Strategic Cost Architecture and Simplification Vice President

The mandate

The Vice President will make structural cost choices visible before they are reduced to annual expense targets. Cost pools have accumulated through legitimate decisions made at different times, but their current relationship to required outcomes, complexity and strategic capacity is not consistently evident. The role will create an economic architecture for simplification, reinvestment and controlled retirement.

This is a permanent leadership portfolio spanning cost taxonomy, activity-to-outcome mapping, complexity economics, commitment horizons and benefit validation. It must distinguish cost that can leave, cost that can only be avoided later and capacity that should be redeployed because it supports higher-value work.

The Vice President can set cost-planning definitions, require economic evidence in simplification proposals, validate benefits and escalate commitments that no longer support an approved purpose. Decisions affecting service, people, contracts and organisation design remain with authorised leaders. Finance will not use analytical authority as a proxy for those accountabilities.

The first year should produce a cost architecture, two end-to-end simplification portfolios and a reinvestment ledger. Success is measured by durable complexity reduction and realised economics, not gross initiative counts or expenditure moved between owners.

What you will own

• Define structural, activity-driven, complexity-driven, volume-driven, regulatory, discretionary and stranded cost categories with horizon-specific controllability.
• Map material activities and complexity sources to outcomes, service levels, dependencies and financial consequences.
• Identify cost created by proliferation, hand-offs, exceptions, low-use variants and duplicated governance without exposing protected operating detail.
• Design simplification cases that state the mechanism, transition burden, implementation capacity, cash timing and adverse service risk.
• Establish benefit validation that separates released expense, avoided growth, removed complexity and redeployed capability.
• Convene quarterly cost architecture reviews where continuing commitments must evidence current purpose and forward value.
• Track two simplification portfolios from approved baseline through implementation, financial realisation and reinvestment.
• Build finance-partner capability to challenge structural cost without defaulting to uniform reductions.

Candidate qualifications

• At least 17 years in FP&A, strategic cost, operating-model finance or enterprise simplification, including Vice President responsibility.
• Evidence of removing a structural complexity cost and reconciling the resulting benefit to cash or financial outcomes.
• Technical depth in cost behavior, activity economics, controllability, transition cost, complexity drivers and benefit attribution.
• A case where a proposed cost reduction would have shifted rather than removed work, and how you changed the decision.
• Experience integrating simplification with reinvestment so released capacity was visibly redeployed to priority outcomes.
• Ability to challenge cost ownership across senior stakeholders without assuming service or organisation-design authority.
• A track record of developing finance leaders who understand both economic architecture and implementation reality.

Working terms and boundaries

• The role is continuing, with first-year gates after taxonomy, portfolio selection, first realisation review and reinvestment backcheck.
• Financial standards, validation and challenge are included; people, service, contract and operating-design decisions are excluded.
• Hybrid work is structured around portfolio reviews, sponsor clinics and evidence-based benefits sessions.
• Savings cannot be booked merely because an activity is labelled simpler; obligation, workload and financial release must be demonstrated.
• Year-one completion requires two operated portfolios, reconciled benefits, transparent reinvestment and sustainable internal capability.

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 FPA-PER-2026-CHI-41.