Investment Appraisal and Benefits Realisation Vice President

The mandate

The Vice President will create one continuous discipline from investment thesis through approval, delivery and realised benefit. Appraisal is currently strongest at the funding gate; after approval, original assumptions, changed scope and actual outcomes can become separated. The role will make learning and reallocation as important as initial financial attractiveness.

This permanent portfolio owns investment-case standards, independent financial challenge, benefit-baseline integrity and post-investment review. It must recognise that different choices require different measures while still preserving comparability across cash timing, execution burden, risk and opportunity cost.

The Vice President may return incomplete cases, approve financial methodology, require staged release recommendations and refer deteriorating commitments for continuation review. The position does not approve capital, lead implementation or own claimed benefits. Sponsors retain those accountabilities and must sign both baselines and outcome updates.

During year one, the new leader will triage the active portfolio, establish review tiers, backcheck a representative set of decisions and embed continuation gates. Success will be visible when resources move in response to evidence and when sponsors can explain variance from the original thesis without rewriting history.

What you will own

• Establish tiered appraisal standards based on exposure, reversibility, uncertainty and decision complexity rather than one universal template.
• Require investment papers to state counterfactual, cash profile, capacity need, dependency, range, opportunity cost and testable benefit owner.
• Create a locked approval baseline and controlled change record preserving the difference between changed facts, changed scope and missed execution.
• Review the active portfolio for duplicate benefits, expired assumptions, delayed decisions and commitments that now merit stop-or-rescope examination.
• Introduce continuation gates with evidence thresholds, recovery choices and explicit authority for escalation to the approving forum.
• Reconcile realised benefits to financial outcomes while separating attribution, timing, substitution and external movement.
• Publish learning reviews that improve future assumptions without turning them into exercises in blame avoidance.
• Develop investment finance partners capable of independent challenge and constructive engagement with senior sponsors.

Candidate qualifications

• At least 17 years in FP&A, investment appraisal, corporate finance or benefits governance, with five years leading a material portfolio discipline.
• Evidence of a post-investment review that led to stop, stage, redirect or redesign rather than simply recording variance.
• Technical mastery of cash-flow appraisal, risk ranges, counterfactuals, attribution, benefit dependencies, opportunity cost and option value.
• A documented example of identifying duplicated benefits across separate proposals before or after approval.
• Experience preserving approval baselines while allowing legitimate scope and external changes to be evaluated fairly.
• Demonstrated independence in challenging executive sponsors without assuming approval or delivery accountability.
• Leadership evidence showing how finance partners learned to examine both investment logic and implementation reality.

Working terms and boundaries

• This is an ongoing appointment, with first-year outcomes reviewed after portfolio triage, standards approval, first continuation round and annual learning report.
• Method approval, financial challenge and escalation belong to the Vice President; capital approval and benefit delivery remain with established forums and sponsors.
• Hybrid attendance centres on investment committees, continuation reviews and sponsor clinics, with scheduled regional travel.
• The team will not act as project management, technical assurance or procurement, and may not certify benefits it owns.
• Year-one acceptance requires governed baselines, operational continuation gates, reconciled backchecks and an internally sustainable partner model.

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-HKG-17.