, implementation, transaction, interchange, partner-funded, float-related and other income. Test gross-versus-net presentation, variable consideration, credits, incentives and cohort-level collected contribution.
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IPO control and close programme. Design a sequenced plan for entity close, reconciliations, manual journals, access, vendor and customer masters, related parties, taxation, regulatory returns, evidence retention and internal financial controls.
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Technology and operational assurance. Define audit coverage for spend-policy configuration, role and limit changes, card or account controls, duplicate or fraudulent transactions, integrations, privileged access, incident response and resilience.
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Metric and disclosure evidence. Standardise active customers, active users or instruments, payment volume, software and transaction revenue, retention, expansion, loss, fraud, gross margin and cash flow. Reconcile historical changes and assign source-system ownership.
Required outputs
The consultant will deliver a readiness baseline, regulatory-role map, funds-flow and reconciliation model, accounting-position register, control-remediation roadmap, metric dictionary, disclosure evidence index, Audit Committee calendar and management certification framework. Each gap must have severity, owner, dependency, target evidence and escalation route.
The work should include dry runs of monthly and quarterly close, material-control testing, metric reproduction and scenario exercises for settlement outage, partner failure, fraud spike, data incident and customer-fund mismatch.
Candidate profile
Candidates should have at least 20 years of experience across FinTech finance, payments, audit, controllership, regulatory operations, capital markets, IPO execution or internal controls. Former CFOs, controllers, audit partners, payments-risk leaders and IPO programme heads may be suitable.
IICA registration is not required. Candidates must remain independent of the statutory auditor and disclose relationships with investors, bankers, payment partners, technology vendors or prospective transaction parties. The consultant may not present advisory conclusions as audit assurance or promote another commercial mandate through the assignment.
Completion standard
The engagement will be complete when material funds and revenue flows reconcile; accounting positions are Board-approved; significant controls have design and operating evidence; IPO metrics can be independently reproduced; unresolved gaps are transparently disclosed; and management can sustain the process without consultant dependency.