Interim Senior Vice President — Shared-Service Cost Decisions and Finance Continuity

The mandate

A banking shared-service platform is expanding its operating perimeter to additional regional service recipients and needs senior finance leadership through the transition. The next SVP has been selected but cannot join until the following planning cycle, so cost allocation and capacity commitments need senior financial arbitration in the meantime. This six-month executive engagement begins on 26 October 2026. You will hold the expanded finance seat, make delegated decisions and preserve the quality of the operating forecast while the successor completes notice and induction arrangements.

The immediate problem is conflicting interpretation of service costs. Delivery teams view added capacity as essential for incoming work, while recipient businesses dispute charges because volume and service assumptions differ between their plans. You will establish a common cost-and-demand bridge, identify commitments already made and distinguish capacity that can be redirected from expenditure that is effectively locked in. The forecast must expose uncertain migration volumes rather than offset them with unsupported productivity promises. Routine reporting should continue while the difficult assumptions receive explicit executive decisions.

You lead twenty-five finance colleagues and can approve forecast revisions, internal finance priorities and expenditure concurrence within the platform delegation. Changes to recipient charging principles, material workforce commitments and contractual migration dates require regional CFO or steering-committee approval. Service owners retain delivery decisions and operational risk responsibility. Enterprise restructuring, negotiating external outsourcing contracts and changing regulatory reporting policy are excluded. The interim will not create permanent posts beyond approved establishment or use short-term cover as an opportunity to redesign the entire finance organisation.

The term ends on 26 April 2027 without extension. Handover requires two complete planning reviews using agreed demand and cost definitions, reconciliation of recipient charges to approved inputs and an inducted successor able to run the decision calendar. Material disputed charges must remain in an owner-based resolution register, not disappear through unexplained forecast adjustments. Bengaluru-based work keeps the executive close to delivery managers, with selected centre visits. A good six-month result is continuity plus a stronger basis for cost decisions, not an artificially frictionless transition achieved by accepting every demand.

What you will own

• Decide the first shared demand-and-cost baseline by reconciling delivery capacity, recipient volumes and committed migration dates, identifying assumptions that require executive agreement before charges enter the operating plan.
• Authorise forecast revisions within delegation using named drivers and supporting evidence, rejecting unsupported productivity offsets that make uncertain incoming volumes appear financially neutral without a credible operating mechanism.
• Establish a recipient-charge reconciliation that distinguishes agreed allocation rules, disputed demand and source-data errors, preserving transparency while routine service billing and management reporting continue on schedule.
• Set financial concurrence for incremental capacity against migration readiness and redeployment alternatives, placing material workforce or contractual commitments before the designated steering body rather than deciding outside the interim authority.
• Resolve planning-calendar bottlenecks through clear ownership and escalation, enabling managers to prepare defensible reviews without requiring the interim personally to reconstruct every recipient and delivery forecast.
• Induct the selected successor using live review sessions, a tested charge bridge and documented residual disputes, confirming that finance managers can defend the agreed evidence when executive cover concludes.

Candidate qualifications

• Offer twenty-two to twenty-eight years of finance experience with senior banking shared-service, cost-management or business-planning responsibility. Describe a service-cost dispute you personally resolved between delivery and recipient teams, including which assumptions were inconsistent and how the decision changed the forecast or resource commitment. Merely allocating central expenses according to an inherited formula will not demonstrate sufficient judgement.
• Bring strong accounting and analytical competence, with Chartered Accountancy or an equivalent professional foundation. You must connect workforce capacity, service demand and cost recovery without assuming reported volume is a complete measure of workload. Experience should include separating committed expenditure from genuinely variable capacity and explaining the financial effect of migration delays, service complexity or changing recipient requirements.
• Have held delegated executive authority during a planning or transformation gap, including the ability to approve forecast changes and decline unsupported spending concurrence. Show how you maintained operations while escalating decisions beyond your remit, and how you avoided turning temporary leadership into an unauthorised structural redesign. Banking governance awareness must support practical decisions rather than become an excuse for endless referral.
• Be available to start onsite in Bengaluru on 26 October 2026 and remain through the fixed six-month term. Evidence a real successor handover in which managers retained ownership of the analytical working. You should be able to explain residual disagreement candidly, protect sensitive recipient data and coach the incoming executive without assuming they will adopt every personal preference you introduced during cover.

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 14 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-INT-2026-IND-015.