Group Platform Chief Financial Officer, Industrial Development

The mandate

An industrial project development platform with four controlled development entities is assembling a portfolio whose commitments now extend beyond any individual project's financing plan. Feasibility papers are prepared separately, with optimistic commissioning dates and inconsistent treatment of contingent costs. The Group Platform CFO will establish a disciplined investment perspective that tests both project attractiveness and the platform's capacity to fund several developments at once.

The appointment is open-ended permanent employment. Its first twenty-four months focus on investment gates, integrated funding scenarios and capital recycling choices as projects move from development to operation. The executive will not be judged solely by financial close volumes: declining an unsound commitment or delaying a project until critical evidence exists may protect more value than securing funding on an unsupported timetable.

The financial model must recognise what the platform knows and what remains conditional. Development expenditure, commissioning risk, customer demand and debt availability do not become certain because a base case links them neatly. The CFO will require evidence owners, downside scenarios and explicit decision conditions, so directors can see the effect of correlated delays or funding constraints across the portfolio.

Within approved delegation, the role leads finance, validates investment papers and controls capital release against authorised stages. The Investment Committee approves new developments, disposals, material refinancing and commitments outside agreed limits. Engineering readiness, land or permitting advice and legal enforceability remain with qualified specialists; financial modelling must accurately reflect their findings without purporting to certify them.

An effective first-year platform will have comparable investment cases, a financing capacity view and stop-or-proceed records that survive scrutiny when circumstances change. The second year establishes a repeatable portfolio review and credible recycling alternatives for mature assets. These milestones build enduring CFO accountability, with ongoing responsibility for financial control, funding discipline and the quality of future investment recommendations.

What you will own

• Establish investment gate requirements that connect technical readiness, customer evidence and funding conditions to capital release, preventing development expenditure from advancing simply because an earlier budget reserved it.
• Decide the finance validation standard for project models, requiring consistent treatment of contingencies, commissioning timing and financing costs while preserving material differences between underlying industrial business models.
• Build a portfolio funding capacity scenario showing overlapping cash demands and refinancing dependencies, giving the committee a credible alternative sequence when several developments compete for limited resources.
• Challenge capital recycling proposals through executable options and transaction costs, distinguishing a theoretically valuable asset from one that can release usable capital within the required investment timetable.
• Govern post-approval assumption reviews, documenting why a project remains viable or requires revised conditions when customer demand, cost estimates or specialist readiness findings change materially.
• Develop lender and investor financial materials that reconcile to approved committee cases, ensuring fundraising narratives do not silently remove downside assumptions or imply certainty not present in the investment evidence.
• Build a finance leadership bench capable of independent project challenge, using investment case reviews to develop judgement and reduce reliance on one executive's modelling knowledge or external adviser relationships.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate CFO, corporate finance or comparable senior investment finance leadership across industrial development, engineering or energy-related projects. Explain how you evaluated a project before commitment, identified a condition that should delay capital release and influenced the final decision. Personal judgement and accountability matter more than participation in a financing workstream alone.
• Bring advanced project financial modelling and funding experience, including commissioning sensitivities, debt service, contingencies and portfolio liquidity interactions. Provide a case where several feasible investments could not safely proceed together, explaining the sequence or financing alternative adopted and the assumptions that made the original combined plan untenable.
• Show disciplined investment governance, including evidence ownership, conditional approvals and post-investment review. You must recognise the boundary between interpreting specialist findings financially and claiming technical or legal assurance. Describe how you handled an unresolved readiness issue in the decision paper without disguising it as a model sensitivity that directors could easily overlook.
• Establish credibility leading finance professionals and managing experienced project sponsors, lenders and committees. Evidence should include a difficult stop, defer or recycle recommendation and the subsequent operating follow-through. A recognised professional finance qualification or equivalent technical record must support clear accounting, control and executive communication alongside investment expertise.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-190.