Senior Vice President, Enterprise Budgeting — Interim

The mandate

A banking group's next-year budget build needs executive ownership: unresolved assumptions and an overextended central team. Business submissions exist, but approval status is unclear and several cost transfers have been reflected differently across the receiving and releasing units. An interim executive is needed to restore budget control before decisions become irreversible operating commitments.

The assignment begins on 26 October 2026 and runs for nine months, with a permanent search operating alongside it. The initial fortnight must establish the submission register, decision timetable and material reconciliation issues; subsequent work stabilises the approved baseline and the first forecast updates. Any extension requires written approval, with total engagement length capped at twenty-four months.

Handover requires a CFO-approved budget, a reconciled forecast bridge, documented ownership for significant drivers and a successor who can reproduce the next planning cycle without relying on the interim's memory. A disputed assumption need not be cosmetically resolved to meet that standard: its decision owner, financial effect and agreed escalation must be visible. Evidence quality matters more than an apparently clean consolidation.

The interim Senior Vice President may reject incomplete planning submissions, assign central team priorities and approve forecast process changes within the existing finance delegation. New expenditure commitments, permanent hiring and transfers beyond approved tolerances require the CFO or designated executive committee. The interim has executive responsibility for planning delivery but cannot vary credit policy, amend treasury limits or authorise a business restructuring independently.

This is not a core system replacement, a prudential reporting remediation or a cost-reduction programme imposed without business evidence. Existing financial tools will be used unless a limited control repair is indispensable. The seat should close with a stable operating rhythm and a fully inducted permanent leader, rather than expand into every finance issue exposed by the budget review.

What you will own

• Triage the inherited submission register into approved, conditional and unreviewed cases, requiring business sponsors to substantiate material assumptions before central consolidation confers apparent approval.
• Decide the recovery planning timetable with named review owners, reserving executive decision slots for cross-business issues that analysts cannot resolve through spreadsheet reconciliation alone.
• Reconcile inter-business cost transfers and central charges, producing a paired adjustment log that prevents the enterprise budget from retaining savings in one unit without the corresponding expense elsewhere.
• Challenge revenue, staffing and investment assumptions through recent operating evidence, documenting where a proposed plan requires an executive risk decision rather than an unsupported planning convention.
• Establish an approved baseline lock and forecast change register, enabling finance partners to distinguish genuine operating movement from the correction of an inherited budgeting error.
• Coach the central planning leads through live review meetings, allocating decision responsibilities so the permanent successor inherits a functioning leadership team rather than a queue of unresolved approvals.
• Deliver a successor induction file containing driver definitions, open decisions, recurrent controls and a witnessed forecast replay, securing explicit CFO acceptance of the transferred planning perimeter.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate enterprise banking planning leadership with a record of taking over an incomplete budget or forecast cycle. Describe how you determined what had genuinely been approved, which inherited assumptions required reopening and how you preserved operating continuity while rebuilding the evidence supporting the final finance recommendation.
• Bring detailed understanding of business-line P&L planning and central allocation mechanics, including reciprocal transfers, shared service charges and investment phasing. Evidence must show your ability to investigate a consolidation discrepancy to its operating origin rather than balance the enterprise total with an unexplained adjustment that creates a later forecast problem.
• Show judgement under a compressed executive timetable, including constructive rejection of unsupported senior submissions. Explain how you distinguished errors requiring immediate repair from uncertainties requiring a recorded decision, and how you communicated the remaining exposure without either delaying every approval or offering assurance the available evidence could not support.
• Establish practical readiness for a five-day executive assignment and documented successor transfer. Provide examples of team prioritisation, review delegation and a handover test you personally ran. The engagement requires rapid availability and sustained ownership of the planning seat, with any concurrent commitments disclosed before the start date is agreed.

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 8 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-INT-2026-IND-185.