Group Chief Operating Officer — Financial Services GBS

The mandate

A financial-services GBS platform has grown through several regional service centres, but its process accountability still ends at local delivery boundaries. An invoice, reconciliation or planning input can meet one team's service target while failing the next team's control needs. The group COO will hold operating accountability across that chain, establishing global process ownership and a service model whose economics and reliability can be understood together.

Approximately 1,100 professionals report through delivery and process executives. The remit covers P2P, O2C, R2R and analytical service operations, not the regulated businesses' credit, investment or financial-signature authority. The operating chief will determine staffing allocation, service priorities and approved transformation sequencing within board budgets. Regulated entity executives retain their own financial and risk obligations, so a central service decision cannot silently change the accountability of the business receiving it.

Employment is open-ended, with an initial twenty-four-month agenda for global ownership, resilience and performance transparency. Bengaluru is the principal operating base, with planned quarterly travel to major recipient regions. The leader must inspect actual handoffs, exception queues and recovery capacity. A dashboard reporting green service measures is not sufficient when users maintain parallel workarounds or control evidence cannot be retrieved without the help of one experienced employee.

The board retains approval over major service-site changes, permanent restructuring and new long-term outsourcing commitments. The COO may reprioritise operating resources and stop an unsafe transition within delegation, but must present the consequence and recovery route. Enterprise tax policy, commercial product strategy and the wholesale replacement of banking technology are excluded. Automation will be assessed as an operating decision with control and maintenance demands, not as a target measured only by announced headcount savings.

What you will own

• Establish global process ownership with explicit handoff evidence and escalation rights, ensuring that P2P, O2C, R2R and planning-service performance reflects recipient outcomes rather than only local queue completion.
• Decide operating resource and service-priority trade-offs within approved budgets, examining control criticality and demand patterns before shifting capacity between regions or process groups with different consequences of failure.
• Govern service economics through transparent cost and demand baselines, distinguishing genuine productivity from work moved to recipient teams or unrecorded exceptions that merely make the central platform look efficient.
• Lead resilience testing across centres and recipient businesses, proving that critical services, approvals and evidence access remain operable when key personnel or ordinary technology pathways are unavailable.
• Sequence approved ERP and automation improvements against operating readiness, requiring accountable process owners, tested exception routes and maintenance capacity before releasing a change into high-consequence service activity.
• Build a delivery executive bench with clear delegation and succession, developing leaders who can challenge misleading service measures, manage cross-regional dependencies and explain operating decisions candidly to the board.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate COO or equivalent enterprise shared-services leadership within a 22–28-year career, with substantive accountability across more than one end-to-end finance or business process. Financial services, GBS, food-service or consumer-product operations can establish relevance. Show an operating decision you personally owned across regional boundaries and identify the actual service and control consequences rather than describing broad transformation ambition.
• Bring practical command of global process ownership, service governance and ERP-linked transformation. You must explain how P2P, O2C, R2R or planning handoffs were designed and tested, including an exception that crossed team boundaries. Six Sigma or GBS training is useful when applied to operating evidence; credentials alone do not substitute for judgement about what a recipient business requires to remain controlled.
• Have led senior managers through capacity and performance trade-offs, with evidence that reported efficiency did not merely shift work elsewhere. Describe how you verified benefit, protected critical service and changed an operating measure that encouraged the wrong behaviour. The group role requires executive authority over the service platform without assuming regulated business powers that belong to the entities receiving its work.
• Show resilience, succession and change-governance experience at a significant delivery scale. Selection will examine an incident, transition or disruptive change where you stopped or resequenced activity and defended the decision to executives. The leader must engage directly with process evidence, maintain clear delegation and develop operating executives capable of sustaining the platform beyond the initial improvement agenda.

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 11 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-116.