Group Chief Business Services Officer — Retail Financial Operations

The mandate

Store and online growth have produced several separate financial-processing arrangements inside an omnichannel retail group. Refunds, merchant-platform deductions and supplier claims can cross channels while each team sees only its own completed task. The group is creating a permanent chief business services office to own this operating system across the enterprise. The appointment is open-ended; an eighteen-month opening agenda establishes processing boundaries and dependable settlement evidence before the institution moves into continuing service development.

The critical decision is where responsibility changes hands. A refund authorised in one channel must be reflected in the merchant settlement and customer record without double reimbursement or an unexplained deduction. Supplier claims depend on agreed commercial facts, while financial policy determines their accounting treatment. You own the common processing and evidence routes, not those underlying commercial or accounting policies. Store operations, merchandising and the group CFO retain their professional decisions. The services function must make unresolved ownership visible rather than force local teams to close an exception merely to meet a processing target.

Approximately 500 colleagues operate through five functional leaders. The group services chief controls capacity, workflow ownership and service readiness across settlement, supplier services and related processing. You approve changes to the common operating model within the endorsed budget, define operational escalation and require source owners to meet evidence commitments. The chief executive and CFO approve material investment, policy changes and strategic outsourcing. Retail assortment, customer pricing and payment-provider selection are outside the office's executive remit. The model must support both stores and digital channels without assuming that identical processing is appropriate in every customer circumstance.

The first agenda should establish reliable handoff evidence and an economic view of the demand each channel creates. Peak retail periods require capacity that can protect settlement and supplier continuity without normalising avoidable exception work. Bengaluru-led visits to stores and fulfilment locations will test whether operating rules work where records originate. The enduring outcome is a group institution whose functional leaders can manage transaction conditions and explain residual exposure, with less reliance on personal interventions from the CFO whenever two channels disagree about which team owns the next step.

What you will own

• Define enterprise responsibility for refunds, merchant deductions and supplier claims through explicit handoff conditions, ensuring a task's local completion does not leave the financial event without a next accountable owner.
• Decide processing capacity across channel peaks using settlement-critical work and exception demand, protecting necessary controls while challenging volumes created by recurring source errors rather than real retail growth.
• Establish reconciliation of merchant settlements to authorised transaction events, requiring documented treatment of unresolved differences instead of clearing deductions merely because the payment provider has issued a final statement.
• Set common service readiness for new store or online-channel activity through tested source records and escalation routes, refusing an operating launch that assumes finance teams will reconstruct missing evidence afterwards.
• Shape the services investment case with the CFO by separating transaction demand, preventable rework and policy complexity, showing which operating change resolves the cause rather than only funding more processing staff.
• Develop five functional leaders to resolve normal ownership disputes within approved policy, maintaining visible escalation for commercial or accounting matters that the services office cannot determine alone.
• Review end-to-end transaction conditions with stores and fulfilment teams, translating practical source failures into operating changes while preserving customer authorisation and specialist decisions required by the underlying event.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate senior delivery or enterprise-services leadership in retail, e-commerce or a comparable transaction-intensive environment. Explain a cross-channel financial event that exposed an ownership failure and the operating decision you changed. The evidence must show more than faster task processing: establish how the complete transaction remained traceable and how your design prevented one function's completed work from becoming another function's unresolved liability.
• Bring 18–22 years combining finance knowledge, operating leadership and P&L or long-range planning accountability. FCA, ACA or equivalent applied financial grounding, supported by relevant management capability, is expected. You should understand merchant settlement and supplier-process conditions deeply enough to challenge operating evidence while preserving the group CFO's authority for accounting policy and material financial judgements.
• Show how you distinguished legitimate peak demand from exceptions generated by poor source practices. Describe the capacity or investment decision that followed, including work you chose not to standardise because commercial or customer conditions differed. The role needs an executive who can improve a common operating model without erasing necessary channel distinctions or measuring efficiency through unreviewed closure of difficult cases.
• Evidence leadership through functional heads at a multi-location scale, including delegation of normal disputes and clear escalation of reserved decisions. Site engagement, precise service commitments and constructive challenge of source owners are essential. Demonstrate how you made operational accountability durable after the first redesign, so the institution did not return to daily CFO intervention when retail volumes or merchant-platform arrangements changed.

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-150.