Director — E-Commerce Controllership and Settlement Integrity

The mandate

The commerce business has increased its mix of marketplace, owned-inventory and service transactions, but finance still resolves several settlement exceptions through end-of-month interventions. The director will own the accounting and control perimeter that connects orders, fulfilment, refunds, payment receipts and seller obligations. The problem is not simply faster reconciliation: different transaction models create different rights, liabilities and recognition points. A payment received cannot automatically be treated as revenue, and an unresolved return must not disappear because a settlement account has been forced to balance through a manual journal.

This permanent appointment carries open-ended employment and a first twelve-month agenda focused on settlement completeness, promotional accounting and close discipline. Twenty-six professionals span controllership, payment reconciliation and AP/AR operations. Their work must distinguish customer refunds awaiting execution, seller deductions under dispute, payment-partner timing and true accounting adjustments. The director establishes classification and approval standards, with accounting-policy exceptions escalated to the group controller. Daily exception resolution should support, rather than compete with, the monthly close by retaining the event history needed to explain each material balance.

Finance approval is required for changes that alter settlement accounting, seller-liability presentation or the financial treatment of promotions. Commercial teams continue to negotiate campaigns and seller terms; payment operations execute authorised transfers; tax specialists determine tax positions. The director may stop an unsupported close adjustment, require evidence before liability release and approve control redesign within the delegated budget. Material accounting policy, external financial statements and disputes involving legal settlement stay with the group controller, CFO and legal owners. Clear accountability prevents the controller from becoming the default owner of every operational failure.

The role is Bengaluru-based with planned Delhi NCR reviews and a hybrid working arrangement. Success means material settlement balances have explainable ageing, identifiable owners and evidence-supported resolution, while management reporting reflects the correct transaction model. The ongoing responsibility also includes developing controllers who can question netted reports, oversee journal discipline and test whether a new commercial arrangement changes the substance of the accounting. External audit support should come from controlled records assembled during ordinary operations, not a separate year-end reconstruction that temporarily hides weaknesses in daily financial governance.

What you will own

• Define settlement accounting rules across marketplace, owned-inventory and service flows, documenting recognition points and liabilities so operational netting does not erase financially material rights or obligations.
• Lead daily and monthly exception governance with payment, seller and refund operations, prioritising balances by substance and exposure rather than clearing whichever discrepancies are easiest to close first.
• Approve evidence-backed journals and liability releases within delegation, refusing unsupported offsets and escalating accounting-policy ambiguity before a manual adjustment becomes a recurring substitute for source correction.
• Govern promotion accounting with commercial and tax owners, separating customer incentives, seller-funded support and platform expense so campaign performance is not distorted by inconsistent classifications across business units.
• Build the twenty-six-person controllership and AP/AR organisation with clear supervisory checks, developing managers who can explain settlement ageing and challenge incomplete extracts without depending on a single specialist.
• Present close-quality and audit evidence to the group controller, linking material unresolved balances to accountable owners, financial treatment and resolution decisions instead of a generic list of open reconciliation items.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring a Chartered Accountancy qualification and twelve to eighteen years in finance, including senior controllership or AP/AR shared-services responsibility. You must have owned accounting judgements and close controls, not solely supervised transaction volume. Demonstrate how you distinguished a timing difference from an unsupported liability release and how that distinction affected the reported balance, journal approval or source correction.
• Evidence commerce, fintech or similarly high-volume settlement experience involving refunds, third-party deductions and multiple transaction models. Explain a reconciliation where net agreement concealed incorrect accounting or unresolved obligations. Your proof should include the underlying events, the rights and liabilities considered and the controls you established so subsequent periods did not require the same manual reconstruction.
• Show command of revenue recognition, principal-versus-agent assessment and promotional accounting through worked cases that you personally resolved with policy and commercial stakeholders. The ability to interpret a contract and connect its substance to order and settlement records is essential. External audit experience strengthens the fit when it includes operational implementation rather than relying on a technical memo detached from execution.
• Demonstrate leadership of controllers and transaction-service managers under demanding close deadlines. Describe how you handled an operational team that wanted a finance journal to clear an unresolved customer or seller issue. We need calm judgement, explicit escalation and coaching that improves evidence quality while retaining appropriate separation between accounting decisions, payment execution and commercial dispute resolution.

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 12 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-037.