Interim Venture Finance Chief — Payment Platform Financing Continuity

The mandate

A payment-technology venture is in a financing process and needs a single finance owner of the cash plan and diligence responses. Operational payment activity continues under existing control and compliance owners. An interim venture finance chief will start on 26 October 2026 for nine months while recruitment for the permanent seat runs in parallel. Any agreed extension must fit within an overall twenty-four-month cap, rather than turn executive cover into an unreviewed continuing appointment.

Your first task is to establish which cash can fund the venture and which balances remain subject to settlement or other restrictions confirmed by qualified owners. The financing case must reconcile operating earnings, cash burn and unsettled obligations without presenting gross payment flows as venture revenue or accessible liquidity. Legal and compliance specialists determine the relevant contractual and regulatory conditions. You maintain the finance evidence and challenge inconsistent treatment, asking for explicit rulings where records do not establish availability instead of supplying your own legal interpretation.

The interim holds executive finance authority over eight colleagues, close standards, forecast assumptions and operating payments within approved delegations. You may refuse unsupported finance submissions and reprioritise expenditure inside the agreed cash envelope. Directors approve borrowing, equity issuance, material funding representations and changes to reserved capital commitments. Partner settlement operations, payment-product redesign and the permanent organisation's restructuring are excluded. The financing process may change its timetable, but the interim's accountability remains reliable evidence and cash continuity, not a guarantee that external investors will approve or complete a transaction.

Handover requires two complete reporting cycles in which venture cash, operating performance and confirmed restrictions reconcile, a finance-owned diligence log with accountable resolutions, and a successor who can reproduce the funding downside case from the maintained records. The permanent appointee must lead one board finance review and one update of the cash plan without interim preparation of the substantive decisions. Bengaluru-based availability is essential. The board will receive a clear residue of unresolved investor or professional questions, rather than a closing presentation that conceals them to imply the financing work is finished.

What you will own

• Establish a first-month liquidity view separating unrestricted venture funds from settlement-linked or otherwise constrained balances, retaining qualified-owner evidence for every material classification that changes spending capacity.
• Decide operating-payment priorities within the authorised cash envelope, showing directors the consequences of deferred commitments before a short-term preservation choice creates a hidden service or financing problem.
• Reconcile the financing narrative to operating revenue and cash burn, distinguishing platform economics from gross payment activity so diligence materials do not overstate the venture's own resources.
• Control the finance diligence issue log through named factual owners and reviewed responses, escalating unresolved legal or compliance conditions rather than converting assumptions into apparently settled financial evidence.
• Lead the reporting team through two controlled closes that reproduce liquidity and operating measures, correcting unexplained bridge items and identifying source weaknesses that the permanent appointee must continue managing.
• Test funding delay scenarios against committed expenditure and realistic collection evidence, presenting actionable executive choices without treating an expected investor decision as financing already available.
• Transfer finance decision ownership through a successor-led board review and cash-plan update, recording residual funding uncertainty and the maintained evidence routes required for subsequent capital discussions.

Candidate qualifications

• Be available for an onsite, five-day executive assignment from 26 October 2026 and explain how you would take control of the cash position during the first ten working days. Show prior responsibility for startup or platform finance where reporting continuity and funding discussions overlapped. The proof must establish decisions you personally held, not only investor materials produced under another executive's accountability.
• Demonstrate 12–18 years of finance practice with head-of-finance, fractional CFO or equivalent senior scope. Strong accounting grounding through ACCA, relevant professional study or proven applied expertise is important. Describe a case in which gross transaction activity differed materially from the enterprise's revenue or accessible cash, including the professional evidence you sought and the financial interpretation you corrected.
• Evidence a financing or capital review in which you maintained clear boundaries between confirmed facts, pending professional decisions and investor requests. You must be able to reject a misleading response constructively, sustain a versioned record and show the board a funding-delay choice it could actually authorise. Familiarity with payment, fintech or comparable settlement-sensitive platform economics is valuable; transaction closure itself is not the required achievement.
• Explain a leadership handover where a successor could reproduce your judgement from maintained finance evidence. The role requires disciplined delegation to a small team, secure handling of funding information and prompt escalation of unavailable or inconsistent records. Readiness to document unresolved conditions is essential: executive cover succeeds through reliable transfer, not by leaving future directors dependent on the interim's recollection of private conversations.

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 10 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-INT-2026-IND-147.