Divisional Chief Financial Officer — Multi-Function Shared-Services Network

The mandate

A Singapore-led shared-services division is replacing transformation projects with persistent global service products across finance, procurement, employee operations and data. The organisation has product owners and roadmaps, but its finances still follow project codes, annual allocations and functional budgets. Lifecycle cost disappears across departments, product benefits are booked at launch and retirement obligations receive little attention. The executive committee has created a divisional CFO role before this model scales further.

The appointee will steward approximately S$720 million in annual services expenditure and provide financial leadership across 2,475 employees and partners. Responsibilities include product economics, planning, performance, capital allocation, control, commercial challenge and benefit assurance. Group finance retains consolidation and treasury; legal-entity CFOs retain statutory duties. This leader will make the division’s service portfolio financially intelligible and ensure decisions respect those wider obligations.

Urgency comes from a capital cycle already under way. Several product teams seek multiyear funding, yet consumption, unit cost and accountable benefits remain uncertain. The CFO must establish sufficient evidence to make choices without pausing all innovation or inventing precision that the current data cannot support.

Transfer pricing and legal-entity substance cannot be an afterthought. Persistent product ownership changes where decisions are made and which teams create and maintain intellectual property. The CFO will work with tax and legal leaders to ensure that funding, decision records and service agreements reflect actual conduct. Product finance must never promise a simple internal price at the expense of defensible cross-border treatment or the fiduciary position of a local entity.

Management information must also separate product health from divisional performance. A healthy service can operate within objectives while its portfolio consumes too much change capital, and a loss-making product may still discharge a mandatory enterprise duty. The CFO should frame both views and prevent a single margin measure from resolving unlike obligations.

Why this seat is open

The product model exposed a responsibility gap and prompted urgent creation of a senior finance seat. No predecessor exists, and the role is additive rather than a reclassification of the controller. The board seeks a qualified executive quickly so upcoming investment decisions do not hard-wire opaque economics. Interim support can reconcile accounts but cannot own capital recommendations.

What you will own

• Define financial treatment for product investment, run, change, remediation and retirement across service families.
• Build unit economics that show volume, complexity, infrastructure, workforce and vendor drivers.
• Establish benefit baselines with consuming businesses and verify realised outcomes after release.
• Advise on funding horizons and stop criteria, including products with strong sponsorship but weak adoption.
• Reconcile product views to divisional accounts and legal-entity control without parallel ledgers.
• Create forecasts that separate rate, volume, scope, architecture and productivity variance.
• Build a divisional finance team capable of challenging product, technology and service leaders.
• Present portfolio choices and downside actions to the relevant board committee.

The first 12 months

The first 90 days will deliver a reconciled product inventory and cost map for at least 70% of expenditure. The CFO will define investment and retirement gates, identify duplicated benefit claims and recommend which pending decisions may proceed, pause or require conditional funding.

By month eight, the model will govern live allocations across at least three contrasting service products. Finance will verify their benefits, establish consumption forecasts and expose the cost of exceptions. One underperforming product should be combined, resized or stopped on the strength of agreed evidence.

At year-end, 85% of expenditure should have product or enterprise-obligation ownership, portfolio forecast variance should be below 7%, and independently verified value should exceed the first funded wave by at least 1.4 times. Unallocated shared cost should fall by 40%, with no deterioration in statutory or management control.

What the board will measure

• Financial accounts and product economics that reconcile without losing decision usefulness.
• Investment, scale and retirement choices visibly altered by evidence.
• Benefit claims owned and validated outside the product organisation.
• High-quality forecasts and early disclosure of consumption or architecture variance.
• A credible finance bench across product, control and performance disciplines.

The person

You are a Divisional CFO, product-finance leader or senior controller who has governed software, platforms or persistent enterprise services. You can work with incomplete product data without allowing every assumption to remain optional. Relevant sectors include technology, payments, global business services and digitally enabled operations.

You bring 22–28 years of experience and have controlled at least S$410 million while supporting or leading an organisation of 1,750 people or more. The committee will seek a product you stopped, a benefit you rejected and a cost allocation you made behaviourally useful. Board exposure and multinational control judgement are required.

This is an onsite Singapore appointment with regional and global stakeholder travel.

Compensation and terms

The base range is S$500,000–680,000 plus annual incentive and long-term incentives. Performance measures cover product economics, decision quality, verified value, forecast and control. Gross savings claims alone carry no reward. Final terms reflect current mix and scope and are subject to standard long-term performance protections.

Confidentiality

Service products, consuming businesses and financial exposures are withheld. Qualified candidates will receive further information after reciprocal interest and a confidentiality undertaking. The role description uses rounded facts and must not be connected publicly to a named Singapore enterprise.