Global Controllership Director — Close Integrity and Judgment Governance

The mandate

This appointment owns the integrity of the group close as a permanent management discipline, not merely the production of a calendar. The Director will establish which accounting judgments may remain local, which require central concurrence and which must be placed before executive or audit governance. The remit includes the quality of balances, evidence and explanations from first entry through signed reporting representation.

The incoming leader inherits no published assumptions about organisation size, systems or operating model. The first task is therefore diagnostic: map the reporting perimeter, locate judgment-heavy accounts, identify recurring late adjustments and understand where accountability separates from ledger access. From that evidence, the Director will set a controllership standard that can withstand both routine quarters and exceptional reporting events.

Decision authority includes issuing close instructions, rejecting unsupported submissions, convening judgment panels and requiring remediation owners to commit dates. Material accounting conclusions remain subject to the approval reserved for the Chief Accounting Officer, while disclosure ownership and business forecasts sit outside this position. The Director is expected to make those boundaries visible so that escalation occurs before, rather than after, a reporting deadline.

During the first ninety days, success will mean an agreed risk-ranked close map, a baseline of journal and reconciliation quality, and a small number of corrective interventions already completed. By month six, the close should operate with explicit evidence gates and transparent exceptions. By month twelve, the organisation should have a repeatable judgment archive, measurable reductions in late corrections and a successor bench capable of running the discipline without personal dependence on the Director.

The durable opportunity is to turn controllership into a source of reliable decisions. That requires firmness without bureaucracy: simplifying low-risk activity, concentrating review on estimates and unusual entries, and making the reasoning behind reported numbers accessible to senior leaders who did not prepare them.

What you will own

• Define a global close policy that assigns preparer, reviewer, approver and escalation ownership for every material reporting stream.
• Establish evidence thresholds for estimates, manual journals, reconciliations and post-close adjustments, with authority to return deficient submissions.
• Chair a recurring accounting-judgment forum and maintain a decision log linking facts, alternatives, conclusion, approver and reconsideration trigger.
• Rank balance-sheet risks by magnitude, volatility and evidence weakness, then direct remediation capacity toward the highest residual exposure.
• Approve the operating close calendar and authorize narrowly controlled exceptions where legal or reporting constraints justify them.
• Present close health, unresolved judgments and correction trends to executive finance governance in language that separates fact from interpretation.
• Build a controllership talent standard covering technical depth, challenge behaviour, documentation quality and readiness for broader accountability.
• Sponsor automation only where it strengthens traceability, control ownership and analytical review; technology purchasing remains outside the role.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate Director-level ownership of a multi-entity close in which you reduced late or unsupported adjustments without weakening accounting scrutiny.
• Show personally authored positions on difficult accounting estimates and explain how contrary evidence, materiality and governance affected the conclusion.
• Provide evidence of designing a balance-sheet substantiation regime that changed reviewer behaviour rather than simply adding attestations.
• Describe how you handled disagreement between operational leadership, local finance and external assurance while preserving an independent accounting view.
• Evidence fluency across IFRS and at least one additional major reporting framework, including reconciliations between policy and ledger application.
• Show that you have built technical-accounting capability below your own level and transferred recurring decisions into a usable institutional record.
• Explain the metrics you used to distinguish a faster close from a better close, including a measure that exposed hidden rework.

Working terms and boundaries

• This is a continuing executive appointment with full-time accountability and first-year outcomes assessed at months three, six and twelve.
• The Director may set close standards and refuse inadequate evidence, but cannot unilaterally approve reserved accounting conclusions or public disclosures.
• Compensation includes annual incentives and long-term awards; there is no day-rate conversion or guaranteed transaction payment.
• Hybrid attendance will follow governance and reporting needs, including concentrated on-site presence around critical close and review periods.
• Candidate conflicts involving audit relationships, financial interests or privileged information must be disclosed before confidential details are released.

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 5 October 2026. Mandate reference FNA-PER-2026-LON-01.